here are my notes from
@bchesky
’s founder mode talk
- leadership is presence not absence
- dont manage the team, manage the work
- power is not zero-sum. everyone can feel empowered
My toxic trait is that I care about green github grass. For better or for worse, this has manifested in Mintlify’s engineering culture.
- We prioritize heads-down builder time.
- Every engineer aims to make an impact by constantly shipping both small and large features.
- Every
Yesterday we hosted 400 top university students at the YC Summer Conference - a fun day of talks about startups. Talking to the students afterwards, I found myself giving a lot of the same advice. So in case it's useful to others, here is my startup advice for students.
Mintlify would not exist as it does today without the brilliant work from
@nextjs
,
@vercel
.
Vercel Platforms allowed us to power multiple docs instances, get custom domains and get instant updates when our users make changes to their docs through ISR.
Introducing Platforms Starter Kit v2 →
It's an open-source
@nextjs
template for you to build multi-tenant apps with custom domains in days, not months.
Built with Next.js App Router and the
@Vercel
Domains API.
It's exciting to reflect on everything we've built, but it's even more exciting to look forward to the journey we have ahead of us!
We're super stoked to be working with
@stuffyokodraws
&
@JenniferHli
and to be joining the a16z family.
The journey has just begun🌱
AI is changing the devtool scene and the future is looking brighter than ever🌟 come join us this weekend at our AI devtool hackathon.
we have fantastic judges joining us including
@rauchg
, the ceo of
@vercel
, folks from the
@cursor_ai
team & more!
register here -
At
@mintlify
, we spend a lot of time talking to our users to understand how we can build things to 10X their dev workflows.
That's why today, we're excited to launch the Mintlify REST API.
i complained about coordinating doordash lunches so our founding engineer created a retool app that generates a random doordash link everyday from our fav restaurants and sends it in our slack.
#providingshareholdervalue
👏
Around this time last year (Halloweekend)
@hanwangio
and I were prepping for the YC interview. It's crazy to think that that was a year ago and I'm proud of everything we've accomplished since then. Excited to see what we accomplish in the year ahead of us.
When your customers navigate from your landing page to your docs, they shouldn't feel a stark difference in your branding.
Today we’re launching custom fonts! Personalize the font of your docs to your own font hosted on a CDN or by choosing from
@googlefonts
to match your docs
They say I make $45K/month just by pure luck and just by posting my MRR on Twitter 🙃
I'll ignore them and have my 8 years of GitHub graph printed on my wall as a self-reminder ✅
Last Friday I got to talk to
@hahnbeeIee
, CTO of
@mintlify
about an important and often underrated topic - documentation!
I had 3 major takeaways from our conversation 🧵
I’m probably the last person in the startup world who has read Zero to One but I finally got around to finishing it and I thought it wouldn’t hurt to share some of my favorite quotes & learnings. 🧵
.
@ycombinator
's W24 deadline recently passed which made me reminiscent on when
@handotdev
and I applied two years ago. Aspiring founders often ask me "was YC worth it?"
The answer is yes.
Read more about my holistic thoughts here:
our designer
@jmsbaduor
is getting mad at me because engineering isn't shipping his designs fast enough. if you're a goated detail-oriented product engineer that can ship come join us
@mintlify
i cant update our status page because uses vercel. we can't correspond with customers because plain uses vercel. 🫠 this is what happens when we all rely on the same infra and it all goes down.
I'm such a big next.js/vercel fan and I live in SF and want to be invited to their events. I've concluded that they only interact with dev influencers so it's time for me to become a dev influencer.
Be customer-obsessed. If you already feel like you’ve heard “Build something people want” a gazillion times. You haven’t drilled it into your brain enough.
Today kicks off Launch Week 2!
This week, we'll be bringing you a new feature every day.
Day 1 brings one of our most requested features: preview deployments 🚀
A good developer experience involves low latency and a snappy user experience.
For majority of our customers this was the case, but as we grew we noticed that some of our customers were really pushing our product to its edges in terms of scale.
This is why we decided to devote
Since I joined Mintlify 9 months ago, we’ve been asked many times to provide more accessibility for non-technical users.
When it comes to delivering a world-class docs, we wanted users to have the flexibility of working in VSCode or platform
😀
@stripe
is an industry leader in documentation.
While building
@mintlify
, I’ve asked myself ‘what makes Stripe’s docs so great? And how were they able to accomplish it?’ 🧵
Introducing the Widget ✨
Documentation is just one part of the solution. The real problem is getting developers to their answers ASAP.
The Widget is an extension of your docs built to instantly answer your users' questions when and where they need it.
Introducing Paradigm – a reimagined workspace with AI at its core.
Centered around the primitive of a spreadsheet, Paradigm puts swarms of intelligent agents at your fingertips.
The real power of Paradigm comes with scale: imagine having tens of thousands of interns working for
AI is changing the way we build software. 4 y.o's are hacking together apps with the help of AI.
If you want to be a part of this movement, come join us this weekend in SF Sept. 7th-8th!
Register here:
Today kicks-off our first ever Launch Week! 1️⃣
For the next week, we will be launching a new feature every day
To start off, Day 1 brings us a re-invited CLI.
i remember when i thought getting customers would solve all my problems... little did I know retention, virality, monetization are all beasts of their own.
Finding top talent is hard. Here are some unique ways I've heard of startups hiring:
- Hiring their old neighbors or roommates
- Reaching out to their power users
- Posting a hard problem on Twitter and nerd-sniping anyone who solves it (twitter lowkey underrated for finding