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clairity | 2 years ago

you've done a great job on the overall UI/UX, but as always, for me the question is where and how the product fits in the overall marketplace. this is true even for free/open source products, as it's hard to maintain momentum on stuff no one else really notices or uses.

is there a pain for managing content for technical writers? yes, probably. not many products target this niche. is the pain big enough to overcome inertia? that seems questionable, but perhaps it is big enough. i doubt large businesses would even look at a fledgling product like this, as it doesn't solve enough pain for them. it seems that there might be a market in small-to-medium-sized technical businesses that have like 1 technical writer and a few guest postings to use a platform like this.

but does it make sense to target developers at all? perhaps for initial marketing, but i'd conjecture that devs mainly just want to get something out on one platform (whether their own blog, or dev.to, or whatever) and perhaps secondarily on twitter (or similar) for more reach and discussion. it seems to be an uphill battle to get them to switch over to a completely different tool that requires integration to get content flowing to all the right places (which is what a headless cms requires).

in any case, the positioning as a headless CMS falls flat to me. that seems to be leading with a technical detail ("headless") rather than the pain and the solution. my off-the-cuff suggestion is something more like "Content Automation" as the descriptor. similar to "Marketing Automation" (e.g., buffer, hubspot) yours is a CMS plus and an automation platform (in the making). it helps people crank out technical content and put it in all the right places to be seen by the people you want to target.

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spondylosaurus|2 years ago

Technical writer here: most TWs I know either lean hard into docs-as-code toolchains (raises hand) or fall the other way into the territory of safe but limited hosted tools, like Zendesk or ReadMe. A headless CMS seems like it falls into the awkward middle—too fiddly for people who want something that "just works," too restricting for people who do want full control to fiddle with their docs. I have to confess that I've been forced to use a headless CMS tool (Contentful) for docs in the past and I loathed it.

Marketers, on the other hand, love headless CMS tools. They're the ones who forced me to use one, since our main website and blog were also built on Contentful at the time. I think headless CMS tools offer the perfect level of configuration and modular authoring for them without the daunting hurdle of having to learn to code(ish).