Eat Your Own Dogfood

Guest post by Hummer Winblad's Lars Leckie.....Lars drove our firm's investment in Aria Systems and, most recently, vKernel.

Last week Phil Wainewright wrote a great post (as he always does) called SaaS vendors, eat your own dogfood, or die. In the post, he describes how SaaS companies need to embrace the SaaS services available in the ecosystem.

I support the viewpoint from the post that SaaS companies need to have religion and leverage SaaS in everyway they can – further, I believe if they don’t they leave themselves open for other SaaS companies to disrupt them. From discussions with the infrastructure management of many leading SaaS companies I often hear how they are forced to use some on-premise pieces on the back-end reluctantly. This has provided the motivation for a few of our SaaS infrastructure investments (eg. Aria – SaaS billing and customer management).

Phil’s title had me thinking along another important vein for SaaS companies…literally to eat THEIR own dogfood and use their own product. For example, Salesforce aggressively uses Salesforce to manage prospects, Omniture eats their own analytics for online marketing, Teleo uses their own product for recruiting and SuccessFactors brags about their own talent management. Luckily we don’t all work for tobacco companies…

My belief is that SaaS companies must use their product for a few reasons:

1) Point of View: it puts everyone in the company in the seat of the customer. This means that the internal teams will live the same pain, the same experience and the same leverage that you are espousing as a vendor. This POV extends the advantages SaaS has of bringing the vendor closer to the customer by putting the customer in the office next door.

2) Analytics: By using your own product you will think about the product extensions and depth of how to apply the benefits of analytics to build stronger products and best practices. SaaS companies have a huge edge with analytics so it makes sense to use them internally as well.

3) Sales Roadblock: a fair question for a prospect to ask would be, “if your solution is so great, why aren’t you using it?" SaaS vendors can do their sales team a great favor by getting ahead of this question.

Any interesting SaaS companies that are using their own product and want to reach out – I’d love to hear from you. Please email me at Lars@humwin.com.