“Round here, we eat our own dogfood.”

“You, uh… what?”

Interviewing for my job with LiquidPlanner late last summer, I was feeling a little over my head. I’m relatively new to the software industry and was meeting with really smart people who have years and years of software experience. And now they were talking about eating dogfood?!

What they were really referring to, of course, was using LiquidPlanner to build LiquidPlanner. And now, with a few months at the company and a successful product launch under my belt, I know why this is so unique, and so valuable.

There aren’t many industries in which you can use the very product you’re developing to inform the development process. Doing so has enabled us to find bugs before our users do, to test new features, and to see how changes to the UI appeal to different users. Not only are we capitalizing on the value of our product but we’re improving it at the same time, a very tasty proposition.