Why Eating Our Own Dog Food Wasn’t That Gross

By: Ryan O’Hara

Last fall, a few weeks before Thanksgiving, the team at WhoQuest was ready to push WhoQuest to people outside of friends and family.

Based in Boston down the street from WhoQuest’s HQ, Emerson featuring alumni like Jay Leno, Veronica Belmont, Henry Winkler, and Dennis Leary (photo: Carly Kaplan)

With a plethora of students studying a wide variety of communication, entertainment, and media arts, we decided the best place to launch our product was Emerson College in Boston, MA.

As we were planning and building out our website to explain our product and benefits, we found ourselves scratching our heads trying to simplify the explanation of what we do. It was then that we decided we wanted to make a bad ass explainer video.

For anyone that’s ever planned or storyboarded an explainer video, it’s really hard. Cost, creative, and thinking of a way of standing out usually end up being big hurdles, so many startups often just mesh together screenshots with feel-good stock ukulele music. We didn’t want that.

This is the kind of music many startups end up using in their explainer videos.

Of all the problems with making a kick-ass explainer videos, there is one obstacle that trumps all others however: finding good acting talent. Watch any successful explainer video…and there is always good acting.

Being a small 3 person team that primarily hangs in the startup scene, Ray, Frank, and I really didn’t know any actors or actresses in Boston. We asked friends for intros, posted gigs on Craiglist, Linkedin, etc. After a week, we really didn’t get anywhere.

Time was running out, and we thought we’d be trapped in the shady underground world of stock ukulele videos. Then Ray had a simple yet brilliant idea: Let’s eat our own dogfood.

My dog Finnegan (right) is eating his own dogfood. My other dog, Scarlett (pictured left) isn’t.

For those unfamiliar with the term:

“Eating your own dog food,” also called “dogfooding, is a slang term used to reference a scenario in which a company uses its own product to validate the quality and capabilities of the product.” -Wikipedia

My favorite example of dogfooding is Mike Scott’s classic Apple memo from 1980, when he asked Apple employees to no longer use typewriters in the office. Those that obliged were rewarded the newest Apple Computers first.

Dogfooding made a lot of sense for us given the situation. We designed WhoQuest to be a place that makes it easy to find people based on their reputation, so why not try and get WhoQuest in front a small group of Emerson students, and see if they can help us find an actor?

WhoQuest builds reputation using user created “who” questions.

I posted the question, and promoted it to a few Emerson students on Twitter. As part of our sign up process, users login with their Facebook accounts, and anonymously vote on friends of theirs.

Sure enough, in less than a week, 39 different users voted 469 times. They generated a crowdsourced list of the best actors and actresses for our video gig:

Users vote on their Facebook friends as answers, and people with the most votes become the top results.

As we were eating our own dog food, we learned a few things. The biggest being that while this top 10 list was awesome, since users could vote on a friend that hadn’t signed up for the site, we needed to design a way to allow Facebook messaging to our non-users. What use is it having someone’s reputation, but not being to act with the knowledge? How else could we communicate and hire them?

Once the question had enough compelling votes, I reached out to all the actors and actresses who made the top 20 list. Some through email (for those that ended up joining the site), some through the new Facebook “send message” button we added, and some through Twitter.

We heard back from 8 different people, and after throwing together a few auditions, the #2 top result, Marcos Gonzalez got the gig.

Working with Marcos couldn’t have gone better. He had creative ideas, his comedy writing experienced helped make lines better, and he was super professional the whole time.

Dogfooding helped us confirm the quality of our users anonymously voting.

For example, Marcos isn’t going to school to be an actor by trade. Finding him as an actor online is nearly impossible. He isn’t in Emerson’s performing arts program, yet he’s done a lot of work with comedy troupes on campus.

Marcos (right) sure looked good in a gi!

Marcos is in school for journalism, so his resume and Linkedin profile reflect that. While he is a gifted aspiring journalist, there is actually a lot of value for future employers knowing his reputation acting.

Marcos’s profile on WhoQuest shows off his reputation.

For example, let’s say that a media site wants to hire Marcos as a writer, they could also use him for podcast, video blogs, and maybe even additional video content because of his acting experience. Linkedin and other sites would never reflect that.

Users got to showcase his talent without him having to do any work. Ultimately this is the product we were able to produce eating our own dog food. Judge for yourself:

Not bad right? As much as I’d love to shamelessly plug WhoQuest, the real message here is this:

Eating your own dogfood is the best way to get in your users’ and potential users’ head, and it doesn’t have to be that gross.

Ryan O’Hara is the Head of Marketing at WhoQuest.