Dogfood Your Own Product

Deel on Deel

Alex Bouaziz, cofounder of Deel, describes an internal rule he calls "Deel-on-Deel": building a product you do not use yourself is a very bad idea, so the company makes itself the first and forced customer of everything it ships.¹ Everyone at Deel is paid on Deel, and every new product is rolled out internally before it reaches customers. Bouaziz frames the internal team as involuntary early users. "My HR hates me for it, because they have to be the first users on it."¹ The posture is deliberately brute-force: "Just brute force it and use your own product. If not, it never works."¹

Born from a product he did not want to use

Bouaziz attributes the conviction to an earlier failure. His first company was a consumer video product in the vein of Musical.ly and TikTok, and about a year in he realized, in his own words, "I actually don't like making videos."¹ The generalized lesson he draws is that a founder building a product they have no genuine reason to use lacks the daily friction signal that drives quality. The failure, in his telling, was less about the video market than about building in a domain toward which he had no authentic pull, which is why he now treats being a natural user of the product as close to a precondition.

What the pattern is supposed to buy

Bouaziz and the surrounding account point to three effects. The first is a feedback loop that closes at near-zero latency, because internal users hit bugs and rough edges before customers do and can route fixes directly, functioning as a private fast lane for shipping. The second is forced empathy with the customer's reality: Deel sells HR and payroll, so running its own 7,000-person, 120-country workforce on Deel means the product team lives the exact pain it is selling against.¹ The third is a credibility asset in sales, since the claim that a company runs its own global workforce on the product is stronger than any demo.

Limits

The pattern works cleanly when the company is a natural user of its own product, as an HR and payroll vendor needs HR and payroll. It weakens when the product's intended user is structurally unlike the builder, which is the real content of Bouaziz's original video lesson: the problem was building in a domain he had no pull toward, not merely failing to use the app. Internal-only signal can also miss segments the company does not itself represent, since Deel-the-employer is not every customer type, so dogfooding complements rather than replaces real customer discovery. The account is a single founder's report on a single company, and it does not specify how to dogfood a product whose users the company cannot plausibly resemble.