Skin In The Game – The Importance of Using Your Own Product

What does Skin In The Game mean?

“Skin in the game” is a risk. The risk can be money, reputation, effort, or physical danger. The idea is that if you really believe in something, you’ll be willing to take risks and gamble for what you believe in. If you can’t do this, you probably don’t believe in the idea.

Why is it so important to use your own product?

“Skin in the game” is a really important term for many entrepreneurs, especially for those developing a product. But why?

To better develop a product it’s really important that you suffer along with the product you’ve created. You must be the primary user and put your skin in the game to understand all the product’s problems, what your customers need and how you can improve it. Only experience allows a more effective evolution, which not only makes you understand the problems but also understand how to solve them.

How does jestor apply Skin In The Game?

We use our own software for everything: our entire operation runs on jestor! We are our first customer and all the team suffers along with the product using it extensively. That’s why jestor keeps evolving, changing and adapting every single day. It may seem absurd, but it does happen. Many executives do not have a sense of what they sell, don’t fully know their own platform, making them unaware of their own weaknesses. That’s what makes jestor different: we use, we live our product.

It’s with a “Skin In The Game” culture that we’ve been able to identify all the pains of our customers, feeling them in our own skin. Having your entire team using your own product is essential to witness all the negative points, all the bugs, code problems, usability, gaps etc., and really understand what needs to be improved or created, as well as the best way to do that. Not to mention that when you suffer from something and the problem is solved, a close relationship, almost of affection, is created with the solution, maintaining the desire to always improve.