Dogfood your product daily to be your own use case for validation
Running your own operations on your product reveals flaws faster than user feedback. You feel the pain immediately and can iterate rapidly.
When to use
When building tools you could use yourself; when validating product-market fit
Don't do this
Building for hypothetical users without using the product yourself
5 Founders Who Did This
Three founders running their own GTM were the primary use case; discovered rigid workflows were wrong when customer asked for webinar attendees
Built personal sobriety blog (Sober Nation) and wrote daily for months. Treatment centers reached out asking how he built the community, validating demand for lead generation services.
Built Vercel's own website using Next.js as 'customer zero', experiencing the exact pain points of deployment and server-side rendering that developers faced
Rob was actively building his personal brand on X while developing SuperX. He used the product daily as an X creator himself, experiencing firsthand the problems the tool solved.
Used Basecamp daily with their web design clients for real project management work before ever considering it as a product. Client reactions served as validation.