Your First and Best Customer is You (16/30)
I'm writing 30 posts in 30 days. This is number 16.
I enjoyed writing the last few posts based on what I recently came across. I will continue to write posts based on ideas I encounter. Not just those recent ideas, but those that I encountered a long time ago and stayed in me for a long time.
Paying Yourself First + Dogfooding
The idea I’m writing today or rather the formulation of the idea comes from Stratechery analyzing Amazon Web Services (henceforth AWS).
He views the relationship between AWS and Amazon.com, the e-commerce business, as between a vendor and its customer. Since both actually are the same company, he calls Amazon.com being its first and best customer of AWS.
This idea of being your own first and best customer has also appeared in different forms. For e.g. pay yourself first in finance areas talk about paying yourself first. In software product development, there’s a term for software teams using their own product while developing it. Because it’s still in the early development stage, the product is still a bit unpolished. Using it feels like eating dogfood. Hence, dogfooding your own product.
For those of a certain age and like to read self-improvement books, they would recall Tim Ferriss breakout title — the 4 Hour Work Week — advocating making products which you would be a customer of.
Rather than saying there’s a cluster of similar ideas in different domains: being your own first and best customer, dogfooding, paying yourself first, etc, I prefer to say this is the same general theme but having different people homesteading it in different domains.
How I’m applying it
I’m applying the first and best customer method in 2 different areas:
writing
producing my own tech-based SaaS
Firstly, in writing these 30 posts in 30 days, I’m writing anything I’m remotely interested in. To meet the minimum of 30 in 30, I have to lower all kinds of standards: quality, focus, etc. As long it’s something I’m remotely interested in, and I write in full sentences, and roughly coherent standalone pieces, then it’s good to go.
The other thing I’m dabbling in, is to build my own tech-based SaaS. For now, my finance situation is pretty stable because I have a 2 year long contract with a service-based customer running from 2021 Jan to 2022 Dec. This gives me the space to experiment with building my own SaaS.
Not much has been decided at this point. One decision (or meta-decision?) I’ve definitely set my mind on is the product has to be something I’ll be strongly interested in as a user.
I’m not entirely sure why. Actually, this idea of writing content I will read and making products I will use has been in my mind for very long. Yet, only now I have taken the actions to make this real. Not entirely sure why I have been stopped from taking these steps much earlier in life.
What about you? Is this idea new to you? If not, what has stopped you from trying it out? Perfectionism? Fear? I would like to know.