What Is Dogfooding? How to Use It (and Real-Life Examples You Can Try)

Think of some of your favorite software products that you use regularly. Maybe it’s Figma for design, Notion for docs, Airtable for workflows, or Bubble, a fully visual app builder.

Your opinion of those products would probably change if you found out the company’s own teams didn’t use them. If Notion used Google Docs for its company wiki, that would be a bit suspicious. If Figma employees didn’t use Figma for their own design work, the marketing would feel unconvincing.

That instinct has a name: dogfooding. Here’s where the term came from, why companies do it, and how Microsoft, Apple, Slack, and Bubble put it into practice. You’ll also find a step-by-step process for running your own program, a routine for dogfooding an app you built with AI, and the limits worth planning around.

What is dogfooding?

Dogfooding is the practice of a company using its own product internally, as part of employees’ everyday work. Companies dogfood to catch bugs before customers do, build product empathy across teams, and test whether the product holds up under daily use. The term is short for “eating your own dog food,” and while it’s most common in software and technology, the idea applies anywhere a company can use what it sells.

The phrase is commonly traced back to dogfood advertising, especially Alpo commercials featuring spokesperson Lorne Greene, who reportedly told viewers he fed Alpo to his own dogs. It later became a metaphor in business and technology for using the products you promote or build.

You might also hear it called “drinking your own champagne” if you prefer a glass-half-full approach.

The jump to the technology world came soon after, when Apple CEO Mike Scott circulated a 1980 memo setting a goal of eliminating typewriters at Apple by January 1, 1981, in favor of Apple II and Apple Writer systems.

Microsoft later became known for running internal dogfooding programs on its own software, which helped make the term standard across the technology industry.

Why companies dogfood their own products

Companies dogfood their own products to find problems before customers do and to give every team firsthand experience with what they sell. Here’s what that gets you.

• Catch bugs and dependency issues early. Dependency issues are problems that show up when one part of your product relies on another part, a plugin, or an outside service that doesn’t behave as expected. When your internal team relies on the product daily, they run into the same friction points and bugs that users do, so you can fix them before they reach the public. For example, if your app crashes when handling large file uploads, your team will discover that during their own work instead of through a customer complaint.
• Create a more stable version of your product for customers. Consistent internal use means you’re testing the product dayin and dayout, instead of waiting on bug reports from users. This ongoing usage surfaces edge cases that formal QA testing often misses.
• Gain clarity on the needs and goals of your target audience. Using the product for actual tasks makes your team experience the user journey firsthand, which builds empathy and highlights missing features. When your sales team uses your CRM to manage live deals, they quickly learn which workflows feel clunky and which features are useful.
• Build stronger support for your product among internal teams. When employees use the tool they’re building or marketing, they develop a deeper understanding of its value, which leads to more authentic marketing and better customer support. A support rep who uses the product daily can troubleshoot issues faster than one who only reads documentation.

Real-world examples of dogfooding

Dogfooding is a standard practice across the technology industry, from early-stage startups to the largest enterprise organizations.

Microsoft has long had employees use early builds of its own software before broader rollout. Those programs test new versions internally so the company can improve the experience before customers get it.

Slack is commonly cited as another example, since the platform was designed around internal communication. Slack’s collaboration features, such as channels, threads, and integrations, became core to the product’s success.

The table below summarizes the examples in this article.

How to dogfood your own product

Strong marketing is just one benefit of dogfooding. Done well, the practice can help a company significantly improve its product. Done superficially, it won’t.

Dogfooding isn’t the same as Coca-Cola banning Pepsi products in the office, or a clothing store requiring its employees to wear only its brand. The point is to use the product for actual work and act on what you learn.

Teams who dogfood effectively increase internal usage of their product to speed up beta testing and generate a steady stream of internal feedback. That feedback helps them iterate with more focus and make the product better.

Dogfooding isn’t always practical across an entire product, but most companies can find meaningful ways to use what they’re building. Two common starting points are your website and your internal tools.

Dogfooding your own website

For many tech companies, your own website is a great place to start, since every team touches it and customers see it every day.

At Bubble, we dogfood Bubble across our own web properties and internal tools, using the same visual editor, database, workflows, hosting, and deployment our builders use. Workflows are the step-by-step logic behind an app, like what happens when someone submits a form. Working in them every day gives our internal builders a feedback loop on the same tools our community uses, including the Bubble AI Agent.

Early in Bubble’s development, we knew we wanted to give people the freedom to build multi-page web apps with polished, responsive design and the logic, database, and integrations a web app depends on. That’s a different job than website builders like Wix or Squarespace are designed for. Building our own web app on Bubble pushed us to improve those capabilities, along with the hosting builders rely on.

