Eat Dog Food

This is Lorne Greene👆🏻. Don’t know who that is? Me neither.

How about now? 👇🏻

Still nothing? Same.

That was up until two hours ago when I looked up where the term dogfooding came from. Everyone in tech uses that term. But when I told my friend in the car today that I was “dogfooding” the shitty app I’m building, she looked confused. She had no idea what that meant

Fuck. I’m officially in the tech bubble now.

“Dogfooding” just means using your own product to see if it actually works.

Over the last three months, I’ve been helping friends and family understand and improve their metabolic health. I needed to see if this thing worked—and whether people would actually pay for it. Turns out, it works. And they did.

That was the MVP.

One big part of the process? They had to log everything they ate for 10 days. Then I asked if they’d go 20 more. They said yes—but not happily. Why? Because it was a pain in the ass. I have a hunch they only kept doing it because they paid for it.

We started with a shared Notes app. It was terrible. But they stuck with it because they really wanted to understand what was going on. I realized there’s no way I could convince most people to take pictures of every meal for 30 days unless the process was frictionless.

That’s one of the biggest problems I’ve seen across every metabolic health or fitness app: Food logging sucks.

People hated doing it. They forget. They give up. Then they quit.

The only way to fix that? Make it insanely easy. Cal.ai did that. So I asked—why can’t I?

Everyone said: “Just use a third-party app.” But I’m too stubborn, and too ignorant.

I thought, “It can’t be that hard to build Cal.ai myself. AI makes everything easier to code now, right?”

I was a mechanical engineer. Not a software engineer. But like most engineers say: “I can probably figure it out on my own.”

Wrong

For the last two months, I’ve been teaching myself how to code using everything I can— ChatGPT, YouTube videos, docs, and begging friends to explain what a cold start or migration actually is. It’s been humbling. At least seven times, I told someone the app was ready. Then I tried it myself— it shit the bed.

So I made the decision: Instead of assuming it was good enough, I’d dogfood it.

I started using it to log everything I eat and drink for 30 days. If this tool doesn’t make my life easier, it doesn’t deserve to make anyone else’s.

That’s the bar.

I’m building this tool because it solves two problems:

1. It helps me connect the dots between food and my glucose levels.

2. It makes food logging easier for others, too.

Great companies were built when founders solve problems they personally feel:

• Airbnb – Needed rent money. Couldn’t afford SF. Rented out their own house during conferences.

• Spanx – Sara Blakely couldn’t find undergarments that worked under white pants. Cut the feet off pantyhose—turned it into shapewear.

• Banza – Brian Rudolph had food sensitivities and couldn’t eat regular pasta.

• Liquid Death – Mike Cessario thought water branding was boring. Created punk-branded water as a joke. Now it’s a cultural brand.

• RXBAR – Peter Rahal and Jared Smith wanted a clean, transparent protein bar for CrossFit.

• Athletic Brewing – Bill Shufelt gave up alcohol. Teamed up with a craft brewer to make flavorful non-alcoholic beer.

I’m not building the next Airbnb. But I am solving a real problem—one I face daily.

If it works for me, there’s a good chance it’ll work for thousands of others like me.

So if you’ve got a problem? Solve it. Build for yourself. Contrary to what our mothers tell us, we’re not special. There are hundreds of thousands of people out there with the same problem.

Solve your problems.

Dogfood it. Share the dog food.

Only if you can stomach it yourself.

You’re Awesome,

Jared

Things Worth Clicking

A few gems I found on the internet this week - no digging required

• Bars from my friend Robyn. Don’t listen to everything you see on the internet

• Justin Mares on how AI is getting better than real doctors.

• How to think creatively by Shaan Puri. Long thread. Worth the read

I Dig So You Don’t Have To

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