Stop building for users. Start building as one.

As founders, we're told to "know our customers". But how can we understand their needs if we haven't experienced them ourselves?

Dogfooding—using your product—isn't a QA formality or development hack. It's a strategic advantage. It's how you build not only a better product but also a deeper understanding of what your customers need.

It's easy to get caught up in our ideas. We plan features, build campaigns, and analyze metrics. But we often miss the most powerful step: using our product. There's a chasm between building for users and building as one.

• Building for users means imagining what they need, writing specs, coding features, and running tests. You're checking boxes, validating functionality, and thinking like a builder.

• Building as users means using your product to solve your real problems. You're not testing—it's not theoretical. You feel the friction, the delight, the pain.

There's a magic moment when you use your tool to achieve a real goal.

Our journey with Flashboard

At first, one of us had a clear vision for Flashboard. The rest of the team supported it, but it still felt abstract. That changed when we started using it ourselves. We manage users, edit data, and publish content. The product stopped being a concept and became a real part of our daily workflow.

Bugs affect us. We feel UX issues. Once, there was a bug that stopped me from signing in. It was an edge case that customers would never hit, but we fixed it anyway. We want to make a great product, not for a faceless "user", but for ourselves. We stopped building a product and started building an experience we believed in.

Dogfooding not only improved the product. It created a shared vision. It aligned our team, strengthened our communication, and gave us the conviction to tell our story with authenticity.

I'm convinced that when I build my next product, I'll use Flashboard to manage it.