Do you need/use it (other than for testing purposes) or are you just developing a product for the sake of doing something?
Feel free to comment what's the product :)
I'm building a wafer stepper. That's a machine that's used to make chips and LEDs. We're building the very first one of its kind now. I'm not sure what it'll sell for, but it's not something you typically get together on Kickstarter. I guess I'd be using it if I owned a semicon foundry or something.
Admittedly, this means that my description of what the machine does was cutting some corners. Ridiculously many, actually, but ok :)
...I cannot begin to imagine what's involved in vibration control.
The idea that you should "eat your own dogfood" doesn't make a lot of sense if the product is (to draw from my personal experience) an x-ray machine, mechanical respirator, semiconductor metrology tool or electron microscope.
I spend my days working on an ERP system. Apart from entering my weekly timesheet and the occasional expense claim, I don't use the system. If I wanted to enter payments and reconcile bank accounts, I would have become an accountant.
However, I use my side project http://www.3dprintingpricecheck.com quite frequently for working on my other side project which involves making 3D-printed geographical models (http://www.printablegeography.com).
Thinking about the larger issue, I think It's actually somewhat rare for professionals to consume their own "product". Lawyers, for example, are often discouraged from doing so.
We're building a survey app for dentists to give to their patients.
We also have a dental practice management app.
And an practice management education tool.
I've also worked on monitoring apps used by electricity companies.
I can continue, but this should do. Anecdotal, fair enough, but I'm using them to paint a concept.
I don't use Appointment Reminder like my customers do. I can't, because I don't own an HVAC company with 200 appointments this week. I suppose I could force myself to use it for e.g. reminding myself of my own appointments, but that's so drastically different from what my customers care about that it would corrupt the whole product if I started adapting it to my own requirements.
All I would say though is if the product isn't something you use frequently then be absolutely sure others are actually using it or do want it.
I believe building something you really need or want yourself is a great way to validate an idea and it'll keep you motivated to build it.
Any of the above is probably "dogfooding" for small companies where people wear many hats while having lowish internal firewalling and power disparity. It's often much less useful at a BigCo where the product team may never see the internal users without scheduling a meeting in advance, and where fixed development schedules and internal politics are creating design lock-in.
Also keep in mind that, for every story about dogfooding improving product quality, there are others about dogfooding creating a runaway blind spot because the company confused the needs of internal users with the needs of customers. Internal use can be a useful resource, but it can't replace customer research.
Now the entire focus of the company is on this internal-project-turned-product and now we get to use Close.io to sell Close.io, which is great. We get to solve our own problems (usually) and others benefit from it (and our product gets better).
Wrote more about it here: http://blog.close.io/coworkers-as-your-first-customers-your-...
We needed to develop both prototypes and production apps faster, so we built tooling...which turned into Exponential.io (tooling as a service).
> seeing the pain our sales teams actually had while doing sales.
This is a great way to find a product. At a minimum, you know you're solving one company's problems (your own). As it's likely there are similar companies, then it's a good indicator that there is potential for the product.
It's great to dogfood, but IMO its not enough. Many customers will have different ways of using the product from you and different workflows. I'd recommend doing heavy customer development very early on to understand those differences.
This was to the point of ridiculing the platform and the people working on it, frequently citing “Linux jokes” such as “you'll probably have to recompile your kernel first” whenever the question was seriously raised about when we'd start at least getting the core libraries working.
And when I say it wasn't a priority, I mean that we didn't even have something that was in a compilable state. A few people had started fixing up the broken code to get something that would compile on Linux in their own free time. After a few weeks of hacking, they were told by management to stop what they were doing and instead focus their volunteer efforts on the project goals, being to ship a Windows and Mac version.
So the company began the process of forcefully moving developers who'd worked on Linux for over 15 years to platforms they felt uncomfortable and unproductive working on.
This is a much longer tale, but it tells the story of a company alienating not only their loyal user base, but also a significant proportion of their own developers. The result? Lack of motivation and resignations.
Well done.
@OP: sad story. I am a little surprised, a little disappointed, and sad that it's only a little.
And if this is the case, it's really sad, I am still Opera fan (many years) and also linux user :(
I have been using Opera 12 since release and now the dream of having my favorite browser on favorite platform is ruined! So sad! Of course I will have to switch away from Opera on dozens of other devices.
