Eating Your Own Dog Food
“Sometimes you download software and you just can’t believe how bad it is, or how hard it is to accomplish the very simple tasks that the software tries to accomplish. Chances are, it’s because the developers of the software don’t use it” Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek
“Eating my own dog food” seems to be the phrase I utter a lot lately. It has come up in our startcon interview (free plug time, go and read it) and it came up in a piece Knokal member Emma from EM designs wrote about working with us (http://emdesigns.com.au/graphic-design-2/knokal-homepage-redesign/).
So what the hell does it mean?
According to Wikipedia “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 test and promote the product.”. It basically means that you live and die by your products. For those of you who aren’t aware, Knokal is an online community of small business owners. We have over 1000 small businesses on our site. So whenever I need something done for Knokal, I use Knokal. I needed an SEO specialist, I used Andrew from SEO Rankup who I found on Knokal. I wanted a redesign on our webpage — I used Knokal to find Emma from EM Designs. I want people to build a business using Knokal. So what better test case than Knokal itself.
Where does it come from?
That one is a little sketchier. For me personally it came from my MBA marketing class about 3 years ago. Further back, some on the internet say it was a Microsoft initiative. Others say it was a dog food executive (how gross and boring would that be). My personal favourite urban myth/origin story is the one about Johnny Carson and Ed McMahon. Back in the golden era of TV, most commercials were done live on set. The Tonight show was presenting a dog food commercial and the trained dog wouldn’t eat the dog food, making the commercial pretty redundant and probably not impressing the dog food people too much (we are all envisioning Don Draper right now). So Johnny or Ed (depending on the telling of this urban myth), didn’t miss a beat and got down on their hands and knees and started eating the dog food live on air. Not a bad endorsement.
Does it work?
It is without a doubt the best thing I have ever done. I discovered some really interesting things about my product that I haven’t picked up in the last year of working on it. Mea culpa — I found a few holes. I found a few industries that aren’t well represented in Knokal. But what that meant was — I could fix the holes. I could say to our dev team “ I don’t like how you have to click back and forth to find this out, we need to simplify this process” or “It would be really handy to have the call button live on the phone so I don’t have to cut and the paste the number”. And the industries not represented? Not too proud to say I picked up the phone and cold called until I was happy that that industry was well represented. I made my product better by fixing the issues that would directly affect me.
The other great advantage of eating your own dog food, is you can work out what your strengths are. Our search function isn’t bad. But changing a few things in the ‘edit my profile’ page makes search freaking epic. It literally cuts everything down to 2 or 3 top class matches to my company. I had no idea it was that good (I had a feeling we were building to it, but seeing it in real life was fantastic). So now I know, next product iteration we are going to make profiles easier to edit and we are going to supercharge peoples searches. Easier search means more business for everyone. I would never have found that out with my boss hat on. With my customer hat on I am able to focus on different things.
Should I try it?
If its possible, yes you should. Try to hire yourself and see whats stopping you. Are you findable on google? Are your contact details on your socials up to date? How hard is it to pay yourself? What don’t you like about what you have created? If you were a customer would you hire you? Find your weaknesses and fix them. Find your strengths and build on them. Eat your dog food and decide whether you will let your dog eat it again.
Answer to the photo: Look at the bottom of the screenshot. A tweet promoting Blackberry, put on twitter from an iphone. Someone at blackberry isn’t eating dog food. Would you be more or less likely to buy a blackberry now?
