Introduction

What is Docuspace?

Docuspace is a platform that allows you to easily build a knowledge base for your idea, organization, team, product, or project. Using our platform you can easily launch, create, and share documentation with a private or public audience in less than 60 seconds. 

Our product mission

Our mission is to help those with knowledge to be empowered and enjoy persisting that knowledge so that those without it, or who are seeking it, can be empowered with new information.

Why did we build Docuspace?

We all know that having documentation is key to ensuring that a source of truth exists for knowledge, information, and processes. When documentation is available, it can save all of us time and energy finding the information we need, improve our quality and process control, and helps make our lives easier and better in many more ways. 

Let's come back to reality now though, we want and know we need to build a documentation knowledge base but it is often relegated to being a last priority and is much easier said than done. As a company who also builds other software products, we spent countess hours trying to find a documentation solution that was easy to setup, use, and cost effective. We tried both paid and open-source well-known solutions and could just not find the right balance for our needs. 

What we discovered trying other solutions

We found that other documentation software simply fell into one or more of these negative categories:

Complicated

• Open source solutions based on technologies such as markdown and wiki were especially complicated to setup, manage and use. We tried solutions such as MkDocs, Read the Docs, Docusaurus, Github Pages, MediaWiki, DocuWiki, and more. 
• Trying to use solutions such as Word, Google Docs and PDFs to author and create your documentation allows you to write your documentation but then you are stuck with how to mass-distribute, protect, integrate your documentation on the web which is where people expect to find it nowadays. Not to mention you end up with an even bigger problem once you have multiple versions, products, or projects that you need to document and manage.

Cost

• As a young startup, cost and pricing matters in every purchasing decision we make. We found that many paid software solutions we tried to solve our documentation problem always resulted in a bill that was what felt like an unreasonable amount for the amount of value it delivered. 
• Some of the solutions we tried that were part of a greater support-desk platform, we tried all the well-known ones, would bundle a documentation capability with their ticketing system but then you have to buy a support desk license for every person you want to be able to help collaborate and contribute to the documentation which was very pricey.

Half-baked

• Open source solutions are often very basic and lack functionality that can be important or time-consuming to work around. But hey it's free so you get what you get, when people are often donating their free time to maintain some of this open source projects. 
• Again solutions that come bundled with support desk solutions are often very basic and limited in their lower priced plans that you are forced to upgrade to their higher plans just to get some more advanced features in documentation. That is if they even have better capabilities in their higher priced plans, we ran into a few solutions that offered diluted documentation solutions in all of their price tiers like documentation is just an afterthought necessity in their platform. 

User Experience

• We found markdown based editors incredibly cumbersome to adopt and use. Our team is a diverse mixture of technical and non-technical users and we found that some of the more advanced features of documentation such as links, using image/video media, and creating tables to name a few were just too different and complicated. Could we make it work? Sure, but from a productivity and adopting standpoint we were better off with solutions using WYSIWYG-based editors that we tried.
• As a company with founders that all come from software-as-a-service backgrounds, we have an eye and expectation that software at is core should be intuitive, performant, and built with quality. So many of the documentation solutions that we tried that were software-as-a-service simply did not meet our expectations. They were often slow, confusing to use, or fraught with bugs.

When all is said and done, documentation has the power to deliver so many benefits, but there is so much friction in finding and using a good platform. After spending time trying to implement and make other documentation products work for our needs, we decided that we can do one better.

Our product principles

As we build Docuspace we are guided by these principles which we believe will guide us on our path to achieve our mission with our product and with our customers.

Keep the little guys in mind

Whether you are a startup or a team member who is trying to lead and spark a documentation movement on your team we want to build a product that is affordable and accessible to those who are brave enough to be the pioneers of our modern world.

Keep it flexible

As a tech company we are obviously trying to solve the needs first and foremost for those of us in our industry field, but we believe shared information and knowledge can be powerful for any industry or audience. As we design and grow our product we are mindful to make decisions that keep our product useful and relevant for many use cases such as business, finance, service, hospitality, legal, medical, non-profit, and so many more that could benefit from being able to easily write and share their accumulate knowledge. 

Keep it simple

One of the many first hurdles you encounter in your quest for establishing documentation is getting people to devote and commit their time to writing and maintaining it in the first place. We believe the experience needs to be as easy and frustration-free as possible to make the time spent in our product as productive and as enjoyable as possible to help remove points of friction that contribute to people avoiding documenation.

Keep the readers in mind

The ultimate goal to realize with documentation is to make it useful after it has been created. What is the sense in investing the time and money writing the content if people cannot find and digest the information or answers they are looking for later on? We will keep a close eye on how we structure, organize, and allow people to traverse the information stored on our platform so that no matter their learning style or preference, we give them the capabilities necessary to get the answers they need faster and easier.

Get started and experience for yourself

Getting started with our product is designed to be as easy as possible. All it takes to get started is to launch yourself an account and you can quickly get started creating and organizing documentation and see for yourself how our product works for you. 

As believers and users of our own product, check out the rest of our documentation if you have any questions or want to learn more about the ins and outs of our software.