Eating your own dog foodOn a recent road trip up the west coast I broke down in Salem, Oregon, and spent a few hours, while the van was being repaired, browsing an excellent used bookstore called the Book Bin.

I remembered my visit several months later when Brendan initiated the Great Dog Food Experiment.

The name of the experiment comes from the expression “eating your own dog food” – which means that a company should use the products it makes. (According to Wikipedia, the phrase may have been inspired by “the president of Kal Kan Pet Food, who was said to eat a can of his dog food at shareholders’ meetings”.)

There are two reasons for this practice. One is that a company should stand behind its product – if you aren’t excited about using it yourself, you shouldn’t expect other people to pay for it. The other reason is that you learn a lot by interacting with a product in the same way that regular users do. If there’s something wrong with the way a dropdown menu works, it might not be apparent through testing, but it will come out through routine daily use.

Of course, StepRep is designed for small and medium businesses, and most of the people who work here at VendAsta don’t actually run their own businesses. It would be redundant if each one of us created a separate account to monitor VendAsta’s reputation. So a while back Brendan proposed that everyone “adopt” a company somewhere in North America, and use StepRep to monitor its reputation, just as if we worked there.

Among the adoptees are a restaurant in Vancouver, a resort in Florida, a bar in New Orleans, a realtor in Phoenix, and lots of small businesses scattered around our hometown of Saskatoon.

I adopted the Book Bin. Using basic information available online – phone number, address, competitors – I created an account for the store, and I’ve been monitoring its reputation ever since. Here’s a screenshot showing the Book Bin’s recent Share of Voice, measured against several competing used bookstores in Salem:

Share of Voice

If you zoom in you can see that the Book Bin is doing quite well, edging out its main competitor, Escape Fiction, in the frequency that it’s mentioned online.

The insights gleaned in our Great Dog Food Experiment have informed the changes, still ongoing, that we’ve been making to StepRep’s user interface over the last few weeks. If you click over there and log in, you can see what I’m talking about.

Check out StepRep’s new look.

Better, right? We’re curious to hear what our regular users think of the changes.

PS. I’ve also been keeping track of some of the work we’re doing on StepRep in recent updates to the VendAsta blog.