There's a principle in software called dogfooding — using your own product in production, with real stakes. It's uncomfortable in the best possible way. Every rough edge you encounter is one your users are also hitting. Every missing feature is something you feel before they tell you about it.
We built ShipPulse to replace three categories of tools we were using ourselves: a changelog publisher, a status page provider, and a testimonial collector. Here's what switching looked like, what broke, and what surprised us.
What we were using before
Before ShipPulse, our stack for communicating with users looked like this:
- Changelog — a custom-built Notion page that we embedded on our marketing site via iframe. It looked terrible on mobile and had no email notifications.
- Status page — a third-party service we were paying $29/month for. It had uptime monitoring but the design didn't match our brand, and the incident communication flow was clunky.
- Testimonials — collected manually via email, stored in a Notion database, copied and pasted into the website by hand whenever we updated the landing page.
Three tools, three monthly invoices, three login portals, zero consistency. And none of them talked to each other in any meaningful way.
The migration
We started with the changelog because it was the most painful. Moving from the Notion iframe to a ShipPulse changelog meant importing our old entries (about 30 of them), setting up our brand colors, and pointing the subdomain. That took about two hours total.
What we immediately gained: email subscriptions. Within two weeks of migrating, we had over 200 users subscribed to changelog updates. We hadn't been able to offer that at all with the Notion embed. Those subscribers now get notified every time we publish — no Mailchimp integration required, no separate mailing list to manage.
Status page migration was next. The main decision point was monitoring coverage — ShipPulse monitors our API, dashboard, widget embed endpoint, and the public changelog feed separately. If any of them degrades, we get a Slack alert and the status page updates automatically. Incident postmortems are published directly from the dashboard.
Testimonials took the most thought. We had been curating them manually, which meant high quality but low volume. With ShipPulse we set up an automated request flow: after a user has been active for 30 days, they get a single email asking for feedback. The testimonials that come in are immediately available to approve and embed.
What broke
Honest answer: a few things, mostly self-inflicted.
We ran our status page monitors on the wrong endpoints for two weeks before noticing. We were monitoring our homepage URL instead of our API health check endpoint, which meant we were getting false positives and not catching the degradations that mattered. That was a configuration issue on our end, but it highlighted that the monitor setup flow could be clearer — so we improved it.
We also initially set up the testimonial widget to show up on the landing page before we had approved enough testimonials to make it look good. We ended up with a widget showing two testimonials, which felt sparse. Now we wait until we have at least six before enabling any new widget placement.
What surprised us
The biggest surprise was how often users referenced the changelog unprompted. In support conversations, users would say things like "I saw in the changelog that you added X — does that mean Y is coming next?" It changed the nature of inbound support: users were following along, engaged, treating updates as a relationship rather than just a notification.
We also didn't anticipate how much mental overhead we'd free up by consolidating. Fewer dashboards to check, fewer invoices to track, fewer integration points to maintain. It's a small thing, but compounded over months it adds up.
Would we recommend it?
Yes — which is not something we'd say just because we built it. We'd say it because the experience of being a user of our own product keeps us honest about what matters. Every week we use ShipPulse, we find something to improve. That's exactly what dogfooding is supposed to do.
If you're running a SaaS product and you're manually managing any of these layers — changelog, status page, testimonials — the consolidation is worth it for the time savings alone, independent of anything else.
You can see our live changelog, status page, and testimonials — all running on ShipPulse — from the homepage →