Pay for your own dog food

http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2009/10/pay-for-your-own-dog-food.html

by nate • 17 years ago

36 15 17 years ago

blog.inklingmarkets.com

LargeWu• 17 years ago

This sounds a bit like the old trick of setting your alarm clock 15 minutes fast to trick yourself into getting up earlier. It works at first, but eventually you get used to just making the adjustment in your head and hitting snooze a couple more times

mbrubeck• 17 years ago

If you own 100% of the business, then paying yourself for your own product is just a trick. But if you have partners and investors, then it will cost you (not the business) real money.

eli• 17 years ago

Doesn't seem like that would work if, say, I'm a startup trying to sell high-volume VoIP service to large enterprises.

joeythibault• 17 years ago

Agreed. It really depends on your market/product. Though I will say that finding a way to use your product (even if it is simply using your VoIP service at low-volume) will unearth the bugs you might otherwise be missing (but that your clients are definitely not).

aplusbi• 17 years ago

But in that case you wouldn't be dogfooding anyway.

tlb• 17 years ago

Good idea. The pricing structure is part of the product. I did the halfway version of this in a previous project: there was a special magic credit card number which didn't actually get charged, but I got the emails every month telling me what had been fake-charged so I felt that part of the customer experience. Recommended.

sammcd• 17 years ago

Idea works well for subscription type payments. I don't know if it works that well for one-time software sales, though.

I'm making a mac application. Most likely I will be charging $50 for this application. It looks like my current design budget is about $1,500. I feel that if I find the product worth $1,500 someone might be willing to pay $50.

falsestprophet• 17 years ago

It may be better to "pay" for your application by taking that money out of the organization by donating, "losing", or burning it.

Only when the money actually disappears will you be able to have a good feeling for how the price affects decision making.

edit: I think it would be better to burn the money than donate it to eliminate the positive reinforcement donating would provide.

cperciva• 17 years ago

This is essentially how I set the pricing for Tarsnap -- I started out by asking myself "how much would I like to pay to store my backups?"

staunch• 17 years ago

Nearly everyone does that, the problem is often that they're not entirely honest with themselves. I know I've caught myself (and others) doing this:

Bob: "I'd totally pay $20/month right now for X"

Sally: "Your lucky day! Xyz.com has exactly that and it's only $15/mo!"

Bob: "Oh, um, uh, well I don't really need it that bad right now"

Actually taking out your personal credit card can be an enlightening experience.

donw• 17 years ago

It's also a good sanity check on your payments process -- if you don't get charged, or you get charged too much, you'll know about it a lot sooner than if you waited for customer complaints to roll in.

bemmu• 17 years ago

People have wildly different notions about what they consider a reasonable price for something. Before I started making social apps, I was selling import books. I had people often paying $50 or more for something that in Japan might have cost $5. Definitely would have missed that if I had just tried to imagine what I would be willing to pay myself, only way I discovered the "real price" was by auctioning items first.

InclinedPlane• 17 years ago

Not doing this is one of the biggest problems with Microsoft's internal dogfooding efforts, in my opinion. They dogfood just about every feature of every product MS offers, but the one thing they never, ever dogfood is licensing and pricing. Everyone just installs "Windows X Ultimate" or "Windows Server X Enterprise Edition" or "Visual Studio X Team System" or "SQL Server X Enterprise" as many times on as many machines supporting as many users as they feel like, rather than being pressured by budgetary constraints to pick the product that meets their needs best at a price they can afford.

The result is that most of the MS rank and file remain blithely ignorant of the extremely high retail prices of these products and their convoluted (sometimes almost punitive) licensing schemes. Given that licensing and pricing is a critical aspect of software use and can easily make the difference between user satisfaction and user desertion to a competitor's product, I've always felt this oversight hurt Microsoft far more than they imagine.

TheEarlyShow• 17 years ago

Somewhat related:

If someone were so inclined to write an audit application that did nothing but watch processes (I'm assuming, unless there's a better way) of paid applications they'd have a viable business.*

I don't know about the experience of others, but I've been in several situations where I've been given a large amount of software, some per desktop, some seat based that I never ever used. It wasn't even as if I purposely dodged the applications. They were paid for, but just sat there.

No inclination to look and see if one already exists.

prodigal_erik• 17 years ago

When I worked there a few years back, the developer tools team was begging for any feedback. The rest of the company would install Visual Studio Glacial Epic Edition and maybe fire it up to edit the odd dialog template, but did as much work as they could in vim or emacs and sometimes windbg (a much more powerful standalone debugger from the same team). Even if you wanted to use it, you were on your own getting it to compile your code, because the build system everyone else used (a make clone with specific support for win32 binaries) didn't interop at all with Visual Studio project files.

Pay for your own dog food

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