How dogfooding shapes our product
The power of eating your own dog food
We believe in using our own products to understand what our customers feel.
This practice, known as "dogfooding," helps us identify pain points, discover new use cases, and continuously improve our product.
By being our own customers, we gain firsthand insight into what works well and what needs improvement. This direct experience drives product decisions and ensures we're building something truly valuable.
Internal examples
Product Update
Every month we send an email describing what we shipped that month.
At first, this email was written in a code editor, and sent with a super hacky bash script where we would loop through all the users, and trigger an API request to send an email to each user.
This was obviously not the best way to do it, but all we had was our Email API and a few hundred users.
After feeling that pain, we built Audiences and Broadcasts, so we could write the email using a WYSIWYG editor, and not depend on a script to batch send emails.
All-Hands Meeting
Every Monday we send a newsletter together for our all-hands meeting.
This was a great way for us to dogfood multiplayer functionality, allowing multiple team members to collaborate on creating and editing content in real-time.
Investor Update
Every month we send a newsletter to our investors with the latest company news.
This allowed us to ship components to broadcast such as the X/Twitter embed.
Feedback Friday
Every Friday, the Customer Success team sends a newsletter to the rest of the Resend team with the most latent user pains from this week.
This regular internal communication helps us stay connected to our users' experiences while using our own platform.
Monthly Incident Overview
Every month, the Engineering team takes a closer look at our reliability and also shares with the team all the learnings and challenges we faced.
This practice helps us dogfood our monitoring and reporting capabilities.
Savour
Every week, the Design team sends a newsletter to share more about how to develop taste.
This internal newsletter helps the design team explore creative uses of our platform while sharing knowledge across the organization.
Public examples
A Song Every Day
Every morning, Alexandre Cisneiros posts a new song, along with some commentary of what that song means to him or why it is there, and links to stream it.
This was a good opportunity to dogfood the Topics API and Broadcast API in a creative context. It also led us to develop a feature for embedding inline images using Content-ID.
Honest • Unfinished
Every few months, Zeh Fernandes shares a newsletter about his personal learnings about how humans interact with computers.
This newsletter helped us dogfood the Local Styles and Global Styles features available in the Broadcast editor.
Dracula Theme
Every month, Zeno Rocha shares the latest news about the open source Dracula Theme project.
This helped us dogfood the performance page that shows after a Broadcast is sent.
The feedback loop
These dogfooding examples create a virtuous cycle where our own usage drives product improvements, which in turn benefits all our customers.
When we encounter friction or discover new needs through our own use, we can quickly iterate and improve the product for everyone.