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Nope, I do not recommend this. This is not really a safe and scalable solution for startups anymore. In your scenario, the app developers create something tha
by hoofhearted 3y ago
Nope, I do not recommend this.
This is not really a safe and scalable solution for startups anymore.
In your scenario, the app developers create something that gains traction. But they have not spent any time writing guides, docs, or any sort of marketing content. They are only worried about their app code, and someone else will fix the tech debt eventually when they set up the WordPress blog site on a sub domain.
If the devs ever reach that point in success, they have now created a silo between the main app, and the WordPress instance. They two apps usually run out of sync in consistency and feel, and factioned teams form around who works within the app, and who works within WP on the content.
The two teams eventually get out of sync, and the users never get the basic info they need to use your app.
Then when nobody is paying attention, someone takes advantage of a vulnerabilty in a dumb WP plugin, and they spam your blog site with porn links and offensive content. Now you have to handle damage control, and closing the hole and erasing the content.
The only successful YC company in recent history I have seen pull this off is OpenSea, but I'm not even sure what they are up to today.
To the contrary, launching a startup is:
20% writing code.
80% writing docs, guides, and marketing content.
Further to the contrary, I have found that the most successful YC companies and products all started their code products with documentation.
Stripe and Shopify both launched, and immediately started building out user guides and marketing content.
The common denominator between Stripe and Laravel at launch was users commenting how easy their product was to use, and how complete and simple their documentation was to understand.
These companies didn't wait to find a content solution, they started writing their content alongside their code since day 1.
- clintonb 3y agoIt’s pretty easy to point <hostname>/docs to an appropriate server. This is literally what Stripe does. There is no need to merge the marketing site with the API or docs.
- hoofhearted 3y agoI don't think that is how Stripe is doing it. The React app code is baked into their docs seamlessly, it's not two different things. I have researched this to get the definitive, but it's difficult to find out what Stripe is using exactly. They are 100% generating their content statically though, and their user docs are dynamic with data.
- clintonb 3y agoI worked at Stripe for over five years. It’s a monorepo with multiple services. The marketing site, docs site, and API are separate services.
- hoofhearted 3y agoNice! Thank you for you the insight! It's clear that it's a monorepo that they are packaging up at build time to create a seamless website. Any ideas on what they are using to accomplish this? Regarding the original topic of this post, I'm 99% confident that Stripe is not using WordPress to write their docs and content either way. P.S. On another note, I've been leaning on BDC to provide me with insight and feedback on my current project. I really doubled down on this modern content system idea after I interviewed with Increase for a senior frontend role under Ben. They asked me to critique the frontend and tell them what I would improve. The only improvements I could find was the lack of user docs and marketing content to promote all their development efforts. It's @bdc of course, how am I going to improve his work when he is setting the bar? Increase lacked content at the time because they hadn't yet found a seamless method of content management with their existing Vue.js codebase. My current project solves all of this with a simple Next.js app that comes baked with everything a startup could need for content.
- clintonb 3y agoYou can learn more about the current system at https://stripe.com/blog/markdoc https://stripe.com/blog/markdoc. It was never WordPress. You may be over-indexing on “packaging”. It’s been a while since I’ve worked on docs, but much of what you’re calling “packaging” is simply routing to another app.
- hoofhearted 3y agoP.S. Yes! Developers want to package up their blog content, user docs, API docs, and app code into seperate repositories, but pack them up together into a single website during build time. Coming soon to Elegant: Split your docs, React code, and blog content into seperate repos, and pack them back up into one app during build time : ) Can WordPress or Ghost do that?
- hoofhearted 3y agoI'm getting downvotted, implying that I'm off my rockers lol. I promise to all of you that I'm somewhat correct, and I have all the data to prove it. I spent over a year doing R&D on this issue, and I found that the most successful startups were actually rolling a detached Docusaurus instance hosted on Vercel or Netlify, as opposed to running WordPress.