The Best Kept Secret? Using Your Own Product.

You hear this term in the tech world a lot:

"eating your own dog food."

Sounds a little funny, but the idea is pretty simple: you should be using the product you make. It’s not some fancy jargon; it’s just common sense. And it’s probably the most important thing we do.

Here at DataMagik, that’s not just a saying we hang on the wall. It's just what we do. I use every single part of DataMagik pretty much every day. I'm not just one of the folks who builds it; I'm one of its biggest users. That changes things—a lot. Keeps You Honest. It's one thing to sit around a table and draw up plans for a new feature.

On paper, everything looks great. But it's a whole different story when you're the one who has to rely on it to get your own work done an hour later. When you use your own stuff, you’re the first one to get annoyed by that extra click that drives you nuts. You find the little bugs that would make a customer want to pull their hair out, and you see them long before they do. You stop guessing what people need and start knowing, because you need it too.

It's All About the Little Things.

This is where you get the real payoff. When you have to live with the product you build, you get picky. Real picky. You can’t just push something out the door and call it "good enough."It stops being about just checking a box on a feature list and starts being about making something you're genuinely happy to use—something that actually makes your own day easier.

That’s how a product gets that feeling of genuine care baked right into it. The amount of love and attention that you can feel in the product makes it that much more impactful. It feels like a solid, well-built tool instead of a flimsy piece of junk—a Handshake Agreement.

At the end of the day, using your own product just shows you stand behind your work. It proves you believe in what you’re building and keeps you focused on fixing real problems, not just chasing whatever the next shiny thing is.

For us, DataMagik isn't just software. It’s how we run our shop. Using it day in and day out is our promise to our customers: we’re right there with you. We feel your frustrations, we know what works, and you can bet we're working to make it better—because we need it to be better, just like you.