Robert Ta built Clarity, an AI app for himself to navigate family, friends, work, and emotions. Using your own product to solve real problems reveals what actually needs fixing. Founders should dogfood ruthlessly, not just use what they built.
If you're not doing this, your product is probably trash. Dogfooding your own product means you use what you actually make. And there is a big discrepancy in kind of using it versus I am using this to get a job I need done. For example, the Clarity app. I built it for me first because life's complicated and I wanted a thinking partner that wasn't ChatGPT or Quad or whatever. I wanted something that, hey, I am your best friend. I will tell you what your core values are. I will reflect that back to your beliefs transparently. And so I thought, okay, I'm going to make this tool for me to demonstrate what it truly means to make a hyper personalized AI at the N equals one level, meaning this AI is hyper personalized to you as an individual based on your beliefs. To do that, I wanted to use this for my own use cases such as navigating family drama, friend drama, work drama, navigating my own emotions. I started doing that and I'm actually dogfooding the thing with real cases that are pract pressing for me. And in doing that I see the roughness around the edges. And if you're using your own product every day, truly dogfooding it, then you'll also see how do I smooth out these rough edges. And I suggest every other startup founder do that as well. If you do that, the feedback loop to make the product better is infinitely zero.
