Our dog food tastes great and we think you’ll love it too.

Simon Minton
Nov 3 · 2 min read

A key concept that you come across in startup world is that of dog fooding — the process of using your own product extensively internally to make sure it solves the problems you are setting out to solve for your potential customers.

For many startups it’s just part of the process of getting software right, making sure that it solves the problem it promises to and squashing as many bugs as possible along the way.

Outside of these pure software-first companies, businesses that have built bespoke platforms to solve business problems or improve processes are realising that they’ve actually been dogfooding viable software businesses, potentially for years. From law firms to couriers, they’re realising that these mature internal products are no longer cost- but potential profit centres. After all, the largest provider of cloud-based servers in the world turns out to be a bookshop that realised their systems were more profitable than the books they were being used to sell (although the books and other bits do make a small contribution too).

Here at Manifest, we’ve been building and using our own influencer management platform, ROGER, for the past two years — it’s part of a suite of digital tools that we’ve built to make our team’s work easier, making sure that they can focus on activities that create value for their clients and ensure our data reporting is industry-leading.

It’s the first tool that we’re opening up to anyone and everyone — clients and competitors alike. We believe it simplifies the management of influencer campaigns and will ultimately improve the perception of the influencer community as a whole, encouraging the use of genuine product advocates above straight product placement.

Software isn’t our key business, but increasingly it’s an area of the company that we realise can increase the value we provide to our customers and therefore is a key focus for us in the coming years — if you want to give ROGER a go, get in touch.


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Manifest Incite

Incite is chock full of marketing, branding and PR insights, opinions and trends, curated by the Incite team at international brand communications agency, Manifest

Simon Minton

Written by

For the past 10 years I’ve worked with the leaders of startups and big corporates to advise on, design and implement their technological strategies.

Manifest Incite

Incite is chock full of marketing, branding and PR insights, opinions and trends, curated by the Incite team at international brand communications agency, Manifest

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