The focus seems a bit blurred, too. The claim is that it's for Support, User Guides, Knowledge Bases, Documentation and Change Logs. But the features list also talks about multuple Blogs. It's not at all clear where they fit in.
Also, being misled is a massive turn-off. First you say "User Guides + Knowledge Bases + Documentations + Changelogs", but then caveat it with "Currently offering User Guides only". But then later on the same page you say "Apps like Intercom, Crisp, and Helpscout, offer only one aspect of support pages and that is Knowledge Bases. Subsection covers all four: User Guides, Knowledge Bases, Documentations, and Changelogs"
You don't cover all four, you _plan_ to cover all four in the future.
The software itself is pretty slick. Currently we're using Crisp Chat's help docs for our SaaS, as well as a static site generator for our API docs. I think this could reasonably replace both.
One thing I really like is the layout. Having general topics on the left, as well as anchor based menu in each article is super helpful.
It’s incredible to look at it from the user’s perspective. And happy that you found it useful. Gives me a few ideas on how to improve certain things.
And to compare it to Crisp, that’s just amazing. Would love to see Transistor’s help and api docs on Subsection at some point.
This was great!
Your feedback is gold!
- the tool is too difficult to use for even yourself to be worth it
- you don’t use your tool deeply so you don’t have intuitive understanding of what is needed to be improve
- you don’t actually take user guides seriously and think they are important for a company to provide
When looking at this kind of service I’m evaluating on two levels: my customers experience, and my authoring experience. By not having your own user guide filled out I’m unable to evaluate the end customer experience (search, navigation, etc).
I know you’re in beta, but I don’t know why you’d do a show HN without at least having your own user guide filled out. A big wasted opportunity.
This was my exact thought. It's nice to have an easy-to-start demo, but I was expecting at least a link to a working (user-side) example.
On homepage there is a guide to one of my other apps, blogstatic, using Subsection: https://blogstatic.io/guide/getting-started
And the Subsection one, which I am currently adding info to: https://subsection.io/guide
Subsection is about a week old and still improving it while in Beta.
Hey HN friends,
I have created this tool for any Saas that is currently missing Support Docs or wants to manage them all from a single spot.
Support Docs, such as: User Guides, Knowledge Bases, Documentations, and Changelogs.
The project started with me looking into how to create support docs for my other apps and couldn't find one that does it all.
Then found out that user guides and knowledge bases do rank pretty well for bottom-of-the-funnel customers = Subsection was born.
Currently you can only create a User Guide as I'm in the midst of deploying themes for KB, Docs, and Changelogs.
Would love to hear your thoughts.
Could you share a bit about what aspects of it you would use and what would be a good price for your Saas?
https://www.accessibilitychecker.org/audit/?website=https%3A...
Even just the basics of alt text and sufficient colour contrast need fixing. This suggests accessibility hasn't been considered at all.
That is the next task in line. Please, check it again soon, to notice the changes.
> Try a Free Demo / NO EMAIL REQUIRED
Ok, sure! I’m assuming this is a demo of documentation created in Subsection, so I’m not sure who would expect it to require email anyway. Click
> Free Demo
> Email is not required to test Subsection!
> Start
Ok, an entire screen to say that again? There’s nothing to do on this screen, so it seems completely unnecessary. How can “no email required” be the most important information about the demo anyway? But sure, click
> Demo Created
> You can now create your very first guide!
> Next
Another screen that says nothing and where I do nothing? I don’t even know in what way a demo was “created”. I just want to see what the documentation looks like, but I guess this is a demo of an admin interface. There’s a slow video here showing me things I can’t do on this screen. Am I supposed to memorize what happens in the video to use on a different screen?
After this I get into the admin UI which seems straightforward - I didn’t play around much with it, but it doesn’t look too complicated. You should jump here in a single step after I click the demo button on the landing page!
I wasn’t so sure about including the second step before creating the Demo, but that was sort of my safety so people don’t “accidentally” create it.
And, overall it could be less steps for sure.
Thank you so much for this feedback.
Not that I’m against “on-premise”, but it’s much easier to deploy updates this way.
Thank you for taking a look at it.