2 min read

A model for scaling technical content and documentation

A scalable content production approach by using raw forum posts as source for polished documentation content.

At Firmhouse we're in this position that we're beginning to onboard more and more customers and thus also developers on our platform. So we need a way to make developing for Firmhouse seamless, while increasing the volume of developers we onboard every month.

This morning I posted on our Basecamp some suggestions on a possible new content creation approach to do so. One big pillar in this approach is to launch a new Developer Community forum.

Here's roughly what I have in mind and what we're going to experiment with:

  1. Developers and customers post technical questions via email support, Intercom chat, private Slack channels we maintain, or onboarding Zoom calls.
  2. Solutions to questions from developers are posted by us on our new Developer Community – A Discourse forum we're setting up. We reply back with a link to the solution in our regular support channels like email or Intercom chat.
  3. When relevant, we can "promote" the post from the Developer Community into our Intercom-powered Firmhouse Helpcenter or our Developer Docs website. This usually gets a bit more polish and follows a certain structure. And should also be accessible for non-technical people.

I think the above approach can work really well because we will now have a place to write down some more raw common FAQs. Something we previously didn't really want to "pollute" our Firmhouse Helpcenter with. And if there's no place to put something, it's very easy to revert to giving all our customers a super personalized response to pretty common problems.

This approach is heavily inspired by how the team at Pipedream has it set up. They have their website, their formal Developer Docs, and also their Pipedream Community. From what I know they process anything that comes into Slack or a public source as a question in their Pipedream Community, then making it available for all their users, instead of just one. I love what they are doing there.

Next steps will be to open up our new Developer Community to the public, and then also allow people to post questions and suggestions themselves.

Glad to see this being kicked off.