Improving technical documentation is usually not high on the priorities list. There is only this vague sense that someone somewhere should work on the docs eventually. That is especially true for start-up businesses and small companies. Who has time to write some lame Get Started guide, when you’re in the middle of finishing that new API or building that new storage infrastructure… But worry not, even you will need a decent docs section one day.

The need for more comprehensive documentation usually arrives rather dramatically. As the customer base grows, so does the number of confused users. Soon, the company is flooded with support tickets, and it negatively impacts the overall capacity. Only the better half of the customers suffer. The other half doesn’t even bother exchanging messages with support, they just switch for competition.

The next landmark on the documentation journey for a young company is an investor. During the due diligence process, they will start with documentation, because they want to understand the product. If the money guy has to scrape bits of information from all over the place to even get the basic functionality of the product, he is not going to send millions this way.

Outsourcing starts

Sudden need for documentation pushes our young company to outsource the docs, because they simply didn’t hire enough people to delegate. Certainly no one with skills in technical writing, and even less anyone who wants to write anything other than a code. And absolute zero of people who want to be the talking head in a video. The logical step in such a situation is to find an agency and outsource.

Finding some random content agency for tech doesn’t take more than five minutes. And  miraculously, every content agency has an expert exact on whatever tech topic you choose. Kubernetes automation docs? Yep, we got you covered. The content agency is hired for a measly fee, and soon new content is flooding all channels – blog, social, websites and many others. 

But the colossal volume of the generated content doesn’t solve the basic issue – that the techies don’t get clear instructions on how to use the product. New articles and tutorials seem to be circling around the topic rather than explaining step-by-step. There is no code, no commands. And if there is, it’s just recycled from somewhere else and doesn’t seem to describe your product at all. 

Well, no wonder – because the materials delivered by the content agency are not written by people with dev, operations, or even remotely tech background. It was likely compiled by a journalist student whose technical qualification is to install Fortnite on his cousin’s Windows last summer. If you don’t have deeply technical creators, you only get very general Wikipedia-like articles.

Different expectations

To be fair, content agencies and tech companies have completely different expectations. Traditional content agencies are marketing agencies. Their goal is to spread the word and attract as many people as possible to buy or at least share a post. And some of them know what they’re doing – in other words, not everyone in the content industry is a snake oil salesman. There are good content agencies on the market who can bring more customers, because more people will find the company via googling. 

But they can’t cover real documentation, because they have no real technical writers and editors. They don’t have any hands-on experience about the things they write about or the things they explain on their fancy video-tutorials. The relationship between a content agency and tech engineers is determined to be a disappointment. 

There is this infamous tweet that said the IT manager should know how to code. I’m not so sure about managers, but I certainly am about tech writers. That is, if you work on any site containing at least one line of code. 

That’s why I founded Red Knot. Our documentation and tutorials are created by people who have real technical background – mostly developers and technical writers by trade. They do test every feature, every line of code or every command on their computer first.

And they do just what other techies need them to – creating clear, clean and concise docs.