Don’t Forget to Use Your Own Products

Sometimes we get so invested and insulated in the process of creating our own products that we forget to actually them ourselves.

Over the past year, I’ve found that concepting and building WordPress themes for our prospective customers that I personally have gotten removed from using them for the same purpose that we’re building them — to help others build WordPress websites easily.

Part of the problem is that we don’t do hard any custom web work anymore …

So each new site I build for myself I take one of our themes and build the site with it. Maybe that sounds obvious to you, but having done web design for almost two years, I haven’t always started with one of our pre-built themes.

I recently redesigned this site, and decided to use our bSocial Magazine theme, one of our designer James Dalman’s first creations for us. And in customizing it for my own use, I learned a lot of things we’ll try to implement later on down the road in that theme possibly but new themes as well.

Here are some of the results of not using your own products:

• You forget what it’s like to be a user, customer (Most devastating result)
• You start designing and building products in abstract, versus reality
• You begin marketing your product to yourself instead of your customers
• You assume too much and make obvious, costly mistakes
• You get confused and lost when sales start to decline

All these things ultimately hurt your product, which hurt your customer, which hurt your bottomline.

So be sure to use your product regularly.