Opera is actually doing their Linux users a service (albeit not on purpose) by not letting them see the travesty of a browser that now bears their name. I wish there was no Opera 15+ for Windows, at least then I would keep the hope for more good versions, instead of knowing that the best browser has died.
By the way, there is a project to create a free browser inspired in O12- - http://www.otter-browser.org/
In your phrase “So the company began the process of forcefully moving developers who'd worked on Linux for over 15 years to platforms they felt uncomfortable and unproductive working on”, you meant that developers who wrote code for the product for Linux, were forced to start writing code for Mac/Windows? Not that they were forced to change their actual development environment OS from Linux to Windows or Mac?
Thanks in advance.
Better set sail for other browsers guys.
And in there, they speak about the Otter-browser (which I already knew about), an open-source project consisting in a web browser aiming to imitate the Old Opera interface. It is till in alpha state, but already usable.
The "eat your own dogfood" approach has never sat well with me. I think of Microsoft forcing it's employees to use Bing and Windows - rather than improving the products it seemed to lower morale and ignored the reasons why people were choosing Google or Apple.
If the idea is to improve the product by actually using it I think a better approach would be to "eat everyone's dogfood including your own," because so many good ideas come in bits and pieces from competition and new ideas can come from surveying the entire market to see what's missing. It's not just about experiencing the good/bad of your own product, but seeing where you fit in the market, who would choose your product, and why.
But to be honest, the reason we built Upptalk was not because we needed VOIP telephony, but that we were incensed with habitual overcharging and roaming charges.
We iterate on our own internal feedback in addition to our customer's.
I've got no problem with sleeping most of the day.
I'm having to restrain myself from telling you, at length, just how beautiful and desirable they are. I would LOVE to have one of those things in my hand at some kind of ceremonial contract signing. And if someone asked me "Where did you get that pen?" I'd just swoon with happiness.
So I don't need it. I don't use it. But I'm still very much eating my own delicious dogfood.
If you have the luxury of working on a product you use yourself (anybody work on developer focused solutions probably falls in this category) then I highly recommend it. Daily use of a product shows you let's you really see what parts of our product are not quite "smooth".
Just don't go down that rabbit hole too far. The features you use and how you use them don't always align with everybody else. As an example, when we first got started with it, what we considered a "low barrier" for a new user to try it out was actually quite a leap. Seeing real users struggle with that let us solve it. In your own bubble you might not notice things like that.
(disclaimer: my company https://circleci.com is a competitor to the direction you guys are taking with Continuous Delivery)
We use ElectricCommander to orchestrate our CI process:
* checkout from Perforce
* build (which uses ElectricAccelerator)
* run unit tests
* build installer
* install on test cluster
* run integration tests
I guess the answer is; it depends, but i'm very cautious now because of the above; once you have your whole organization and client base working with it fulltime, it is hard to switch and you often cannot say no to features as the competitors will be adding them. We should've (hindsight) just forked our intranet and forget about selling that part with the 'new' stuff.
My personal code projects? They're not products, they're tools: they get written to solve specific problems or to do specific tasks. Sometimes only once, usually a few times, then they are never touched again.
We dogfood it all the way, so definitely every day for our own needs. We analyze the performance, event breakdown, engagement stats, funnels, and everything about our analytics dashboard within our own analytics dashboard. Traditionally we do analytics/marketing for the mobile space, but it works great for web as well.
We also have a couple of people on the mobile team who launched an iPhone app for tracking the Boston subway: http://proximitapp.com/. They of course use Localytics for their analytics and in-app and push marketing and gave us great feedback.
We've learned a ton from real-world use of our app in both contexts. Dogfooding really is invaluable for us.
And internal use also drives product development - whenever I come across an annoying task (for example, changing between different form layouts in Bootstrap) I try to add a tool for handling that, preferably with a single click.
I can't imagine any other way of developing a great product.
Edit: Just read a good point by patio11. What I said of course only works if you are a member of your target audience.
I don't think it's a "need" but I do enjoy using it and built it because it's something I wanted.
If you're interested I just did a write-up on it http://bradjasper.com/focus.html and open-sourced it http://github.com/bradjasper/focus
My goal lately is to try and find stuff that I like building and that has a market—not having to pick either or.
By the way - it looks really nice. I'd use it if I weren't on Arch Linux.
