I’m not sure where I learned that phrase. It was either from my long stint in telecom at Level 3, which makes no sense whatsoever, or from my days in consulting at Bain. In either case, the point of the saying is that if you are trying to get your customers to try something, you had better be using it yourself so that you know exactly what the customer is experiencing.
This applies both directly and indirectly to Envysion and we try to be diligent about it, and we are definitely making strides at doing it more pervasively throughout our business. Let me share some examples with you. In a direct sense, we use our own video service to monitor our building and even some of our employees houses (the outsides of course). The service came in quite handy in the first week in our new building a year ago when a workaholic young woman in marketing was alone in the office late at night. She heard someone rattling the doors and saw from across the cubes a scruffy guy with a backpack “lurking” outside the building. She was naturally afraid to go out to her car so she called our CTO (who lives close to the office) to ask for some assistance. Before he started to come over, Rob got onto our service, looked at video of the doors from a few minutes ago and quickly identified the scruffy villain as none other than our scruffy developer Joey who had forgotten his badge and didn’t know anyone was in the office. This is an obvious one, of course we’re going to use our own video service. Note: I could have used the infamous cone stomping/parking space confrontation example where our neighbors used our own video service to highlight some of our, um, questionable negotiating tactics but I have found making fun of my bosses in public is frowned upon.
An indirect but more recent example of us eating our own dog food is our use of other software as a service businesses for our own purposes. The primary example is our use of Salesforce.com, which is perhaps the best known of all software as a service applications. We use salesforce extensively for our CRM and sales processes.
Why is it important to use other SaaS applications internally that have nothing to do with our service? It helps us experience the SaaS model and apply our learnings to how we operate our service. For example, one of my pet peeves with Salesforce is that I can’t just add a user (when I hire a new salesperson) by clicking a button. Their whole model is software and self service based , but I can’t click a box and sign up for a new user license? Instead I have to email my account exec, have him send me a pdf of a contract, print it, sign it, scan it and email it back to him, then he adds a license and then I can add a user. This is particularly irritating when I have forgotten to do this ahead of time and a new salesperson shows up for day 1 training and I can’t get them on Salesforce right away until I go through that process. Salesforce isn’t stupid, they probably realize the pain this creates, but they are focused on getting that ink signature on a contract so they make their customers suffer a bit for it. With our service, we think how this will apply to customers that want to add another camera (which has a license implication) to their service. Do they need to call us first and ask us to add another camera license so they can see their new camera or do they plug in their new camera and that automatically triggers an increase in their licenses? There are pros/cons to each approach, but we are better prepared to think the issue through b/c we’ve gone through the same thing from a user’s perspective with our own SaaS tools.
