Coffee Shops & Dogfood

I've spent the better part of the past month working out of coffee shops. It's an interesting aspect of the modern economy that distributed teams can be so effective. Github, for example, which hosts code for much of world including Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, has a single office in San Francisco but employees all over the world. Several are right here in Nashville. I know a guy in Chattanooga that works for Microsoft. An increasing trend I've noticed in user group communities is that leaders tend to be part of this remote workforce.

In the 21st century, why pay for expensive office space and be limited to the local talent pool? One of the guys I work with now lives in Florida. The bulk of our communication occurs through Github and Slack. The same is true for the local guys on our team. Next month we'll be getting a small office, though, because coffee shops don't have whiteboards. Or refrigerators.

Ray, my wife's father, has been living with us again since late summer. This is the third time he's lived with us in the past few years, but hopefully he'll have his house back from his other daughter next month. Ray plans to use it as an office. He too is building a startup with a distributed team, although several of them are in Johns Creek. Ray is not really into the coffee shop thing, but he is on the phone alot.

Back in September before I started at GiveToken I built a nice little piece of SaaS software (is that redundant?) to expand the spreadsheet I'd been running since I watched Randy Pausch's last lecture. I called it TaskGiraffe, Cara made me a nice logo, and I started living in it like I used to live in my spreadsheet. I got some friends and friends of friends to try it out, but none seemed to find it as useful as I did.

When I started at GiveToken last month, I stopped spending time developing TaskGiraffe, but I still spent every day on it. It does just about everything I want in a task management system except complete the tasks for me. Maybe a TaskRabbit integration could solve that though... The point is, it is a product that lends itself naturally to dogfooding. I recently saw a local Githubber comment on the NashDev Slack that Github wikis are not very good because they don't use use them at Github. "The parts we dogfood get more love."

Some products, however, do not lend themselves very well to dogfooding. At LeadsPedia we didn't really start using our performance marketing platform until we were doing a significant amount of online marketing. At PatientFocus we couldn't really try to collect our own medical bills. So I've been racking my brain how we can dogfood at GiveToken. We aren't doing a large amount of hiring right now, so we can't really send out recruiting tokens ourselves to see how they improve the hiring process. And we don't want to start trying to fill positions for other companies because that would put us in direct competition with the recruiting firms who are our customers.

Such are problems for next week. I'll keep noodling on it, but right now I have to take a daughter to a soccer game. In the mean time, enjoy my coffee shop selfies in case you missed them on twitter: