Use Your Application, Eat Your Cookie
As posted on the FreshBooks blog:
One of the things I like to see when I subscribe to someone’s service is that THEY use their own service. I call this “eating your own cookie”.
We are in the process of redesigning our timesheet. It’s a great design project to sink my teeth into. How to we start something like this? We USE THE TIMESHEET.
Starting this morning everyone around here is responsible for tracking their time in 10 minute intervals – this is going to force us to use the timesheet regularly and get in touch with the painful activity of accurately tracking your time down to the minute.
If you are building web applications, using your own product is KEY. We built FreshBooks to help us manage our web design company and we still use it to manage the billing of a handful of clients we have not let go of…. And after three years, the cookie still tastes good, but with our upgraded timesheet, it’s about to get sweeter.
I’ve never heard “eating your own cookie” however I have often heard “eating your own dog food” in this context - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_one’s_own_dog_food
Great example of what happens if you don’t eat your own… here:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=32538
I think eating cookies must be a Canadian thing.
When developing in Prague, we ‘drank our own beer’ so I think it is a regional thing.