Bootstrapping Docs at a Startup
summary
Bootstrapping docs at a startup is a concrete playbook: documentation for CockroachDB gets built from scratch by the first tech writer while the product has been in development two years with 15 core engineers and 60+ open‑source contributors. The process pivots on Bootstrapping docs: interview founders, write an FAQ that FAQ gets ~5% traffic, choose pragmatic tooling (GitHub + Jekyll + TeamCity), wire CI to render PR previews and run link tests, and publish a Quick Start that covers install and starter cluster — all measurable choices that actually ship and attract contributors.
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chapters (20)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:56A common Startup Day 1
- 4:25What to do in the abstract
- 5:32What to do, for real
- 6:30What are the questions?
- 6:57Interview founders and lead developers
- 9:30What you get
- 12:13Tools: What's important for bootstrapping?
- 13:21Took: Flexible Design
- 14:06Took: Flexible Integration
- 15:11You're not alone!
- 16:26Source Control
- 17:09Website Generation
- 18:20Automated Testing and Publishing
- 19:55"Existing resources" behind my decisions
- 22:13What do your user's need?
- 23:22Ask peers to demo getting started
- 23:46Do it yourself
- 24:20Go back to founders
- 28:21Write a Quickstart
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