“Dogfooding”: You’re Doing It Wrong

Background

The term “dogfooding” is a slang term of sorts for the phrase “eating your own dog food”. In general terms, this means putting yourself in your customers’ shoes by using the products or services that you sell. According to this Wikipedia article, the term originated in an ad campaign for Alpo Dog Food where Lorne Green made a point to say that he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Another origin story has the founder of Kal Kan Pet Food eating a can of their product every year at the annual shareholders’ meeting.

Value

“Dogfooding” seems to have caught on especially well in the software industry, so as a software developer I’ve participated in “dogfooding” before. It really is a valuable exercise and can illuminate shortcomings in your product. Depending on what your company sells, dogfooding might not always be easy, but I recommend it whenever possible. I wear the sunglasses that we sell on a daily basis not only because I really like them, but also to evaluate them like a customer would. It also never hurts to have people ask me where I got them; I’m always happy to point them in the right direction!

How Can You Screw This Up?

The point of this post doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with bootstrapping a business, but I’ve never understood how the most obvious dogfooding scenario in the world often seems to fall flat. I worked in a lot of restaurants when I was broke college student. Every place I ever worked would charge the employees to eat the restaurant food. Some places offered a discount, but none of them would encourage the employees to eat the food by doing the obvious: make it free. What better way to improve the quality of the product than to have the people who prepare it also eat it from time to time? Admittedly, I didn’t always work in gourmet establishments so I suppose some of my former bosses didn’t really care much about improving the product. Perhaps they were focused more on keeping costs down to maximize profits. I’m always in favor of keeping expenses low, but I never want to be involved with a company that isn’t committed to having a great product and constantly trying to improve it.

If you’re starting a business, I think you’ll find it a lot more rewarding to put in the countless hours necessary if you believe in the product and are committed to making it the best it can be.