2 min read Founding

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.

You might also like...

Nov
04

Dealing with "the big client" as customer-funded business

What is being customer-funded and how do we deal with prioritizing "the big client" over regular ones.
3 min read
Nov
03

The state of testing at Firmhouse and what to improve

We're big on automated testing at Firmhouse. An overview of what we use and what we can improve.
2 min read
Nov
01

Strategy doesn't happen in tickets

We fully switched to using Linear for development. The only thing I have a big beef with is that suddenly everything becomes a ticket. And it's very easy to fall into the trap that you start using Linear for more than it's suited for. Especially because tickets aren't suitable for strategic work.
2 min read
Dec
03

I have a new side-project and it's called ClubCard

Have fun following me along!
Nov
29

Rails 6, TailwindCSS, TailwindUI, and Stimulus New App Guide (November 2020)

Get started quickly a new Rails 6 app with TailwindCSS, Stimulus included. Follow these instructions and commands.
3 min read