Our product is jotform, an online form builder. We probably create a form for our own use once a month or less. The last form we created was a survey for specific set of users. We found some problems on the sortable list widget and fixed it. http://widgets.jotform.com/widget/orderable_list
I use at least once a week for the mass production of another project I'm working on. You simply can not compare the quality of insight you gain from using the product yourself (not mock usage, but real usage and that's an important distinction) to any other kind of external feedback. The biggest difference is when improving the UX, especially in terms of coherency.
I enjoy working on it, have quite enjoyed the site re-write (https://admin.wonderproxy.com/) but my day to day life doesn't need to route traffic through Brazil.
On previous projects where geolocation/locali[s/z]ation was a high priority, we've had to rely on either a hodgepodge of VPN credentials or poking someone on Skype! This is 100x better. Great work!
We are building a site to engage people to write daily (in English), www.dailythem.es, and while I know using the site more is very useful, I have to keep thinking about the business direction and figure out user demographic before I spend all days using my own product.
In fact it is very easy to use our own product not only for project management in the strict sense of the term, but also for bug tracking, file storage and distribution and community management.
Besides it being useful for us, we have already been able to put a lot of our own requirements into the published version.
So if you like our referral program saas, you can use our referral program saas to refer our referral program saas to anybody else who needs a referral program saas.
While "eating your own dogfood" doesn't work in every industry or product (as some of the top comments are discussing), I'm a firm believer that if you're developing something intended for a typical person (developer, casual user, what have you) to use every day, you really should be using it every day as well. I've used too many products that were "mature" yet felt so poorly designed and developed that you'd have to wonder if anyone at the company ever touched them beyond basic testing.
(optimising the code can be the tiniest things too - I stripped a misguided optimisation just the other day, for about a 10% speedup in some very common operations. Just removing a flag single test as every character was appended to a buffer - even though it meant having to potentially do a malloc and memcpy in the degenerate case - is a win overall in our tests)
We desperately looked for such tool to use it ourselves, but found nothing. So we decided to build it. Only in the process of making it, we have realised that there must be other agencies that need it too.
In the end we have a product that we use ourselves everyday and sell it to other agencies too. What's interesting, we are still learning how to use it in the best way possible and we then share our knowledge with other users. So the benefit of using the product yourself is not only in requirements specification and testing, but in workflow and usage best–practices.
We currently use it to investigate root-causes of disruptions, track down bugs in the development and staging environment, and most important: monitor our entire infrastructure. This is also in line with our company vision that should allow users to have a single overview on their entire stack of servers, websites and applications. This will reduce time spent on digging through log files, switching between lots of fragmented SaaS tools, et cetera.
As silly as the end result is, you need a decent understanding of the product to integrate it with SnapChat ( http://blog.pagerduty.com/2013/10/pagerduty-can-wake-you-up-... )
One thing as a business we are trying to do more of this year is put ourselves in our customers position. This was a big reason I started BootStrapped Weekly (http://bootstrappedweekly.com). I wanted to take a step back and start fresh with no existing leads, no inbound links, and no existing market.
It has certainly opened my eyes to new ways we can help our customers be more successful.
It's interactive teaching software (in-class and online) that we've used in the course when it runs, but the course only runs for part of the year.
http://github.com/impressory/impressory
"Supercollaborative" teaching of software engineering is my main project; this was written because I found existing teaching systems didn't support collaborative classes online, and live-interaction in-class, particularly well.
I can't say I use it daily, but surely more than 1/week. My interests are tech and quite specific, and HN is better from that point of view, but for general news I use Theneeds. I'm also a person that doesn't post/like/share too much (neither on HN, Theneeds, Twitter, Facebook...).
My co-founders however use it daily. It's their primary source of news & things to share. Sometimes, we also use it to stream the "hot" music at home ;) Moreover, we recently added to the team a couple of "enthusiastic"... pretty cool (and satisfactory) imho!
Like many of us, I use a number if privacy-focused plugins in my desktop browser (ABP, NoScript, Lightbeam, self-destructing cookies, etc.) but I also find myself increasingly browsing the web on my iPad -- where these protections are non-existent. Privacy mode helps a little, but it was never designed to combat the online tracking we see today.
So yes, I am building for myself. But hopefully I am not the only one wanting a powerful mobile browser that protects me and my loved ones from being tracked and fingerprinted online.
I use it every day. Most content isn't notable enough that I would want to come back to it, or keep notes on it. However, a few times a day, I stumble across something that I really like, and then post it to on Soulmix [2].
If you want to give the beta a spin, just request an invite, and I'll send one to your email.