Bubble’s website is a complex app built on our own platform. Because it’s built on Bubble, our team can shape new features and pages exactly the way they want them, either by chatting with the Agent or by editing directly in the visual editor.

A great example is the Ideaboard, a page on Bubble’s main website where users can contribute and engage with ideas for product improvements. The concept isn’t unique to Bubble, but the team built it themselves because it’s a strong fit for what Bubble is built for: user-generated content, database logic, and moderation workflows in a fully visual app.

The team designed the first version around collecting and prioritizing user ideas, with basic moderation for Bubble team members. Josh Haas, one of Bubble’s co-founders and co-CEOs, says the project shows “how Bubble helps you develop ideas fast.”

Today, the Ideaboard is a great source of feedback and ideas for the Product team as they work through what to prioritize on the roadmap. Because it’s built on Bubble, the team has flexibility they might not have if they’d used a different service to build it.

“[We] set up our own moderation system tailored to the content and to the needs of our community,” Josh explains. “It can evolve as needs change ... You can imagine different new ways we could integrate the Ideaboard more deeply into other parts of the product experience to make it even smoother for our users.”

For a closer look at how the team works, watch our internal builders’ masterclass on How Bubble Builds Bubble for Scale.

Dogfooding products as custom internal tools

Using your own product as part of your internal tech stack is often the most practical way to dogfood, because your team depends on it to get work done. For example:

• ClickUp should use ClickUp for its internal project management. If the tool creates friction for the team, like slow load times, confusing task views, or clunky workflows, they’ll feel it before customers report it.
• Uber employees should regularly use Uber to get to and from the office. Experiencing the product firsthand surfaces usability issues that ride-along sessions and user interviews rarely catch.
• Slack should use Slack for its internal messaging. When the team relies on it all day, notification fatigue, search limitations, and threading issues become part of their own workday instead of a support ticket someone else files.

...and so on, all the way back to Apple using its own word-processing system instead of typewriters.

Your entire product may not make sense to use internally. Still, there are likely features your team could use regularly for testing and feedback.

For example, a company like Loom may not want to replace all of its meetings with Loom videos. But it could use Loom features in interesting ways throughout its workflows, such as recording explainers for its blog or managing sales outreach with custom Loom messages. Trying a variety of use cases internally first gives you a stronger understanding of your product’s functionality and a clear way to test for inconsistencies.

At Bubble, we use several internal tools built on our own platform. Our teams build admin tools that combine visual interfaces, database actions, permissions, and custom logic in one place. Our internal Content Admin tool is one example.

Building the tool on Bubble was a “no-brainer,” according to Bubble Developer Maria Posa. The Content Admin lets Bubble employees safely change data in our app through a simpler interface with guardrails built in.

Because it’s built on Bubble, the tool does more than create, read, update, and delete records, the basic set of actions developers call CRUD. It also uses visual workflows, database logic, privacy rules, and conditional behavior that the team can read and update with no code.

The Content Admin covers a wide range of content. On the simpler side, the People team has a page where they can add, edit, and delete employee records as part of the onboarding process.

On the more complex side, the Marketing team can edit announcement banners to display important info about upcoming events and feature releases. “But it also automates logic like publishing in the future, showing the banner on specific pages, and allowing users to dismiss it a certain number of times,” Maria adds.

How to run a dogfooding program, step by step

A successful dogfooding program needs structure. Without a clear process, feedback gets lost in chat channels and the team stops participating. Here’s how to set up a program that improves your product.

1. Pick the workflows your team does for real every week: Don’t assign arbitrary testing paths. If your team uses your app for project management, have them manage their weekly sprints in it. Everyday tasks surface the friction points that scripted QA testing misses.
2. Decide who dogfoods and for how long: Set clear expectations for participation. For a small startup, the founders might use the app daily. For a larger organization, you might run a two-week pilot with the Marketing team before rolling a feature out to customers.
3. Set up one feedback channel: Give your team a single, low-effort place to report issues. Whether you use a dedicated Slack channel, a specific form, or an internal issue tracker, keeping feedback in one place prevents bugs from slipping through the cracks.
4. Triage what you find: Sort incoming feedback so you know what to tackle first. Separate critical bugs that break core workflows from unexpected behavior and nice-to-have feature requests.
5. Close the loop: Show your team that their feedback matters. When you ship a fix based on an internal report, announce it. Teams stop dogfooding when they feel their reports go into a black hole.

