January 2024 Summaries

To grow a startup, founders often need to acquire customers and gather feedback to improve their product, rather than focusing solely on creating an optimal product from the start. By doing things that don't scale, such as manually reviewing and improving customer documentation, Mintlify's founders were able to gain valuable insights and deliver a delightful customer experience, ultimately leading to rapid growth and expansion of the business. This approach allowed them to validate their idea, identify areas for improvement, and optimize their product before scaling up. By taking a laborious but effective approach to acquiring customers, Mintlify was able to overcome its initial limitations and establish itself as a successful startup.

Mintlify's founder shares a candid account of how the company grew from zero to over 1,000 customers by engaging in labor-intensive, non-scalable activities, such as manually migrating documentation for initial clients and crafting custom documentation for potential customers. This approach, inspired by Paul Graham's essay on doing things that don't scale, prioritized customer acquisition and validation over creating a flawless product. The founders, Han Wang and Hahnbee, learned through multiple pivots and by delivering exceptional customer experiences that securing initial customers provided invaluable feedback for product improvement. Their strategy involved reaching out to acquaintances in the startup community, offering technical writing services, and proactively developing documentation for prospects, which eventually led to a larger user base. As Mintlify grew, they transitioned from hands-on methods to developing a self-service onboarding system, maintaining the ethos of prioritizing customer relationships to guide product evolution.

Chat Analytics has been added to the Mintlify dashboard, providing more detail on user queries and chatbot responses. This allows users to segment chat history by date, manage AI Chat usage, and analyze query frequency. The feature is available on the startup plan, enabling users to identify common queries and gaps in content, ultimately improving the structure of technical guides and API Reference sections.

Chat Analytics was introduced on the final day of Mintlify's Launch Week II, enhancing the dashboard by offering detailed insights into user interactions with AI-driven chatbots. This feature enables teams to analyze chat history by date, manage AI Chat usage, and identify frequent queries and content gaps, thereby improving the structure and effectiveness of technical documentation. Following the successful deployment of ChatGPT for documentation, Chat Analytics provides a deeper understanding of user engagement, which is crucial for refining technical guides and API references. Available on Mintlify's startup plan, this tool aims to optimize user experience by offering granular data on chatbot interactions, and users are encouraged to explore it via the Mintlify dashboard.

Custom JS is now available on Mintlify's growth plan, allowing users to integrate custom analytics and integrations into their documentation. This feature provides further flexibility and customizability for imports, including user tracking and integrations with other tools and platforms. Users can get started by adding a `.js` file to their docs repository, which will be reflected in production after pushing an update. The new feature aims to provide more options for users who want to add additional functionality to their documentation.

Mintlify is open-sourcing its MDX Engine, which exposes two APIs: `getCompiledMdx` and `MDXComponent`. The former takes in MDX content and converts it into an object that can be rendered by the `MDXComponent`, while the latter renders HTML based on this object. This engine is crucial for creating exceptional documentation as it focuses on the developer experience, allowing developers to integrate Mintlify's package and access its flavored markdown and code syntax highlighting. The team welcomes contributions to the project and encourages developers to give their engine a try when developing new blogs in 2024. To get started, one can directly access the NPM package, install it using npm or yarn, and follow the provided example to use the engine in Next.js projects.

Launch Week II Day 4 announced the introduction of Custom JS functionality for Mintlify's growth plan customers, enabling enhanced customizations such as custom integrations, analytics, and user tracking within documentation. This development aligns with Mintlify's philosophy of offering default opinionated settings while allowing for infinite flexibility, thus facilitating advanced features like platform-specific tab auto-selection. The integration of Custom JS exemplifies Mintlify's commitment to providing documentation that caters to both ease of use and the need for sophisticated customizability.

Mintlify's Launch Week II Day 3 introduced the open-sourcing of its MDX Engine, offering two APIs: getCompiledMdx for server-side MDX compilation and MDXComponent for HTML rendering. This development allows developers to incorporate Mintlify-flavored markdown and code syntax highlighting into their projects, enhancing the community by encouraging contributions and active development. The MDX Engine is designed to improve the developer experience by facilitating the creation of exceptional documentation and is available as a package on NPM. The initiative reflects Mintlify's commitment to supporting developers and fostering innovation, with a maintained roadmap and openness to community suggestions.

Snippets V2 is a new feature in Launch Week II that offers more flexibility and performance while being rebuilt from the ground up to resemble the import experience that developers know and love. It allows for fully reusable components and variables, enabling users to avoid repeating content in multiple places by storing variables that can be easily called. This setup can be a powerful tool when versioning documentation, where only certain properties may change. Snippets V2 is designed with the principle of DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) in mind, applying it to building docs and making it easier to maintain consistency across documentation. To get started with Snippets V2, users can upgrade their CLI with `npm i -g mintlify@latest` and follow the instructions for implementing snippet V2, which includes creating a new file in the `snippets` directory, adding content or variables, importing and passing props.

Launch Week II Day 2 unveiled Snippets V2, a comprehensive rebuild designed to enhance flexibility and performance by supporting fully reusable components and variables, aligning with the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle in software development. This new feature utilizes MDX to facilitate the direct import of external components and variables, offering powerful tools for documentation versioning and content reuse, thus preventing the repetition of content across multiple locations. Snippets V2 is engineered to provide an import experience familiar to developers and can be easily integrated by updating the CLI with the latest version from Mintlify. The update is particularly beneficial for managing documentation where only specific properties may need to change, streamlining the process of maintaining consistent and up-to-date content.

We're launching Preview Deployments on Day 1 of Mintlify's second launch week, allowing users to generate a unique link showing their documentation changes in production before they go live. This feature is crucial for ensuring accurate and reliable documentation updates, enabling earlier issue detection and improved developer workflows. With preview deployments, users can share links with team members and users to receive feedback on new product or feature releases, making it easier to maintain a source-of-truth for their users.

Mintlify's second Launch Week commenced with the introduction of Preview Deployments, a feature that generates unique links for pull requests, allowing users to see exactly how documentation will appear in production before it goes live. This highly anticipated feature enhances developer workflows by enabling teams to detect issues early and gather feedback, ensuring that all changes to documentation, such as product guides or API references, are accurate and reliable before deployment. Available in beta for two weeks, Preview Deployments aim to maintain a consistent source of truth and improve the overall process of creating and updating documentation. Once a pull request is merged, the changes are reflected in production, and the generated link expires, emphasizing the importance of accurate documentation for users.