Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#11

Post by gkoberger »

forgotmypw wrote: post #6
gkoberger wrote: post #3

Founder here! I know funding news isn't always a match for HN, but I'm glad someone posted it here since HN is where it all started. Here's our launch, if anyone wants to go back and look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422408

FYI, this link I found somewhere redirects to a 404: http://readme.io/home

Fixed, thank you!

We think we used that URL when we submitted to HN a few years ago because the root domain had already been submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526 (I ended up offering to pay for it!)

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#12

Post by harrisonjackson »

choward wrote: post #9

I've read pretty much everything on the site and between the high level marketing speak and generic wireframes, I have no idea what it does or what problem it actually solves. There's even a link if you hover over about that says "Learn about why we exist". I thought for sure that would have something, but it's just a list of all the employees. It looks like the only way to figure out what it actually does is to sign…

Did you go to the products page? Not questioning what you said at all just curious how deep you dug (obvs apex should have the info you were missing), but as someone that is pretty familiar with their offering and someone that has hosted api docs and sdk documentation through other sources their copy and marketing is on point for me - and the marketer/founder in me wants to know where the disconnect happened for you.

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#14

Post by foobaw »

Big reason why Readme really didn't work for us was because - we wanted one secured internal knowledge base and one external knowledge base but that was not easily supported. Also we needed integration with Zendesk because we wanted to re-direct customers to our KB but that was not easily done.

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#15

Post by choward »

gkoberger wrote: post #10
choward wrote: post #9

I've read pretty much everything on the site and between the high level marketing speak and generic wireframes, I have no idea what it does or what problem it actually solves. There's even a link if you hover over about that says "Learn about why we exist". I thought for sure that would have something, but it's just a list of all the employees. It looks like the only way to figure out what it actually does is to sign…

Hey! We do API documentation, plus a bunch of other tools. All the logos are click-able (for example: https://developers.intercom.com/ ) if you want an example. So, basically, we sit at developer.whatever.com, and take care of everything from reference guides to marketing pages to tutorials to support forums. If you have any more questions or feedback, feel free to email me at greg@readme.io! We're always updating th…

Thanks, I think I understand now. I honestly would have never guessed those were clickable without hovering. All I did was scroll. I didn't move the cursor so I also didn't notice the image change on mouse over.

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#16

Post by bretpiatt »

bg0 wrote: post #13

[you're right]

$100 is 1/50th of a $5,000 per month employee. From looking at your business from the website in your profile it feels like high quality API docs could speed up many members of the team.

It's hard to evaluate situations from the outside so I could also be totally off. At Jungle Disk we consume a ton of tools and they are all easily positive ROI. Good people are hard to find and expensive vs. SaaS subscriptions.

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#17

Post by gkoberger »

foobaw wrote: post #14

Big reason why Readme really didn't work for us was because - we wanted one secured internal knowledge base and one external knowledge base but that was not easily supported. Also we needed integration with Zendesk because we wanted to re-direct customers to our KB but that was not easily done.

Feel free to reach out to greg@readme.io if you're still interested!

You can have multiple projects, and the internal ones can be secured in a variety of ways (OAuth, site-wide password, admins only).

As for Zendesk, we have an integration (the little modal popup thingy), or you can disable our support forums and redirect any sub-URL to Zendesk!

It still might not be the right fit, however I'd love to talk more if you have feedback or thoughts!

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#18

Post by gkoberger »

gkoberger wrote: post #3

Founder here! I know funding news isn't always a match for HN, but I'm glad someone posted it here since HN is where it all started. Here's our launch, if anyone wants to go back and look: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8422408

Also, we're hiring! https://readme.com/careers

Engineers, support, solutions engineer, dev evangelist, content writer (with a technical background), and more! If you don't see the right job, email greg@readme.io!

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#19

Post by choward »

harrisonjackson wrote: post #12
choward wrote: post #9

I've read pretty much everything on the site and between the high level marketing speak and generic wireframes, I have no idea what it does or what problem it actually solves. There's even a link if you hover over about that says "Learn about why we exist". I thought for sure that would have something, but it's just a list of all the employees. It looks like the only way to figure out what it actually does is to sign…

Did you go to the products page? Not questioning what you said at all just curious how deep you dug (obvs apex should have the info you were missing), but as someone that is pretty familiar with their offering and someone that has hosted api docs and sdk documentation through other sources their copy and marketing is on point for me - and the marketer/founder in me wants to know where the disconnect happened for you.

Yes. It was pretty much the first thing I read actually. It makes a little more sense after a re-read. I still have no idea why there are snippets of code at the top telling me how to make a POST request. Anyway, I'm a developer, so when I evaluate something I'm very focused on "how do I use this for real in production and how much pain is it going to cause me?"

So what I usually do first thing is go look for the documentation. When I clicked on "documentation" the first time I expected documentation. It's under the "Products" section at the top and bottom of the page, and that can be interpreted as "product documentation" or "documentation for the product". But as you know, it's the marketing page for a product called "Documentation".

On that page I couldn't really get any more information other than "Easy to Update Within Seconds - Sync your Swagger file, update content in our editor, or merge a suggested edit to make sure docs are always up to date."

I'm not sure what this means. Is this a manual process I have to do or do you have an API call I can hook into my build system?

Is having a Swagger or OpenAPI file a requirement? If not, what's the alternative?

How does the changelog work? Do you read it out of a git repo or manage it on the site?

I have more questions along those lines and I think some screenshots or documentation for actually using the readme documentation product would help a lot.

Re: ReadMe (YC W15) Raises 9M Series A from Accel and Y Combinator

#20

Post by gkoberger »

choward wrote: post #19
harrisonjackson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you go to the products page? Not questioning what you said at all just curious how deep you dug (obvs apex should have the info you were missing), but as someone that is pretty familiar with their offering and someone that has hosted api docs and sdk documentation through other sources their copy and marketing is on point for me - and the marketer/founder in me wants to know where the disconnect happened for you.

Yes. It was pretty much the first thing I read actually. It makes a little more sense after a re-read. I still have no idea why there are snippets of code at the top telling me how to make a POST request. Anyway, I'm a developer, so when I evaluate something I'm very focused on "how do I use this for real in production and how much pain is it going to cause me?" So what I usually do first thing is go look for the doc…

Thanks for the feedback! We can work to make these answers more obvious on the site, but in the meantime:

> I'm not sure what this means. Is this a manual process I have to do or do you have an API call I can hook into my build system?

We do have an API and a CLI tool for automating, or you can sync it in the UI.

> Is having a Swagger or OpenAPI file a requirement? If not, what's the alternative?

Nope, we have a manual editor in the UI for describing your API!

> How does the changelog work?

It's just a blog mostly, but with icons for different types of changes

> Do you read it out of a git repo or manage it on the site?

Everything is on the site, since locking it in git makes it tougher for non technical coworkers to make changes. That being said, you can sync it to git. We have built in page history, versioning, and our own version of pull requests called "suggested edits".

> I have more questions along those lines and I think some screenshots or documentation for actually using the readme documentation product would help a lot.

You can see your docs at https://docs.readme.com

Thanks for the detailed feedback!

Post reply on HN