The Importance of Dogfooding Your Own Product
By RG team · 12 min read
Last Updated on May 20, 2023
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Why Dogfooding your own product is the closest way to guarantee-ing success as a creator
As an entrepreneur, one of the biggest challenges is creating a product that turns out to be a hit among the users. A good product is not just about meeting the initial requirements but also delivering on the user's expectations and providing value that resonates with them. To achieve that level of finesse and deliver something that your audience will love, you need to dive deep into the product, understand it inside-out and create an experience that you would love to have.
One such method is "Dogfooding," where you consume your product yourself. The phrase originates from the notion that pet-food manufacturers should eat the pet food products they make to understand their customer's needs. The same theory can be applied to businesses where you use the product that you are creating.
In this article, we'll explore dogfooding in detail and understand why it is the closest way to guarantee a product's success as a creator. From user research to judging the product for improvements, we'll delve deep into understanding the importance of dogfooding. We will also take examples from the biggest companies that applied dogfooding to their products and succeeded. The article's ultimate goal is to provide entrepreneurs with enough insight to create a product that their audience loves and that caters to their needs.
User research is significantly more challenging if you don't use your product
When it comes to delivering a product that meets user expectations, there are no shortcuts. It is essential to understand the user requirements and their pain points to create a perfect solution. The process of understanding a customer's needs is termed as user research, and it's an integral part of the product development process.
However, conducting user research can become significantly more challenging if you don't use your product. To put it in perspective, if you're not using the product that you are creating, then how do you expect to understand your audience? There will always be gaps in the understanding of the problems that your product is trying to solve, which can result in creating suboptimal solutions.
When you use your product yourself and make it a part of your daily work processes, you become the user. You get to experience the product first-hand and identify the issues that a user may face. This process allows you to have a deep understanding of your product, making user research significant more manageable. Since you have now found defects, loopholes, and bugs proactively, it becomes easier to understand where the product is lagging and needs improvement.
It should be noted that user research is not just limited to one phase of product development. Conducting user research at every step of the development life cycle will help you create a product that is in sync with your user's expectations. Each episode of feedback will aid in the creation of an optimal solution for the problems being addressed with your product. Therefore, it is highly crucial to use your product to conduct better user research and create a product that your users would love to use.
You must be able to adequately judge your product to make improvements
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Creating a product is not a one-time task. It is an iterative process that requires constant improvement and tweaking to meet the user's changing requirements. To improve the product, you must be able to judge it effectively. Judging your product requires a deep understanding of its different aspects.
When you eat your product's dog food or use your product yourself, you create a personal experience, and you gain a better understanding of what works and what doesn't. You know where the product shines and where it needs a revision. This extensive personal knowledge of your product helps you understand what to improve and where. Then, you can make appropriate changes to your product, making sure it becomes a perfect fit for your target demographic.
The product development journey is often not a solo one. There are multiple stakeholders involved in the product development process, and each stakeholder may have their biases and personal opinions. That being said, it is essential to have your view of the product that is not influenced by any external factors.
Therefore, eating your product's dog food becomes a crucial aspect of product development. It allows you to become an integral part of the product development process and become a valuable stakeholder who can judge the product rationally. You can create multiple iterations of the product based on your personal experience with the product, making it perfect in all aspects and catering to every user need.
Statistically, if you like it, others most likely also like it
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When you create a product, you always have a specific target audience in mind. You believe that the product you're creating is solving a specific set of user needs and will be valuable to them. However, at times, it becomes challenging to decide if the product you're creating will be well-received by the audience you intend to capture. This is where dogfooding becomes valuable.
When you are consuming your product yourself, you become the user and can experience the product like your target audience. If you like your product, you gain the confidence that others would like it as well. While personal experience might not translate symbolically across your target demographics, it does have vast significance. It makes it easier to create product changes that cater to an extensive range of users rather than just one set of users.
Dogfooding brings an immense amount of understanding to the product development process. It lets you create a product that is not only personalized to the stakeholder's requirements but also caters to a broad range of user needs. It's a step towards understanding the product beyond its technical prowess, metadata, or statistical projections. It shows that the product that you are creating has the potential to solve real-world problems, and you have erred towards a solution.
If you're not using it daily, what product are you using instead? Why? That's what you must focus on
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It's a universal truth that if you're not using your product yourself, someone else is using that product. The market is full of products, and your target demographic shares just a fraction of your product's pool. Therefore, every missed day using the product is a missed chance of discovering a potential bug or improvement.
