Dogfooding, or 'eating your own dog food,' is the practice of using your product in your daily operations, originating from a Microsoft practice in the 1980s.
Dogfooding is a systematic approach to product development where you become your own first customer to discover and validate market needs from the inside out.
The core principle of dogfooding is that if you solve a problem you genuinely have, you're more likely to solve a problem others have too, aiding in achieving product-market fit.
Dogfooding is critical for startups and product teams in the pursuit of product-market fit, shifting focus from building products for theoretical users to solving problems they intimately understand.