Imagination
Education platform for tech companies
After close to a year of researching SaaS documentation, I suddenly realise the question should be:
Why do users need to read documentation?
Problem
Companies like Microsoft, AWS, Google, Hashicorp, Twilio, Pulumi have their own learning platforms.
Value props
Market size
Target users
Chatbot to interact with documentation
It’s daunting to read through the documentation, especially bad documentation. A tool is needed to summarise docs and generate code examples to minimise time to first program.
Why now?
Advancement of LLM of course. What wasn’t possible in the past has been made possible now.
What is it?
A chat interface like Intercom embedded to the developer portal. Why chat interface but not something like CommandBar or Algolia? That is to create a more interactive approach to documentation. A popup widget like CommandBar or Algolia doesn’t create a feeling of human interactivity and doesn’t suite with chat applications. Have you ever seen a chat interface that pop up in the middle of the screen and dim the rest?
What insights that you know but not other competitors?
Readme, Gitbook, Docusaurus, Nextra does a decent job of building beautiful documentation. What they lack is a layer of interactivity.
Three possibilities:
(1) If documentation-as-a-service companies jump into this sector, at best they can only build a very good interactivity tool on their service, which is locked in (and devs don’t like being locked in). If they don’t bother building this, my product can integrate with theirs.
(2) If another company jumps into this sector. The probability isn’t high. The hype with LLM is up. Companies are busy building other types of applications on LLM. Documentation may be left behind. That’s me being optimistic. Some similar products are Copilot for Docs, Humata (but this one is for PDF only), this thread on Reddit, read this, and this, and some painpoints about internal documentation
(3) General tools may exist that help summarise and interact with content in a particular page, but it’s general and may not be suited to documentation in general and the company’s coding techniques.
(4) Biggest competitor Kapa AI. There was another one (Sidekick) which somehow pivoted to be ETL pipeline.
Command bar embed to all websites
Command bar gains lots popularity due to its ease of use. Embed command bar to all websites and use natural language to onboard customers.
Pros:
- B2B. I like B2B.
- Can still be web development, which is my expertise.
- Not many SaaS is doing this right now.
Cons:
- Competition from CommandBar. It’s relatively new (founded in 2019 or 2020), but gains tractions from big companies like Netlify, Hashicorp, etc.
- I personally cannot see any painpoints from users of CommandBar.
- Data privacy: It’s more sensitive to store and process business data.
- It’s only cool (for me) to host a search bar on a blog. I’ve not seen any other applications of a command bar for all websites.
- Commandbar is already a popular player in this sector. If they do this, that means competition. If they dont do this, that means there is a problem with this idea? (not so sure)
Personal knowledge management
Task ChatGPT to do various tasks such as summarise lectures, meeting notes, youtube videos, podcasts. You can also ask questions based on those videos/notes. For protected data, authenticate the app to read content.
- Chat app
- Send articles (or scan QR code for computer)
- Send youtube video
- Connect to Spotify to summarise what I am listening to and recommend more.
- Connect to Google Calendar to get events
- Read only chat bot
The key thing lies in the power of personalisation. Instead of using the general purpose model ChatGPT, now people can personalise the model, create their own assistant.
- Youtube videos
- Spotify podcast
- Book (connect to Kindle or Audible). The difference with ChatGPT is that this can summarise newly released books (as ChatGPT has a cutoff knowledge of Sep 2021). This is not really personalised tho (think of OpenAI decides to expand the cutoff knowledge date).
- Zoom meetings (think about confidential data)
- Documentation (public facing only, not internal documentation)
- Open source code (can’t think of anything as of yet)
- Lectures (think about confidential data)
Some prompts I would want to have:
- Go watch the most liked videos/podcasts on entrepreneurial topics on Youtube and Spotify.
- Go watch popular videos on documentation and how to do documentation as code on Youtube and Spotify
- Go watch all lectures on the course Math IA
- Go watch most liked videos about productivity tips from Ali Abdaal
- Analyse GitHub repo, or Stackoverflow answer about specific product
After learning, you can Q&A. Pitfall: Why does it have to go watch/read all these things when it already has the knowledge?
Similar to Tiktok? The power of summarisation indulges the laziness of human’s brain. People nowadays prefer shortcut to learning.
How does Tiktok success? Allow creators to monetise their content? What if I do the same thing? Allow creators to monetise app?
This can be in a form of prompt builder. Example:
From Youtube, watch 10 most liked videos about entrepreneurship from Y Combinator.
From Spotify, listen to 10 latest podcasts about investing from The Smart Money.
From Canvas, watch all lectures on the course Math IA.
From my files, read all uploaded files
From this website https://nextjs.org/docs/getting-started, read all.
From Zoom, listen to meeting.
From Google Meet, listen to meeting.
From Google, read 10 most relevant results about Splose.
Creators can create apps in form of prompts. Call it Prompt marketplace [Holy shit OpenAI does something similar]
Apps I am using: LinkedIn, Gmail, Youtube, Spotify, CommBank, Binance, Amazon, Slack, Notes, Agoda, Airbnb, Calendar, Notion. If I have to create a customer-facing search bar, what can it be?
- Calendar: Get the latest events, summarise events, rearrange events, etc.
- Youtube: summarise videos
- Slack: Summarise conversation from X to Y. Q&A
Can be agents that connect to all sorts of software. This looks more like a personal assistant
Pros:
- This is what I personally want to have.
- Less sensitive data: only public data like youtube videos, and podcasts [are you sure? what about Canvas lectures, Google Calendar, emails, etc]
Cons:
- Time to market will be longer due to mobile app development.
I decided to go for the command bar idea. It can still be overread (like an assistant that overreads to help you overcome onboarding friction). Plus CommandBar doesn’t seem to enter the documentation space yet. (Updated 14 May: I decided to drop this idea. Enough to prove that I am not very decisive)
Usage of ChatGPT
- Copy-writing
- Translation
- Recipe
- CV, cover letter
- Schedule day
- Fine-tuning based on personality research into CEOs and asking what-ifs based on a current decision facing the company.
- Summarisation youtube videos, podcasts, etc