Does a simple documentation platform even exist anymore? i will not promote
I genuinely don’t understand how documentation software became this overcomplicated. Yesterday I wanted to update a few pages for our product and somehow ended up reading about Git syncing, repositories, Markdown syntax, deployment settings, and version…
I genuinely don’t understand how documentation software became this overcomplicated. Yesterday I wanted to update a few pages for our product and somehow ended up reading about Git syncing, repositories, Markdown syntax, deployment settings, and version control. …for documentation. Why is the barrier to writing text higher than the barrier to building the actual product? Then you finally find something that looks decent, and half the stuff you’d expect to be standard is locked behind a plan that’s $200–$300/month. And before someone says “it’s only Markdown”, that’s exactly the point. I don’t want to think about Markdown. I don’t want to think about Git. I don’t want to think about where my docs are hosted. I just want to open a page, write something, hit Publish, and move on with my day. Am I just looking in the wrong places, or does a documentation tool exist that’s actually simple, doesn’t cost a fortune, and doesn’t make me feel like I’m setting up a CI pipeline just to publish a help article?
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A simple tool does not exist because documentation isn't simple. It's a highly complex topic. Sure, writing some initial documentation for a new product in a startup is easy. But then you scale. Things start to get messy, fast : You need versioning to ensure past releases are covered, or product versions You need multi-language support for your international sales You rebrand ? It would be nice not to skim through 100s of instances of your logo or brand to update it Designer updates branding guidelines and change the font. Have fun. Do you think Boeing rewrites the documentation for its planes on each new release ? Wrong. They reuse old doc and insert new parts at the right place - hence complex chapters, tracking, and all And I haven't talked about the document format yet, special characters, diagrams, legend, footnotes, glossaries, annex... Documentation is looking easy deceptively. Hence the simple needs are covered by a markdown on GitHub or a wiki, and when you scale, you transition to paid tools that make your life easier. I'm not sure what you are trying to solve, but either it's a simple tool and you are reinventing the wheel, OR it's not simple and plenty of tools exist - they are complex for a reason.
“I couldn’t find a tool that did this one thing so I built it” and the research is a quick Google search that stops at the first page.
That part about "market research" on Reddit seriously gets to my mood sometimes. They get some random shower thought and genuinely think that they're doing market research by getting Reddit reactions rather than spend a couple of minutes using a search engine to find some very definite answers. And sometimes they've even actually built something without knowing that there already were some properly established businesses offering those same services since more than a decade. Even with vibe coding and quickly built landing pages it's such a waste of time.
Which one of those are complex that exist? I had no idea such stuff existed
Do your own research there. If you do not know a field, do not try to launch a tool in one. There are plenty, usually pricy and with very captive user base as they don't want to change the file format for thousands, if not millions of pages. The manual for an airbus plane, once printed, takes the same volume as the plane itself. Just an example.
Smells like market research or promotion, because they always go "I struggled, shouldn't it be easy?!" followed by "I built this tool". Not everything is as easy, quick and simple as those that aren't familiar with the subject think it should be. And running a business with all the competency and people and tools and whatnot is expensive. There are no shortcuts outside of the trades/tools that you happen to already be familiar with and competently know how to use.
This!!!
jesus christ you people are so self indulgent
Use a notebook with pen and paper, and take pictures and put them on Google Drive and ignore it like most people do with all the existing documentation
Bookstack is simple, great and free.
What kind of tool are you using?
if you can’t run a documtation extractor, you might be the moron from infomercials who needs a product to drink a glass of orange juice this is not something you can struggle with and still be good enough to succeed
quick ai search - nuclino, notion (free tier), Confluence (free tier) also search for WYSIWYG editors - it means what you see is what you get.