Dogfooding

As someone who runs a software business, it's in my best interests to be as in tune to the needs of my users as possible. One of the most direct ways you can do this is to be a user of your products yourself. In some tech circles this is known as Dogfooding, and is especially popular among indie hackers who hang out on Twitter. This probably explains why they end up building so many Twitter analytics and scheduling tools. (They hang out on Twitter, so they build tools that help them during the time that they hang out on Twitter)

This concept gets a bit tougher to implement if you want to go further afield with your product ideas. My business branches out from my experiences doing data analysis inside of big companies and trying to bring some of those tools to smaller businesses, especially media and online publishers. To some extent, you can use these tools on a company blog, but in my case, misapplying my own advice led me to make some decisions that I regret in hindsight - like gating access free resources behind a free members only login. I feel like in some way I was applying advice that applies to certain categories of media companies, but not really so much for business blogs that primarily want to funnel traffic into actually buying their products.

So in some way, I see this personal blog as being a place that I can experiment a bit more with just publishing content and in so doing, I can use more of my tools and better understand challenges that my users face. I think finding the right angle where this fits for you personally while helping you from a business perspective can be difficult to find, but going through that effort so you can eat more of your own dogfood should be worth it.