Beyond Dogfooding

Developers have a particularly inarticulate term “dogfooding”.  According to Wikipedia, the term is defined as: “Eating your own dog food or ‘dogfooding’ is the practice of using one's own products or services.”  I will spare you the details of derivation of the term, but it loosely refers to an Alpo dog food commercial from the 1970s, where actor Lorne Greene referred to feeding the product to his own dogs.

The practice encourages developers to test their company's products in the wild.  The theory of dogfooding is that it gives the developers (and presumably management) instantaneous feedback on possible uses of the software, its shortcomings, benefits, and information necessary for innovation and improvement.

I just today received my first login to Ozeki to dogfood our service.  I am beyond ecstatic, and words don’t describe the feeling of seeing something that was once just an idea in your head turned into a real-world product.  It would seem to me that mere dogfooding would be woefully inadequate.  I want to inject Ozeki directly into my veins.  So, we are going to use it in every way.  We’ve dubbed this practice “Cainlining”(canine + mainlining). 

From here, we will use Ozeki to sell Ozeki, by negotiating better, faster deals and unlock high-quality revenue growth. I look forward to sharing more with you about our experience Cainlining Ozeki shortly.