We’re live on Product Hunt 💯

Hello internet friend. Just a heads-up that we’re currently being featured on the front page of Product Hunt.

No this isn’t a deep-dive into strategy and lessons — it’s just a heads-up that we’re going to be a bit sleepless and silly over the next 24 hours. And to share openly how interesting it is to see a documentation product trending so heavily on such a fun community.

A familiar 😍 adding some colour to the Product Hunt front page.

In other words, the only downside of this fantastic company (and community) we’re building is that we very capably solve a very specific set of problems.

What I’m saying is that software documentation maybe isn’t quite the conversation starter like sending rockets going to space.

Could be an actual photo of a collection being published in Corilla. But isn’t.

But the thing is that it’s an utterly necessary problem to solve. Corilla is solving it because is hasn’t been solved adequately — that’s the whole reason I was a part of the infamous PressGang CCMS crew inside of Red Hat. We needed to build something because it needed to exist in the world.

And the last year of the Corilla beta has been a drawn out mission of listening to our community, looking where the industry is shifting and converging, and shipping just enough features to keep growing and adapting in the right direction.

The interesting thing is that Corilla isn’t just a set of features. Nor is it the sum of its parts in terms of Markdown editor, version control, publishing API, editorial tools, team management, collaboration… the list goes on and on.

What we are doing is solving an immediate problem while also ensuring we not only have a seat at the table when it comes to defining the technical content platform of tomorrow… but the chance to make some very big bets on the future of content.

Which is where the Product Hunt has been amazing. Not only are the conversations in the community there interesting (and entertaining), but the sheer volume of enthusiasts and domain experts jumping into the product and sharing their feedback is amazing.

And in the meantime, we’ve gotten to experiment with some interesting new engagement tools. Such as this customer video support service from Bonjoro. Chatting with the founder, I took the tip to send some of these to my own email account, and just share the link. It’s an awesome idea. Check it out:

And of course we’ve been pumping out the ridiculous tweets…

Posting nonsense to Facebook…

There were about five people in this list I shouldn’t have emailed.

And making fun of our Nathan (our CTO), who doesn’t like my (amazing) Slackbot idea for reasons that I will (probably) never understand…

Banter.

It’s been a long and sleepless night keeping up with the new users registering accounts in Corilla and engaging via our in-app support chat. The high activity is due to an onboarding question that is sent to all new users… #onboardingtip

And that really sums up the entire experience for us — working out what Corilla can do for you (while furiously refreshing a page).

And emojis. Lots and lots of emojis. 😬 💯🔚

EDIT: we just saw that we’ve currently got 303 upvotes. You know that THAT means right? 😎 #docssleepraverepeat

Everybody needs a Corilla.