> People will anonymously scout docs to determine if your product can help them Regular users don't do that: developers and techs do. That's what marketing mat

> People will anonymously scout docs to determine if your product can help them Regular users don't do that: developers and techs do. That's what marketing material is for. > If public, docs are discoverable by Google, which means they are part of your marketing awareness effort Purpose-build marketing materials are better than technical documentation. They can contain technical information, but they serve a different purpose and work best when created for that > Writing docs is cheaper than shipping code, and therefore can be worth implementing to compensate (as you wrote) Sure, doing a bad job is usually cheaper than doing a good job, but if you do a good job designing your interface, and you do a good job creating marketing material, there's no comparison. Trying to shave pennies off of marketing material, especially, is about as penny-wise and pound foolish as you get. Your average end user probably reads exactly zero lines of formal software documentation in their entire lives, and that probably has a lot more psychological inertia with them than interest in your product. Even if it's well-written, they're not used to it. They find it intimidating and off-putting; using it as marketing material with it is a surefire way to turn off a whole lot of potential customers. It would be like a nightclub trying to save money by firing the models they pay to hand out flyers and hiring a couple extra hulking, chipped-tooth bouncers to pick up the slack-- it's not like there's any technical reason they can't do it, and it's the same flyer either way, right? Let the appropriate professionals ply the expertise they went to school for and built their career on rather than pushing that onto a developer who only thinks they can sub in as a technical writer and interface designer because they don't quite understand what those people add to the process: they just know how its technically implemented. I was that developer for years before I went to school for design. Devs really really can't intuit their way through those processes like they assume they can- That's why damn near any FOSS that's been taken up by non-technical crowds is controlled by foundations or corporations with professional designers and writers.