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# Dogfooding as a Solo Developer: What It Misses
- URL: https://www.markrsh.com/the-art-of-dog-fooding/
- Published: 2025-05-04T17:34:48.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-31T17:20:21.000Z
- Author: Mark Houghton
- Tags: Product

Dog Fooding is the idea of using your own product as a customer would. It's about pressure-testing the experience to uncover what works, what doesn't, and what truly adds value.

I've been doing this prior to and since our initial release of SoonCall (an app for [long distance friendship](https://sooncall.com/blog/maintaining-long-distance-friendship?ref=markrsh.com)), and there have been some tremendous benefits to making it part of the development cycle.

However, this self-reflective feedback mechanism should compliment, and not replace, feedback from your paying users.

## Why you should be doing it from day one

- If you're not using your own product, you probably don't know where the real friction points are.
- If you're not empathising with your users, you probably don't know what problems they're trying to solve.

## Important Reminders

### Don’t steal food from your dog.

- User feedback is always going to be more valuable than your own experiences with your product.
- It's easy to forget that you're using the product from advantaged perspective. You know it inside out, and you probably know why things work the way they do.
- Your users don't. Something that is obvious to you is probably not obvious to them.

### Don’t feed chocolate to a dog.

> Just because you like chocolate, it doesn’t mean you should feed it to your dog

- Your users are spending time in different places to you. They're probably trying to solve a different problem to you.
- It’s important you don’t fixate on solving problems that feel important to you when your average user might not care.

###