Starting Up Don't Preach to Teach If You Intend to Sell I was reading a blog post earlier from a moderately well known social media company. The post, whilst framed as educational, was almost entirely dedicated to pedaling their wares and establishing the founder
Customer Stories Star Wars Robots and Educating the Future Innovators—In Discussion with Sphero's Sara Sampson Like most nerdy movie buffs and tech lovers, I’m a big fan of Sphero, the masterminds behind that BB-8 Star Wars robot. They are—in my humble and totally unqualified opinion—one
Starting Up Hiring for Culture Fit and Hurting Hearts 💔 Who knew hiring as a small, bootstrapped team was so tough. A few months ago, we began our search for a Customer Success Manager. It was an entry-level position. The short version is
Starting Up The Crappy Art of Rejecting Writers Rejection is my biggest weakness. Whether it’s me saying no, or me on the receiving end, I’m just not good at it, at all. I can take criticism. I'm a pro
Starting Up When is a Startup no Longer a Startup? When does a startup become a company? Is it a case of profitability? Team size? Revenue? It’s been on the front of my mind recently. Part of my job is to manage
Product Insights Not the Hardest Admission to Make (a Clickbait-Free Story) I have to admit something. HelpDocs is not the only software your support teams will ever need. And we have no plans to be. As a marketer, it feels a bit strange to
Product Insights HelpDocs 💖 Front Before I joined HelpDocs, I was a freelancer. I worked within a few teams, but was rarely on the inner circle or anywhere near support, so had very little use for a collaborative
SaaS Insights The Painful Experience of Breaking up with Customers Breaking up with customers sucks. It’s like any relationship. You’ve both poured everything you can into making it work, but despite all your best efforts something just doesn’t fit together
Announcements Late-Summer Product Updates Over the past few months, the engineering side of the HelpDocs team has shipped like there’s no tomorrow—although, if you were to ask them directly, they’d be modest and say
Starting Up Why We're Not Marketing Our Enterprise Knowledge Base Software When I first joined HelpDocs a few months ago, my experience with support docs, and enterprise knowledge base software was pretty limited. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been in marketing in
Starting Up Breaking the Bad Habit of Breaking Habits Around 18 months ago, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and it made me feel sick. A couple of years before, I'd quit a 14-year smoking habit, and had replaced
Starting Up Living up to Your Own Definition of Success When I took the leap to go freelance, one of my first roles was helping flesh out the blog of a branding agency. The company I was working with, Motto, is a visionary
Remote Insights Rediscovering Work-life Balance: What I Learned While Honeymooning in a Swedish Airbnb Regular readers and followers on Twitter might have already picked up on my love of balance. The Swedes have a word for this, Lagom, which roughly translates to something like “just enough”, or
Remote Insights Delusions of Culture: Making Remote Work as a Small Team Since working at HelpDocs the past few months, I’ve become a pro at explaining what remote work is and how it works. So much so, I’m thinking of adding it to my CV under “additional skills”.
SaaS Insights Stumbling to CTO: My Journey Becoming a Developer I’m perched up against a cushion with my legs splayed out on a super soft grey sofa. On my desktop I have 5 terminal windows messily scattered around, two Atom code editors
Support Smarter Remembering My Golden Ticket Support Experience A few days ago, the creative geniuses at Geckoboard shared a glorious poster with a bunch of comical characters, affectionately referred to as "The Tickets". There are nine tickets in total,
Announcements A Powerful New Text Editor and Dashboard for Everyone If you’re anything like us you spend a lot of time in text editors. Email, live chat, writing documentation, sending birthday messages to your Gran on Facebook, and writing letters of complaint
Remote Insights Actually, Distractions Aren't a Bigger Problem for Remote Work As I write the bulk of this post, I'm sat at my desk, tucked in a nook in the dining room of the Grade II listed country cottage I rent with my partner.
Remote Insights Not All Remote Jobs Are Equal When I began working remotely full-time in 2015, years of occasional freelancing had skewed my expectations. I'd become convinced life would be greener if I were only freed from the shackles of the
Announcements June Product Updates: Turbo Translations, Quick Clips, and Launching Lighthouse June was a big month for the team at HelpDocs. We shipped a bunch of fixes, a few key updates, and some cool new features like automatic machine translations. We also hired, well,
Announcements A New Way to Keep Your Docs Fresh If you're anything like us, you like to ship, often. It's not always a big and shiny new feature. Sometimes it's simple bug fixes or subtle changes to the user experience that make
Starting Up Lessons From Carving Productively A couple of years ago, I first wrote about venturing into the splintery world of woodcraft. I had no idea it would turn into an ongoing obsession. I had even less of an
Support Smarter What Hotels Have Taught Me About Customer Support When we started building HelpDocs, I had a lot of assumptions about customer support. I believed the loudest, angriest customers got all the rewards. I thought doing small favours for customers was a
Customer Stories Centralised Knowledge and Support is Empowering a Decentralised Network Data is big business. If you use cloud storage for data, you already know and understand the importance of it. It keeps your data stored and accessible in a safe and reliable way.
Product Insights How to Build Features Users Need by Ignoring What They Ask For The customer is always right, or so we're told. For decades this idea has underpinned customer satisfaction for businesses around the world. "Le client n'a jamais tort", chant the French. "
