Looking for feedback for a knowledge base solution
Hi there!
We've built a knowledge base solution ( https://kwiki.io )out of our own necessity and recently put it live for everyone to see. We are not aggressively pushing it for now since we're looking to get a few early adopters first in order to polish out possible issues and features - even though we've been using it internally for more than 6 months now without a problem.
Since a lot of us here are building some form of a product, I guess we all need some kind of simple and beautiful documentation to improve user experience. If anyone is interested in checking out Kwiki and giving an honest feedback on usability, issues, feature ideas etc., I'd be more than happy to give a paid tier access for free for e.g. a year to anyone interested!
Thanks in advance and good luck to us all :)
Nice work!
My feedback would be that most knowledge base /wiki software really focus on their product rather than the "Job To Be Done" of the client and handling their inner objections. If you can make your site more about how a manager would get their 5 busy staff to add content to the knowledge base or case studies on how someone saved x time from customers getting their own answers, I think the engagement rate will increase.
A good example of this is Help Scout with their Learn section and blog content.
I hope your product takes off!
Hey Rich, thanks for the great feedback! This is one thing we're trying to figure out - how to stand out and give more to our clients - and your idea seems really useful!
We are actually trying to find a good niche. I feel like 'general kb software' is a pretty crowded space and that finding a good niche (and adapting kwiki to it) would be a good idea...
Sounds like you're heading in the right direction and it would be wise to target specific industries. I wonder who the main users of knowledge bases are?? Ecommerce stores, finance industry...
Your project looks really great!
I produce a lot of documentation for my personal use, and I'd really love to try kWiki for this use case.
However I don't feel at ease with this information hosted in the cloud as much for privacy reason as for data safety (I don't imagine myself losing this content for any reason).
I understand I might not be in your target market, but are there - or would there be - any options for someone like me who wants to run it just locally (or on my personal web server) and sync content between my devices?
First, thanks for checking it out!
Second, I hear you. You're not the first one with this concern that mentioned it to us.
We did consider packing the thing into a docker or some other container thingy and provide that as 'enterprise tier', giving you this on-premises capability. However, without doing that backed by a good contract we pretty much risk giving out the entire codebase :D
Another option for cases as your is encrypting everything on the fly. We do not have this capability at the moment, but basically we'd use either a certificate or password to encrypt/decrypt data on client side before sending it to our backend. In this case we'd essentially store only encrypted info which could be read only by authorized people. It's an idea 'up in the air', we need to figure out how exactly we'd implement this to make it simple to everyone :) Maybe it's not a bad idea to make this a thing and target such a secretive niche since all other solutions just store your data, like us currently.
What would you think about such use-case?
Hello @beemar, thank you for your answer.
Your approach is interesting, but to me it is not as much the confidentiality I am worried about, which is solved with encryption, but the availability of data over time.
I would be worried that I'd use this system, and then suddenly one day, for whichever reason (kWiki getting acquired for example ;) ), I lose access to my stuff.
I also think this reasoning might apply to other customers in your main demographic (cloud users), who would have concerns over the "perpetuality" of your service.
But your point about risking the codebase is entirely valid and I honestly have no insight how could this be resolved.
Maybe it could be done via a system of licensing, something like this https://keygen.sh/ (I'd be happy to pay for a license, I wasn't asking for a free version)
If an alley like this is interesting to you, maybe you could look at how Confluence is pulling it off? There are trial images available for download.
Either way, your product is really well finished and it's looking great. Wishing you all the best in your journey!
Hi Omar, thanks again for your feedback. What you are saying about perpetuity of product makes perfect sense... Licensing the product is not a problem, protecting the IP (code) is though :) I'll have to think a bit about that...
Yeah it's a tough nut to crack indeed! Feel free to reach out to me if you have ideas you want to bounce over.
Hi,
I checked your service because I'm highly interested in some kind of documentation for my own service (www.saas-idea.com) to document our features and using and also, to integrate in our SaaS boilerplate. Your docs look great to me. Which language/framework have you used?
Thanks!
Hey Zencentric, thanks!
We are using a combination of React and Django for Kwiki, that's the base of it.
If you'd like to include it in your boilerplate, that'd be great - we'd be happy to cooperate with you on it. We could open up an API for you for example to set up accounts/pages programatically with e.g. templates or something.
Cheers
Well, the stack is pretty close to mine - it's Flask and Vue. But I don't think that it's possible with your React/Django vs mine...
Thanks anyway!
I was thinking more about something like this: You set up SaaS for your client using your boilerplate and automatically set up documentation for their SaaS using Kwiki. We automatically whitelabel their docs to something like docs.yourclient.com and that's it. Pretty much like you'd do with using zendesk and similar solutions.
I actually thought about the same. With this approach it doesn't matter which language to use. Okay, let me think more about it. Meanwhile, can you tell me, if it's possible to customize the styling with my own styles?
Not at the moment, but it would be rather simple to build out a custom css capability so you can adapt colors to SaaS color-scheme
Yeah, I probably meant the same. Just to provide my own styles instead of a standard one. Right?
Exactly!