# Your product must earn your use

Dogfooding begins with an honest preference, not a story about an imagined customer.

## Start with a problem you can feel

Build something you would use. Better yet, build something you do use. That is the starting point for Project Dogfood.

It is not an absolute rule. You can serve a need you do not personally have. But then you need a real relationship with people who have it: enough curiosity to listen, enough empathy to understand what hurts, and enough ingenuity to solve it. An imagined customer is an easy person to impress. Their imagined profits are harder to spend.

If you cannot dogfood the product yourself, find somebody who can. Watch what they actually do. A polite compliment is weaker evidence than a person choosing the tool again when nobody is watching.

## Your habits are a starting point, not the entire market

The other extreme is building a perfect monument to your own peculiarities. A workflow that fits you exactly may require everyone else to become you before it becomes useful.

The useful middle is integration: feel a problem, solve it, and ask which parts belong to the problem rather than to your habits. Preserve the details that make the solution good. Remove the details that merely make it familiar to you.

Sometimes a very opinionated answer is the right answer. A smaller community may value it intensely. That is a choice with consequences, not a mistake by definition. You still have to understand who benefits and whether that group can support the work.

## Choosing another tool is feedback

A product does not deserve your use because you built it. It earns your use by helping you accomplish the task.

When you choose a competitor, ask what you are buying with that choice. Is it speed? Trust? A missing feature? A familiar shortcut? Better writing? Lower mental effort? The answer points toward a problem you can work on.

Preference is informative, but it is not infallible. Your taste can be unusually demanding or unusually narrow. Compare your reasons with the experience of another person who has the same underlying need. Keep your standards; inspect your assumptions.

## Make the record useful

A Dogfood post should name the task, show the attempt, describe the result, and explain the next change. A working demo is helpful. A failure that changes the design can be just as useful.

The project pages connect these notes to the tools, their current availability, and the next piece of reading. They are a record to build on, not a claim that every product already runs the business.

> The product should earn its place in the work. The story should earn its claims with evidence.