Hey SaaS business owners. What are your thoughts on outsourcing content creation for your knowledge base (customer facing product documentation)? The good, bad, ugly?
An apprehension I often hear is a third-party writer can never be as "knowledgable" about your product as you are - so, no one other than the developer/maker/product manager should write content for the knowledge base. I feel there are two facets to this apprehension:
- It's a well-placed argument, but the fact remains, developers/makers find it challenging to take the time out from their routine development, customer development, marketing, customer support activities and write the documentation; leaving no room for the ideal exercise to update it. The argument is akin to we all agreeing that a founder should write.... continually... There are several case studies on how that helps build traction/brand recall for product. But are we able to do so with all the needed discipline?
- Often we do not allocate, and by allocating, I mean to allow for time and money for the writer to learn all the aspects of the product and stay assigned to the project than looking at it as a upworky-one-time-short-assignment.