🍼 "baby fooding"

👋 Hi there - it’s Egemen. Thanks for reading Scalable.

In Turkish, we have this terrible idiom/saying that goes: “do what the doctor says, not what (s)he does”.

🤦‍♂️

I have a school of doctor friends who are heavy smokers, diabetics, living sedentary lives, and have all that jazz.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re not a doctor - congratulations (like, really).

Most doctors don’t “baby food” their own curriculum.

When you’re building your product, one of the key aspects is understanding what your customers go through - what exactly they experience.

Today I’m sharing a common practice so you can apply to what you are building right away.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

💡 Spotlight: Brainbase

I’ve come across one of the more interesting platforms lately - Brainbase, a first of its kind Enterprise Agent Platform - EAP.

“What’s EAP?” you might ask, well, as the cofounder Hugo Lamy has put it:

• It learns as it works, gets better over time, and helps save money

• It helps create AI tools faster; what used to take months now takes weeks

• It grows with your business without causing the problem

• It can handle up to 70% of repeated tasks automatically

• It's built to fit your specific business needs, not a one-size-fits-all solution

You know what the coolest part is?

They baby-feed their own product: Brainbase runs on Brainbase.

They are baby fooding their product.

That’s how committed these guys are. You should give them a try.

🧠 Deep-Dive: baby fooding (dogfooding)

The term "baby fooding" or sometimes playfully called "dogfooding" is used when companies use their own product internally.

The logic is simple.

You prepare the food. The food is safe, the is prepared with extensive care, and is nutritious in every way. But before you feed your baby with it, you first have a little taste yourself.

Why? Because it’s your baby. You still want that food to taste alright.

So the term "baby fooding" (short for "eating your own baby food") means a company uses its own product or service to perform its day-to-day operations.

In the context of SaaS businesses, it allows you to experience the product like a customer, and also helps identify bugs, usability issues, or missing features before the product reaches customers

PostHog, an analytics tool I love using, heavily uses their own tools to enhance product development and user experience.

• PostHog uses its own analytics platform internally to test new features like Surveys and HogQL, identifying issues before public release.

• They also use their Data Warehouse feature to integrate and query data from platforms like Stripe and HubSpot.

So what was the benefit?

👉 Quick feedback loops improve development speed, internal use uncovers bugs early, and dogfooding helps prioritize features that genuinely address user needs.

🎙️ Working on a startup? Grab some time with me.
Tell me what’s going well - or not so well. I’m here to help.

🗺️ Method: This founder got scammed (and how he found out)

I am a huge fan of Shark Tank - it’s definitely not representative of a typical founder-investor relationship, but it’s great television.

Robert Herjavec, one of the sharks lurking out here, got scammed by one of his employees many years ago.

🙌 I’ll let him do the talking for this one for about 2 mins, enjoy!

He first heard it from a former employee who was leaving, but then he understand how his sales flow was being abused by baby fooding his own product as a customer.

Yes, he pretended to be a customer, and got through the experience himself - then reached out to some “lost clients” to further understand how and why things were the way they were.

Yet another great method to show you should baby food you product as much as you can.

Use your product.

⚾️ Catch: deepseek

If you follow the stock market, crypto market, or simply just the news, you’ve probably heard of deepseek.

Chinese AI company specializes in open-source large language models (LLMs), founded in 2023 and backed by the hedge fund High-Flyer.

Their models, like DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, are known for efficiency and global competitiveness, available on web, mobile, and API platforms.

It’s almost “too good” that I made shockwaves all through the western side of the world. At a fraction of the cost, they are outcompeting OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, and Meta AI.

👉 Scalable partners with best-in-class publications.
Take a look at what our readers also enjoy reading.

☝️ Scaled This Past Week: Clay

Clay has raised $40M in Series B - it’s the scale of the week!

Clay.com is a platform designed to enhance go-to-market strategies by providing access to over 100 premium data sources and AI research agents.

• Key features include CRM enrichment, lead scoring, targeted list building, and automating inbound/outbound marketing processes.

• Trusted by 200,000+ teams, including OpenAI and Notion, it streamlines data-driven campaigns for businesses of all sizes.

Oh by the way, they have a free tier - no credit cards required, go play around with it!

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