If It Doesn’t Work for Us, It Doesn’t Ship

As a founder or business owner building a software product, the highest-leverage habit you can adopt is to deliberately make your own product the default and usually the only tool you and your entire company use for real, mission-critical work.

No occasional testing. No falling back to Google Docs, Slack, email, spreadsheets, or any other tool “just this once.” You intentionally structure every part of your operations so the company cannot run without the product working smoothly and delivering a great experience.

This means running your actual money-making processes inside it: sales pipelines, customer support, onboarding flows, billing disputes, marketing campaigns, hiring, fundraising decks, everything. You ban competing tools with a clear company policy and no exceptions, not even for the founder. Every new feature is first battle-tested on internal projects that actually matter. If it breaks, the whole company feels the pain immediately. Founders and leadership become the heaviest, most demanding power users because those who care most about the vision need to feel every piece of friction acutely. You track your own internal usage metrics as seriously as customer metrics. Your company’s own dashboards are the first thing the team checks every morning. Any workaround or quick fix in another tool gets treated as a critical bug, not a temporary convenience.

Occasional use gives you stories. Relentless, no-escape dogfooding gives you raw, unfiltered truth about what is broken, what is merely annoying, and what actually delights people.

The best products are not designed by guessing what users might want. They are forged by founders who refuse to tolerate bad software because they are forced to use it 8–12 hours a day, every single day.

Dog food, like your company’s survival, depends on it because it does.