The idea: Avoid the dreaded shoulder-tap more often by documenting your team’s most common “how to” guides in one place. Even better - convert any “how to” guide into a personal checklist that you can use to track your progress.
I like to think of “how to” guides like recipes for how to do something specific to your team. This site helps you create and organize them.
Background: I’m a software engineer, and more recently a software engineering manager at one of the FAANG companies (I’m not mentioning which one just to retain a tiny bit of anonymity). My point, though, is that even at huge established companies, having one place to share your team’s “how to” guides isn’t easy. My company has a huge internal wiki. It’s awful. Search sucks, and it’s like the Wild Wild West — no structure at all.
Some teams/companies try to solve this with “Knowledge Base” software, but I think what we need is a little simpler. Knowledge Bases are great for things like general information, strategy docs, and collaborative efforts… but not so much for straight-forward how-to guides (AKA SOPs or checklists).
At my current and all of my previous companies, we’ve always struggled with how and where to document our how-to guides/SOPs/checklists or whatever you want to call them. This grew out of my own need and I’m hoping to make something of it if other people find it useful too.
What I’d love feedback on:
1. Does the idea resonate? Does it apply to you and your team?
2. Does the messaging on the site make that clear?
3. I know it’s still pretty basic, but does it provide enough value right now to be considered an MVP that people might pay for?
Thanks for taking a look and pointing me to TopicBox! There are some overlaps (team collaboration based on email), but I think that's ok. There is plenty of room for improvement in this area. My focus has been on simplicity. I don't think we need to re-invent the listserv concept necessarily - but I do see a huge opportunity to make group email discussion lists (mailing lists) much more streamlined, simple, and intuitive.
Making group collaboration easier seems like a win no matter what.
Its the "Forever" part that makes me not want to use it as much, because I'm afraid of actually liking it and coming to depend on it, and then it going away. I'd much rather just pay some modest amount and know that I'm contributing to a viable business than hope that the owners have a business plan that works with "Free Forever"
I can assure you that in the WP industry paid for themes is not a guarantee for success. We know, we've been there with Obox Themes. We have a business plan that we are confident will keep Layers around for a VERY long time.
The most frustrating thing for me was the complete lack of any real communication from Microsoft. For awhile, even their status dashboard was down. I only found out about it after I got a PagerDuty alert and had to search Twitter (other people complaining about it) to confirm.
We have an Azure CDN backed by a Compute Instance, and zero official notice from Microsoft about this still. I've learned more about the problem from news articles than the company that provides the service. Fortunately we haven't finished migrating the rest of the site to Azure. No emails from them, nothing. Not even a tweet on their official @WindowsAzure account. Frustrating.
His opinion is certainly not unreasonable, and I'm impressed that he's willing to give up a significant amount of revenue to release the book the way he wants to see it.
That said, I'm fairly frustrated that there is no electronic version. I like to take book notes too, but I like to take them on my Kindle, and I have no plans to buy more paper books. I feel like both the author and I are missing out because of his uncompromising position. (Assuming his position is what the Quora post claims..)
> I'm impressed that he's willing to give up a significant amount of revenue to release the book the way he wants to see it.
I don't think that revenue would be as significant to him as it would be to the average person.
So it seems more of a control thing, which I find unfortunate. Maybe the paper version is 'better', but presumably, if the book is good, an eBook version would be better than no version, and for some people, that is the choice.
I like to think of “how to” guides like recipes for how to do something specific to your team. This site helps you create and organize them.
Background: I’m a software engineer, and more recently a software engineering manager at one of the FAANG companies (I’m not mentioning which one just to retain a tiny bit of anonymity). My point, though, is that even at huge established companies, having one place to share your team’s “how to” guides isn’t easy. My company has a huge internal wiki. It’s awful. Search sucks, and it’s like the Wild Wild West — no structure at all.
Some teams/companies try to solve this with “Knowledge Base” software, but I think what we need is a little simpler. Knowledge Bases are great for things like general information, strategy docs, and collaborative efforts… but not so much for straight-forward how-to guides (AKA SOPs or checklists).
At my current and all of my previous companies, we’ve always struggled with how and where to document our how-to guides/SOPs/checklists or whatever you want to call them. This grew out of my own need and I’m hoping to make something of it if other people find it useful too.
What I’d love feedback on:
1. Does the idea resonate? Does it apply to you and your team?
2. Does the messaging on the site make that clear?
3. I know it’s still pretty basic, but does it provide enough value right now to be considered an MVP that people might pay for?
4. What did you like?
5. What’s missing?