Dogfooding

Hey all! It’s been a while. I lapse like this when it comes to content and have been in my own head about writing again. It’s a weird and tiring cycle ☹️ 

Thank you Jesus, worked myself out of that. So here’s a post for the week. 1x per week. Sometime Thursday. That’s the goal.

My company built a product I'm struggling to use in my own ministry. It's taken me awhile to figure out why.

In software development, there's this concept called dogfooding. In 1988, a Microsoft employee named Paul Maritz sent an internal email titled "Eating our own dog food," encouraging a manager to increase their internal usage of the company's product. The phrase stuck.

I'm the CEO of Seedling and I also serve as a co-vocational youth pastor at my church (Echo.Church, Sunnyvale campus). I want my students to pray. It's a core spiritual discipline that's shaped me.

So I've been dogfooding Seedling for months. Going through the friction. Feeling every pain point our customers feel.

When prayer starts flowing, Seedling crushes it. We supercharge pastors and leaders on how to think about caring for their community in ways they wouldn't be able to see on their own. Because we're dogfooding our own product I can say with conviction that the app is growing in the right direction. It's a real force to mobilize people to pray and to share testimony. It's also growing in producing the right insights (not just charts and graphs) on what you should be doing as a leader.

But here's what dogfooding revealed that surprised me.

One of my primary goals as a youth pastor is to engage my flock outside the day we meet. I don't want to engage once a week. I want to engage daily, in meaningful ways.

Like through prayer.

Prayer is incredible. It's the richest piece of engagement you can possibly get from someone. Asking someone "How can I pray for you?" is effectively the more piercing and honest way of asking "How are you doing?"

In church metrics, prayer is vastly more important than any checkin event. Yet as church leaders we put so much emphasis on engaging with us through checkin.

We all know checkin is nowhere near as important as prayer. We also know it's important nonetheless. I'm a youth pastor and former campus pastor so I get it.

It's only through dogfooding Seedling that I recognized I want all of it. I want to know the health of the ministry and I want my people to desperately pray.

One of my pastors said it best: "I'd gladly pay $1,000 a month if we could get 500 people at our church praying every week."

That moved me. Because it's not a feature request. It's what every pastor I've talked to actually wants but doesn't know how to ask for.

We started building a prayer tool. Through dogfooding, we discovered we're actually building a shepherd's dashboard. Deep pastoral insights anchored in prayer, with relevant checkin data and teaching curriculum helping provide recommendations on how you can care for your flock more powerfully.