1.4x increase in onboarded devs for Crossmint in July with technical docs & guides
A technical documentation case study — How docs & guides drove 1.4x new developers to Crossmint in July
Alfonso Gomez-Jordana Manas, Co-founder of Crossmint, brought me into the team for a 3-month contract to help attract more web3 NFT developers.
Crossmint is a web3 infrastructure company focused on bringing NFTs to the mainstream. It’s the easiest way to create, buy, and sell NFTs.
The primary focus for this 3-month sprint was a complete overhaul of the technical documentation and new technical posts on Medium to make it easier for developers to integrate Crossmint into their NFT projects.
In this case study, I’ll break down how technical documentation updates and a few technical guides ultimately helped lead to a 1.4x increase in onboarded developers in July 2022.
I’ll split the case study into two parts, Documentation & Technical Guides.
Part 01: Technical Documentation
Crossmint is a cross-chain platform and we need to ensure that integration works smoothly across all supported blockchains. For this reason, we chose to focus on in-depth documentation pages for each chain. Each one has slight differences in terms of how to get onboarded.
I documented all of Crossmint’s features for Solana, Polygon, and Ethereum and their various APIs, like their Whitelabel API.
Solana’s documentation page
Crossmint supports a variety of integrations with Solana, including custom contracts and Candy Machine v1 and v2. The most common one is Candy Machine v2.
The Candy Machine documentation page guides the user through this sign up process. The only required information here, besides the name and description, is the Candy Machine ID. The documentation page is primarily focused on helping developers find this Candy Machine ID and get it into the console so they can create their collection.
Ethereum’s documentation page
Compared to Solana, Ethereum’s documentation page is more complex because more information is required for integration. The required fields are:
- Contract type
- Contract address
- ABI section for the mint function
- NFT recipient address mint function argument.
The most important part of this page was simplifying the technical jargon as much as possible and guiding users through finding the correct information.
Some users were having trouble with the ABI section for mint function and the NFT recipient address mint function argument, specifically and some of that was due to the name for these fields.
We simplified as much as possible by writing clear step-by-step instructions on where to find this information.
The White Label API documentation page
Besides offering credit card checkout integration into some blockchains for NFT developers, Crossmint offers various APIs. One of those is the White Label API for Enterprise clients. The API lets you accept payments, mint NFTs programmatically, create new custodial wallets for users, and transfer NFTs.
We documented the API using the OpenAPI specification to write all the data each endpoint needed. There were also various examples provided.
We all know developers go straight for the code in the docs and so providing real-world, copyable code samples is important when creating API documentation.
Part 02: Technical Guides
Besides making it easier to onboard new developers who have already found the platform, Crossmint wanted to attract more external web3 developers with guides up on Medium.
Solana is the most common blockchain that developers use to integrate Crossmint. This article helps web3 developers create a fully-fleshed Solana NFT connection with credit card integration.
We included the links to the guides in the Crossmint documentation if developers wanted to follow along and found some people coming over from the documentation.
Setting up an NFT collection using Ethereum is much more complex than Solana and the above 22-minute article demonstrates that. This article was meant to attract more Ethereum developers and then showing how easy credit card integration is with Crossmint.
One unique feature of Crossmint is the ability to purchase NFTs that exist on one blockchain with different cryptocurrencies. This article aimed to show Solana developers that this feature exists and how to get it integrated with Crossmint.
As of October 5th, the highest sale for an NFT using Crossmint used this feature.
In Conclusion
Ultimately, significant technical documentation updates and some technical guides helped achieve a 1.4x increase in onboarded developers for Crossmint in July 2022. I’d say that’s a very good number for what we produced.
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