How to dogfood an app you built with AI

When you build an app with AI, dogfooding helps you catch where the app drifts from what you imagined. AI app builders get a first version up fast, but the AI makes many of the choices along the way. Using the app daily shows whether those choices work for your users.

A daily routine for dogfooding an AI-built app looks like this:

• Use it for an actual task: Run the app through work you’d do anyway, instead of clicking through a demo path. If you built a booking app, take your own bookings in it for a week.
• Compare it with what you pictured: Note every spot where the app’s behavior drifts from what you imagined. Small drifts, like a status that changes at the wrong moment, are easier to fix early.
• Check that you can explain it: Walk through what happens when someone cancels a subscription or resets a password. If you can’t explain why the app does what it does, look at that part next.
• Fix it now or log it: Decide whether each issue blocks your users or can wait. Keep a running list so nothing you find gets lost between sessions.

On Bubble, the logic and data are visual, along with the screens. When dogfooding turns up a problem, you can open the workflow, see which step is off, and change it yourself by chatting with the Agent or editing by hand in the visual editor. Because the logic reads as plain-language steps, you can fix what the AI got wrong without waiting on a developer.

When dogfooding has limits

Dogfooding provides valuable feedback, but it isn’t a complete replacement for external user testing. Your internal team members are power users who understand the product’s architecture and intended workflows better than a new customer ever will.

Because employees already know how the software is supposed to work, they often unconsciously navigate around poor UX design or confusing interfaces. They also have a higher tolerance for bugs in early builds. To build a product new customers find easy to use, pair dogfooding with external user research and usability testing.

Here’s how dogfooding fits alongside other testing methods.

Build the product worth dogfooding

Dogfooding isn’t the answer to every product challenge, but it keeps us honest about the promise we make to builders: You can build apps with AI without giving up control. That’s why we build and change our own website, internal tools, and product workflows on Bubble, with the same tools our builders use.

Bubble is a fully visual app builder. Every part of an app, including the logic, data, and privacy rules, is visual and editable, no code required.

When your team finds something off while dogfooding, you can see how that part of the app works and change exactly that part. Use AI when you want speed or edit by hand when you want precision.

Describe your idea to the Agent, and it starts with a planning session, asking clarifying questions before it generates your app. Everything it builds, you can read and refine yourself.

If you already work with AI tools like Claude or Codex, the Bubble MCP (beta) connects them to your Bubble app. As you grow, Bubble for native mobile apps lets you build for web, iOS, and Android from one editor on one shared backend, with hosting, security, and scaling built in.

More than 6 million builders use Bubble to build and grow their apps. Getting started is free, and generating an app with the Agent doesn’t use AI credits. Get started for free and build an app your team would want to use every day.

Frequently asked questions about dogfooding

Why is it called dogfooding?

The term comes from the phrase “eating your own dog food,” which is commonly traced to dog food ads like Alpo commercials featuring Lorne Greene, who reportedly said he fed Alpo to his own dogs. Microsoft later helped make it a standard term in the technology industry.

What’s another word for dogfooding?

Some companies call it “drinking your own champagne,” a more upbeat name for the same practice.

What is an example of dogfooding?

One of the earliest examples in tech is Apple’s 1980 memo setting a goal of replacing the company’s typewriters with Apple II computers and Apple Writer. More recently, Bubble builds its own website, the Ideaboard, and internal admin tools on Bubble, using the same tools its builders use.

Is dogfooding the same as beta testing?

No. Dogfooding means a company’s own employees use the product in their daily work, while beta testing releases a pre-launch version to a select group of external users for feedback from outside the company.

What’s the difference between dogfooding and alpha testing?

Alpha testing is an early, structured phase, usually run by internal QA or product teams on a build that isn’t feature-complete, to find major bugs before a beta. Dogfooding is ongoing everyday use of the product by employees across the company, on early builds and released versions alike.

Can you dogfood your own app if you’re a solo founder?

Yes: Use the app for your own work, keep a running log of issues as you hit them, and ask a few friends or early customers to try it, since you know the app too well to spot every confusing screen. On Bubble, you can open the part of the app that’s off and change it yourself or ask the Bubble AI Agent to change it.

How long should a dogfooding phase last before you release a change?

It depends on the size of the change: A small fix can often be checked in a few days of normal use, while a new feature or redesigned workflow often benefits from 1–2 weeks, long enough to cover a typical work cycle. Larger releases can run longer, especially when several teams need to try them.

How do you know if dogfooding is working?

Look at how many issues your team finds internally before customers report them, how quickly fixes based on internal reports ship, and whether the same issues keep coming back. Steady participation is another signal, since people keep filing feedback week after week only when they trust it leads somewhere.