As it has grown, it's been interesting to observe the parts of it that I work on a lot (the parts I use - I just today fixed a bug in something that I kept seeing in my weekly emails) vs. the parts that get neglected because I don't see them as often.
My latest project is CourseCraft (https://coursecraft.net) and just due to its nature I use it less than Bugrocket. I've only made one course so far (https://coursecraft.net/courses/z9NcY).
I struggle with saying no, because I want the library to be useful, but I also don't want to have to maintain and potentially break features that I don't personally use.
Although the conventional wisdom is to build things you had a need for yourself, I believe this is one of the riskiest ways to create breakthrough innovations. Far easier to go find people who have a problem and who are not developers and get them to pay for something.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zyz.mobile
Originally, I wrote it for myself so that I can check meanings of Japanese word without an Internet connection while reading Japanese text.
But after I finished writing it, I lost interest in learning Japanese. So I don't use it, but I continue to put time on the app.
Though after being on stage at a DC Tech event and hearing the organizer complain to the audience of the UX we added a play button & ability to play a bunch of songs. We now use it everyday and more people are too.
http://speakerblast.com (if interested)
My other current projects are e-commerce related, for other people. I don't shop at their stores in particular, but I feel like shopping elsewhere on the web gives me similar insight.
Our QA process is relying on it.
We're:
- automatically checking our most critical features every time our code changes in our QA environment
- monitoring the end user experience on production environment using the same automated tests every minute
- creating and maintaining the tests with our tool
- getting live feedback to our development team's flowdock chat through our own APIs
One of my projects (online appointment scheduling), though, I started using only recently for a reddit cake day reminder. People register and the software sends them an email when their reddit cake day is coming up.
This is why I believe in open source so much. It's all not-for-profit so it has to be worth something to you or you wouldn't work on it. This makes that it's always something useful, at least to you, and probably to others.
In retrospect, finding a product I would be able to truly benefit from was really a very good idea - I believe it really helps me daily to keep the level of persistence which is required to grow a product (both sales-wise and from a benefits/features point of view).
The ultimate form of ethnographic immersion - rather than just watching someone do their job, or ask them probing questions... actually do their job for seven years.
I also created the Min CSS framework, an extremely tiny (995 bytes) CSS framework, which I use in all the websites I make. http://minfwk.com
As a result, we use the plugins themselves quite often, including on the website itself. Its definitely a great motivator to fix bugs!
I have been working on form building solutions since over a year. For the first 6 months or so, I made custom forms when I needed them. Lately, I've started using my own product, simply out of need. It's surprising how much you learn when you are a genuine consumer of your own product.
1) read WTF / why have I not ran for it
[blatant self-promotion and links to all of my apps]
Stemmed from something painful I had to do every day (build HTML emails) that a web app didn’t exist for. Then I slowly went from using it to every day to running it every day. If you’d have asked the question a year a go I’d have said every day.
Using it for invoicing for my side hustles. I would love to use it more as that probably would mean I was making more money :). In any case; seeing your own product through the eyes of the user is extremely beneficial and something I would recommend to anyone.
Outside of software for developers and IT I suspect the majority of companies don't use their own software, which is counter to what most people here believe.
It's actually a big part of the culture at Riot Games, the idea is that we're trying to be the most player focused company so it is important that we all play, it helps us make a better game.
Once I finish my new counterpick feature (user based) I'll use it even more to see what the Hivemind thinks about God counterpicks.
Also I built a password manager (https://identee.com). I am finishing a pro version of it (with a Command Line Interface client, instead of browser based), which is the one I am using. Indeed I am the only one using it since its not live yet ;-)
Please do write to me if you are interested. Email in profile.
As I've been developing it I started using it to sync stuff, access machines remotely, etc.
clickable link http://webscrapemaster.com/
we aren't in the industry so don't use it ourselves at all but we think this is better as we can actually try to move the industry forward with best practices from other industries versus sticking to old ways and status quos that might not be the best way, it was just the way people have always done it.
of course we make quite a bit of features/functionality directly from user feedback.
I've heard some googlers use ad block on their work machines. And the irony isn't lost on them when you ask them about it.
Unfortunately tech types like here on HN… not so much
As I'm not an installer not much need for it (life would be a lot easier if I was :) ).
Worked for an online store, then some SaaS companies - not in the target market in any of them.
I don't need/use:For business software
But for a lot of small business software, my first guess is often wrong and I need a feedback loop.