[fredsters_s]

It's probably instructive to think about the type of product that you'd be dogfooding.

For most startups, dogfooding is a process of heavily using your own product to figure out what works and what doesn't and better understand the painpoints in the product from your customer's perspective.

That process changes quite significantly - what we're calling 'extreme' dogfooding - when the product you are dogfooding is a crucial part of your build process, because you cannot deploy if the product isn't working properly, whereas with most products that aren't developer tools a problem found through dogfooding isn't going to do something as drastic as preventing your deploy :)

[biot]

The nature of your product means that you are able to use the product as part of creating the product. Much like how a trucking company uses its own trucks to deliver the parts needed to build/repair those same trucks. Or how gcc is used to build gcc. What you call "extreme dogfooding" is more like half plain old dogfooding and half bootstrapping.

[fredsters_s]

It's got nothing to do with bootstrapping.

[biot]

It's quite similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers)

The process of getting a compiler to compile itself is not unlike your process of using Rainforest as part of the build process for Rainforest.