TJL #49: Eat your own dogfood (Daily productivity #24)

Simple tips & trick to be more productive

Jan Meppe

Jan 12, 2021

Welcome back Daily Productivity #24. In this newsletter I share interesting stories to make you more productive.

Read today’s tip down below! 👇

Daily Productivity Tip #24

Eat your own dogfood.

Is My Dog Happy? | The Dog People by Rover.com

Eating your own dogfood means actually using your own products.

I believe that eating your own dogfood (using the products that you build) can improve your productivity.

The story that I want to share with you today about eating your own dogfood comes from the Coding Horror blog.

Extreme dogfooding

This story is about Stephen. Stephen is a woodworker and also a fan of dogfooding.

In fact, Stephen is the ultimate dogfooder.

The primary and also most dangerous tool in any woodworking workshop is the table saw (see image above). These things are extremely dangerous. Over 3,000 people each year lose a finger in an accident with a table saw.

A guy named Stephen Gass has come up with an amazing solution to this problem. He is a woodworker, but he also has a PhD in physics. His technology is called Sawstop.
It consists of two basic inventions: He has a sensor which can detect the difference in capacitance between a finger and a piece of wood. He has a way to stop a spinning table saw blade within 1/100 of a second, less than a quarter turn of rotation.
The videos of this product are amazing. Slide a piece of wood into the spinning blade, and it cuts the board just like it should. Slide a hot dog into the spinning blade, and it stops instantly, leaving the frankfurter with nothing more than a nick.

You guessed it. Stephen eats his own dogfood! He has tested his product on his own finger! Incredible! This is what it looks like.

It says something that you trust your own invention so much that you are willing to risk losing a limb for it. It says something about the product… or the inventor.

How I applied this tip

I started reading my own newsletter! It sounds stupid that I never bothered to read my own newsletter but this is another great example of eating your own dogfood.

I realised that I was writing my newsletter, but not reading it myself.

If I write something for others to read, what an injustice it is to not read it myself.

The whole point of this newsletter is to inspire and motivate and what if I can’t even inspire or motivate myself? Blasphemy!

How you can apply this tip

Of course it is not always possible to use your product, but if you can, you should.

This is another great way of actually testing whether you built a compelling product or not. Be your own first user! Why not?!

There is this certain deep user empathy that is hard to fake. Only by building and having someone play and use it you really get this feedback that you’re looking for. Often enough we think that a user wants a certain feature, but in reality they want something different, and you won’t know until you let them use your product!

This whole newsletter is about sharing inspiring and interesting stories to make you more productive. Eating your own dogfood can make you more productive because it makes you take the right choices in what to build.

Thank you for reading!

That was today’s issue of the Daily productivity Newsletter 🚀

Daily Productivity is a newsletter in which I share practical and effective tips on how to become more productive.

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As always, you can find me on my website janmeppe.com or on Twitter at @janmeppe.

Previous TJLs

Read my previous TJLs by following on the links down below:

Today Jan Learned

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