Everyone involved in a startup uses their app as much as they can. In our case, we decided to push it one step further. Our app is mostly useful for long distance calling. I have an iPhone and I pay a carrier to make phone calls. I didn't totally cancel my carrier, I needed it for my data plan and to receive calls. But anywhere I am, when I need to make a phone call, I use Tribair, local call or not. If there isn't a WiFi near by, I just call using my data plan. The experience has been very useful. The ultimate goal in eating your dog food is to improve your app. In my case, I was mostly interested in improving call quality. Over time, we were able to cut the delay between callers and actually improve the quality of the sound. We did a lot of quality testing and surveys. I shamelessly called Canadian embassies across the world to collect recordings with different settings and play them back to people so they could rate the calls. We found out that their rating was directly proportional to the volume of the call. The louder the call, the higher the rating. In the newest version 1.2.1, calls are louder and users can increase the volume directly in the app, during a call. Nowadays, most of the time the person called doesn't even know that I'm using a VoIP service, and I don't tell them. It's becoming normal to have high quality calls.
Using it all the time also came with a few nasty surprises. When I'm near a subway station at peak hours, using my data plan is not a good idea. The network gets congested and the sound sucks big time. But other than that, it has worked perfectly. Even in crowded coffee shops, WiFi has never been a problem.
Eric
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