Kbee
Turn a Google Drive Folder into a Professional Knowledge bas
After spending all of February refining the product and slowly growing our user base, we decided it was time to launch on ProductHunt. We had previously launched a deal on Pitchground, so we had a lot of the infrastructure in place to do this pretty easily, from things like screenshots and a code redemption flow.
We wrote blog posts on both Medium (https://medium.com/@SandeepDinesh/eliminating-next-js-isr-builds-with-client-side-rendering-2c30ee198831) and IndieHackers (https://www.indiehackers.com/post/our-journey-from-idea-to-producthunt-5e69031138) to share some things we learned along the way, started letting folks in our network know we were launching, and got our customers excited as well.
We didn't know what to expect, but as they day went on our ranking grew until we got to the #2 spot!
We had over 700 visitors to the page and over 50 signups, and are still seeing the residual effects of the launch!
Now the challenge is giving folks an amazing experience and converting them to paid customers. Good problem to have :)
Woke up to our first paid subscription today!
The customer who signed up had visited our site in the past and was on our mailing list. To date, we've sent three update emails to this list. The email went out at 9AM and a subscription was created in Stripe at 9:10AM. We're attributing this subscription as our first conversion using our newsletter.
We heard loud and clear multiple times that custom domains were people’s most sought-after feature. So we’re excited to announce that you can now add a custom domain to your knowledge base!
We’re also experimenting with providing advanced search capabilities via Algolia Docsearch! If you’d like to test out this early feature, sign up at [Kbee]
Finally, we launched our public-facing roadmap! This is a place for Kbee users to provide us with feature requests and feedback on our roadmap.
Finally, you can now make a knowledge base from any existing folder in your Google Drive!
2 weeks after our initial launch, we’ve had over 100 sign-ups for Kbee!
While we’re super excited by this number, we’re disappointed to note that a majority of folks haven’t created any new articles in their knowledge base.
We’ve had about five users create and use their Kbee instances properly for a variety of difference use cases. We also were able to gather feedback about our pricing model and product roadmap.
When we initially launched, we intended to give the first 25 users of Kbee free access. What we’ve seen is that a small percentage of folks who sign up are willing to provide feedback whether by jumping on a call with us or by joining our Slack group.
We’re rolling out a new onboarding checklist within our product to try and solve for getting folks to do more with Kbee. Wondering if anyone has any feedback or ideas for how to increase our engagement metrics and have users actually use the product. How would you do it?
After some good advice, we redesigned the landing page (https://kbee.app) to be more clear and crisp. We removed the demo video and replaced it with a shorter and cleaner GIF that shows the product in action.
From early feedback, many people were confused as to why building a Help Center on Google Docs was something desirable, so we added in a section explaining "Why Google Docs".
We also decided to make the beta 100% free until we build out all the features we want to charge for like analytics and the various integrations. The next challenge is to streamline the onboarding flow and start ramping up the marketing machine.
We finished our MVP today! We've decided to call it Kbee (KB is a frequently used acronym for "Knowledge Base").
With Kbee, you can turn a series of Google Docs into a full-fledged Help Center/Knowledge Base with the push of a button. Instead of writing your entire help center on one single doc, you can create a separate Doc for each article and have them all published under the same Help Center as separate articles
When we launched our first SaaS product, we “built” a help center on Google Docs that we then published to the web. This worked but had some glaring limitations: Search was abysmal.
Unless a user was willing to peruse all of the links in our table of content, they had no way to quickly search for content that was relevant to them.
It looked really janky. No matter how much we tried formatting our Google Doc, the published version always looked really amateur.
We had no idea what people were actually looking at on the document. With a Google Doc, there was no way for us to understand where users were spending their time.
We looked at other help center software but were turned off by the price, design, or user experience. Some products forced us to turn our articles into “guides”. Others were way too expensive for our budget. We ended up settling for a help center product that felt like a big compromise.
Putting together guides and keeping them updated was a tedious process. We found ourselves writing out the full guide in Google Docs first and then migrating it over to our Help Center tool. All of our collaboration had to happen in the Google Doc first and then one of us had to go and migrate it over to the help center product. The product itself had a bit of a learning curve so both of us ended up spending a lot of time creating content that didn't follow any uniform standards.
What we really wanted was a simple help center that was a) easy to use b) easy to maintain c) looked nice
We realized that while Google Docs was easy to use, the published versions did not look nice nor was it easy to maintain (all of our content had to be in a single Doc).
So we've decided to build a product that helps us build a Help Center on top of Google Docs/Drive that looks nice and is easy to maintain!
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