Eat Your Own Cooking

Show Notes

Most bug reports travel through three people before anyone fixes them. By then the pain is a paragraph in a ticket and the person who felt it has moved on. There's a shorter path.

Featuring: Daniel Priestley

Watch on YouTube

Read the full post

Brought to you by:

Trends.vc: Discover new markets and opportunities.

HeadsUp: Know when your competitors move. Before your customers do.

Multi: Turn any content into a YouTube video.

Where to find Dru:

I write an essay daily. Get them free
Follow me on X
Watch my video essays on YouTube
Follow Dru's Notes on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

Subscribe to Dru's Notes for a new episode every day.

Creators and Guests

Host

Dru Riley

Founder of Trends.vc

DP

Guest

Daniel Priestley

Featured in Dru's Notes: Eat Your Own Cooking.

What is Dru's Notes?

One mental model each day in a few minutes. Habits, business, building products and thinking clearly. From Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc.

It's late on a Friday. You finish a long piece of writing. You drop it into the tool you built and watch it render into a video. Scene three loads with the wrong music. You feel the wince before you think the thought.

That wince is the gold.

Recently I ran a Trends.vc report through Multi.

The wince is the bug report writing itself.

- The button that sits a thumb's width too low
- The step that drags for thirty seconds
- The output that's almost useful

Eating your own cooking makes empathy automatic. The product breaks while you use it and you fix it before you close the laptop. You're the customer and the founder.

The hedge: your workload will map imperfectly onto every customer's. The solo founder publishing daily reports through Multi hits different edges than the marketing team running a weekly campaign. But your workload is a real load. It beats the hypothetical one you'd otherwise have to imagine into existence.

Compare it to the alternative. A ticket lands in someone's inbox. A stranger describes a frustration in words. The PM files it, prioritizes it against other tickets, schedules the fix for next sprint. The friction reaches them secondhand. Words on a screen, written by someone who already moved on.

When you are the user, the diagnosis and the decision sit in the same head. You feel the pain, you write the fix. The roadmap fills in from the friction you feel.

What daily problem could you solve with a tool you'd ship and refine yourself?