We always say you should eat your own dog food. Our CTO prefers the phrase “drinking your own champagne.” Sounds a little more positive.
But whatever you call it, using your own product (known as dogfooding in the world of tech) is a smart idea. If you believe in your tech, you should want to use it. And we believe in ours, so we use it all the time.
In this blog, we’ll share some of our favorite examples of dogfooding at Idomoo. In some cases, we have whole blogs, even case studies, about these success stories, so you can read more if you really want to dig deep.
We’ll also share why it matters so much and why we think you should eat your own dog food too, especially if you’re a tech company.
The Perks of Eating Your Own Dog Food
First off, when you eat your own dog food, you notice how it tastes. That is, you notice the quality. If you’re using your own product, you naturally catch your own bugs. There’s nothing like hitting an unexpected error mid-demo to inspire a little empathy for your users — and a quick Jira ticket to solve it.
When you use your own product regularly, you spot friction points fast. The confusing UI. The extra click. That one setting buried four menus deep. And the great thing is you’re in a position to fix those problems. You know who to call (or DM on Slack) to get it prioritized and resolved.
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But it’s not just about QA. Dogfooding is a secret weapon for product innovation. You get ideas you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Real-life use cases, not just theoretical ones. You’ll find yourself thinking, “Wait, wouldn’t it be cool if it did this?” And voilà — your next feature is born.
It also builds trust across the team. When sales reps, marketers, engineers, and designers are all using the product they’re working on, they’re aligned. They care. They’re invested. And that passion comes through — in client calls, in campaigns, even in code.
And the last perk? It’s good PR. People notice when you actually use the thing you’re selling. It creates conversations with prospective customers. Our own CMO has shared at events how using our AI to create videos (because we don’t have an animator on staff) has been a lifesaver. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s a real lived experience. And that kind of authenticity comes through.
To recap, because most of you won’t read all that (we’re a video company, we know), here are the top reasons dogfooding is great for tech companies:
- You catch bugs and points of friction so you can resolve them fast.
- Having staff use your product breeds new ideas to spark innovation.
- It builds trust across teams so everyone’s invested.
- It shows the world you believe in what you’re making.
Our Success With Dogfooding
We’ve had lots of success with using Next Generation Video in our marketing efforts. We’ve also used our tech in other ways internally — for example, HR uses customizable video to introduce new team members and AI video to support employee training.
But for this blog, we’ll focus on how we’ve used Next Gen Video externally and the biggest wins. For now, this is just a partial list, but we’ll continue to update this post as we gather more data. Campaigns are ongoing, and the data is rolling in all the time.
If you don’t know or remember what Next Gen Video is, here’s a refresher.
Increasing Email CTR With Personalized Video
We’ve always known Personalized Video increases engagement. We see it with our client campaigns whether they’re distributed via email, web or in-app.
So naturally, we wanted some of that for ourselves. We sent multiple email campaigns with and without Personalized Video. The results? Emails with Personalized Video got a nearly 4x higher click-through rate and 3x higher click-to-open rate. Even open rates improved, thanks to including “Personalized Video” in the subject line — a small change that paid off.
Turns out, our audience likes receiving personalized content just as much as your audience does.
Saving Time and Money With AI Video Ads
We tell people Lucas AI Video Creator can 100x your team’s ability to create videos. So when we want to scale up our own video marketing, what do we do? Use Lucas, of course!
Creating high-performing video ads used to take us weeks and thousands of dollars for freelance support. Our stellar in-house studio is busy working for you all — but we don’t mind. Lucas has unlimited free time, so we used him to create branded, conversion-optimized video ads in minutes. No freelancer. No weeks of revision rounds. Just a prompt and a few clicks.
Our AI-powered video ads delivered over 2x higher CTR compared to industry benchmarks, and, best of all, production time and cost dropped by over 99%.
Read our AI Video Ads case study for a deep dive into what we did and what worked.
Driving Engagement With AI Video Newsletters
Speaking of Lucas, he helps with our email campaigns, too.
We used to send newsletters the old-fashioned way: blocks of text, a few static images and a lot of time spent writing, editing, designing and formatting. It took a full day, sometimes longer.
That changed when Lucas came on the scene. We swapped out long-form text for short-form video, using Lucas to instantly generate engaging videos from a quick prompt. No need to fine-tune what we wanted to say. He handled the script, scenes, animation, everything. We just put it into the email.
Our CMO wrote a blog post all about our AI video newsletter success, but if you want the spoiler, here it is: Engagement jumped 59%. That’s not even mentioning the time saved internally with our team. But you’ll have to click through and read the post for the full story.
Boosting SEO With AI Video
This one might be the most surprising. More engagement with Next Gen Video? Sure. More conversions? Absolutely.
But AI video improving our SEO wasn’t something we expected when we started this campaign.
The process was simple. Use Lucas to turn 10 blog posts into 20 videos — one vertical, one landscape. With our AI solution, turning a webpage into a video is easy. You just drop in the URL.
We put the 16:9 (landscape) version on the blog and post all of them on YouTube. Then we waited for the algorithm to do its thing.
After just a few weeks, multiple videos surfaced on Page 1 of Google for their core keyword, getting our brand in front of more eyeballs. We also found that blogs with videos generally got more engagement as users spend longer on the page.
Here’s just one example of the 20 videos Lucas made.
If you’re curious to hear more, see which blogs we used and watch some of the other videos created, check out our case study on turning blogs into videos.
Dogfooding Is Delicious
If you’re not using your own product, you’re missing out — on insights, on innovation, and, as we’ve seen, on real results.
Every example above started with a simple decision: “Let’s try this ourselves.” And each one proved what we already believed, that our tech works, and it works well.
Whether it’s quadrupling email CTR, saving weeks on ad production, or climbing to the top of Google with AI-generated video, dogfooding gives us an edge. It helps us build a better product, connect more authentically with customers, and stay true to our mission of making video faster, easier and more effective.
So yeah, we eat our own dog food. And honestly? It tastes great.