By not using your product, you're also showcasing that you don't think that your product possesses enough value for you to use it yourself. It's a reflection of how little confidence you have in your creation. While it might be tempting to determine your product's value based on other metrics, ultimately, your personal experience using the product becomes the paramount feedback loop in the product development process.
Therefore, to create a product that users love, you must ask yourself some fundamental questions. Why are you not using the product yourself? What are you using instead? What are the shortcomings of the other products that your product can solve? These questions are fundamental to your success as an entrepreneur and the success of your product. These are the aspects that Dogfooding brings to the product development table.
In conclusion, the fundamental idea behind using your product is to find the problems and indirectly competencies in the market. By seeing how your product stacks up against competing solutions, you can be confident in your product's value to your targeted demographics. Therefore, understanding the products you are not using is especially important to understand the problems with the market, including the failure points of the competition.
A mentor who started a 7-figure finance community told me "You must be using your product every day"
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Dogfooding is a practice that has existed for decades, and numerous notable voices have endorsed the practice. One such voice is from a mentor who established a 7-figure finance community. This mentor said, "You must be using your product every day."
It is best to heed the advice from this mentor because it carries a wealth of knowledge that reflects the ground realities of the industry. The idea behind using your product every day is that you get first-hand experience of your product and see its impact on your life. If your product is not improving your life, then it is a fundamental issue that needs to be addressed.
When you use your product every day, you get to see practicality, usability, and long-term viability of your product. You learn what it takes to have your audience use it daily, and this, in turn, gives you valuable input into improving your product for a long-term solution.
A key aspect of a product that caters to your users' long-term needs is that it must engage them daily. Failure to do so will lead to low usage, retention, and eventually the demise of the product. That's why engaging with your product daily becomes critical in the product development process. By using the product daily, you get to understand what it takes to keep your user engaged and provide a hassle-free experience that would delight your users.
Think about first iterations of large products - AirBnB founders wanted to rent out their apartment, Bezos was a book-lover and wanted an easy way to buy/sell
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Dogfooding is not just an essential step in product development, but it has also been crucial in some of the world's most successful companies. When you go back in time and look at the first iterations of their product offerings, you'll find that these companies also used their products.
Take Airbnb, for instance. The founders initially wanted to rent out their apartment and make some quick bucks. To create a platform that would cater to their needs, they started using their platform themselves, and that experience helped them create an optimal solution for their target demographic. Similarly, Jeff Bezos, before founding Amazon, was a book lover who envisioned a world where one could easily buy or sell books online. He used his product himself, created the user experience he wanted, and eventually created a product that was not only user-friendly but also a market leader.
The point is that dogfooding is an integral part of product development, and companies that have used it have become successful and have revolutionized the industry. It speaks volumes about how necessary it is to understand and use your product to create an optimal solution for your target demographic.
In conclusion, dogfooding is an essential aspect of creating a successful product, and companies that have applied it have seen success. Personal experience is instrumental in understanding your product, critiquing it, and creating a holistic solution that caters to your user's needs. Therefore, as an entrepreneur, you should use your product daily, understand its technical, practical, and physical aspects, and use that feedback to create a unique product that caters to your user's needs.
Conclusion
Dogfooding is a product development practice that involves using your product yourself to gauge its effectiveness, usability, and value. It serves as a vital tool in understanding the product's practicality from a user's perspective. The process of dogfooding provides crucial insights into areas that require improvement or revision and enables you to create a product that caters to a broad range of user needs.
Through the use of dogfooding, you can gain a deep understanding of the product and its market requirements. It empowers you to proactively identify the defects, shortcomings, and potential improvements that the product needs. Dogfooding also fills the gap between the creators and users and allows for personalization of the product that caters to the users' needs.
Taking inspiration from the success stories behind some of the most successful startups, dogfooding has become an integral part of creating a successful product. It is also important to understand that dogfooding is not a one-time process but an iterative journey that requires constant improvements to meet the changing user requirements.
At its core, dogfooding is the closest way to guarantee a product's success. It serves as a feedback mechanism that allows entrepreneurs to deliver a product that resonates with their target audience. Through the application of dogfooding, entrepreneurs can create transformative products, drive customer satisfaction and create a user base that is loyal to the brand.
Therefore, it is crucial for entrepreneurs to embrace this approach and use their product every day to create a best-in-class product that caters to user needs, solves their problems and revolutionizes the industry.
