There’s an old saying in the software Biz… “eat your own dog food.” It should come as no surprise that it’s a good idea to use your own product: It’s simply the best and only way to ensure that you’re building something that other people want to use. If you wouldn’t use it, why would someone else? At Box, we’re lucky enough to not only use our own product, but to use our product to build our product.

Over the past 6-8 months our team has grown to a point where we’re beginning to truly see the pain points that larger teams and organizations run into. We’re now at 21 people, and hiring for a role or two every month, which means there are lots of individuals that need access to information. When starting out, we knew Box was a great tool for personal productivity and managing your information online, but we didn’t quite grasp the consequences it could have for people working together. By solving our own productivity and collaboration problems, we’ve been able to design Box in a way that we would ideally want to see software work. It’s been a very enlightening experience, and it’ll be an evolving process to make sure all of our needs are met by our own solution.

Along the way, we’ve run into the issue more and more of how to create and manage content online in a way that works seamlessly regardless of browser or operating system. Whether it’s for managing a project, creating marketing material, or just keeping track of personal tasks, there’s an immense amount of data that needs to be shared and organized. We’ve started to build functionality internally to help with this process, making it extremely easy to create this content online… for now, we’re calling this feature “Web Documents,” and it ties directly into our effort for simple online collaboration. More will be discussed and showcased in the coming weeks, but in the meantime, if you’d like to learn more about how to be a tester, email me at aaron@Box.net.