Hi, I'm Marek, founder of Inline Manual - new documentation tool

Introductions
#1

Hi everyone,
my name is Marek and I am designer, developer (Drupal for the past 9 years - contributing, organizing events,…), ux, business, wearing all sort of hats and a founder of few projects:

Inline Manual - tool that allows you to create walkthroughs and tooltips on top of your application without coding. Allowing you to be agile even with documentation, making it re-usable and less of a hassle. The portal is working almost like github does, you can create public walkthroughs, eg. “How to create a user” for WordPress and other WP people can take it and have a documentation/help for theirs WP installations in seconds, or they can clone it and extend it.

We have been bootstrapping for the past 2 and a half year. And I am also doing side projects when I feel like I need a change. The most recent one is http://eventhunt.io - tech and startups events curated by locals which was first on product hunt for a day (what a strange feeling that side project is more popular than your main activity :smile: and I am turning that one into a business too, which is still a fun project, IM is already serious with having quite a lot of paying customers)

Looking forward to sharing my knowledge that I have gained for the past years and learning new things.

Oh, and recently as an update we launched this https://inlinemanual.com/tooltips_and_launchers

1 Like
#2

Welcome - Interesting idea there with Inline Manual.

#3

Cool! I was literally just thinking about this a couple of days ago! I took a quick look at the site and saw the ‘request a demo’ option. Wish there was a video!

Just signed up and I’ll try to dig into this at some point soon.

#4

Thank you Ryan, it originates from the idea of making the documentation of any web project easy to create and maintain. Eg. the screenshots and screencasts are so painful to create, re-use, etc…

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#5

Great, welcome aboard then! Yes, we are just in the process of rebuilding our support portal, so hopefully we are going to have an updated knowledge base with video soon, thank you for checking our product out!

#6

Great idea for a product. Home page looks good (although the peer validation (used by lots of companies) wasn’t immediately obvious (and that’s a HUGE selling point).

I like calling the free plan “Free Ride” :smile:
My BIGGEST question is “where can I see it in action”?

Is there a walkthrough of the walkthrough-maker?

and does it work interactively within a single-page webapp? (we’ve tried some other tools like ListenLoop and they dont’ work well with .javascript apps (at least not ours :frowning:

#7

Hi Clay,
true, should be bigger right? :smile:

So, this is one of my favourite features of the product: to see it live click this https://inlinemanual.com/?imTopic=1042 it will automatically launch a player overview tour. These links you can for example use in support chat, if someone asks you how to do things, etc…

Single page apps, yes, it should work out of the box, if there will be glitches, there is a special function that reinitializes the whole player (eg. when the DOM is redrawn, you can call it, etc…) - it is described here https://inlinemanual.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202832995-Single-page-apps-integration-AngularJS-
We are learning that it is difficult to taylor this to every application, everyone is building apps differently, different structure, sometimes they use not valid selectors, or like SalesForce, changing IDs of the elements on page load. Not easy challenges, but I believe after the two years we can say we are covering 80% of the use-cases, which is good I think. :smile:

Glad you like the product!

#8

Sotak,

Have you done any Landing Page Optimization on theat landing page?
Are you a/b testing it?
(for example, testing the suggestion I gave you last time)

#9

Hi Clay,
no not yet, we are doing some changes for our upcoming release with A/B tests. Been busy with other things, such as WordPress plugin, etc… but we are working on more landing pages, will incorporate your suggestion in one of them and will let you know. :slight_smile:

#10

Nice to meet you sotak, and congratulations on Inline Manual! I haven’t used it yet, but I honestly love the concept, and it looks solid.

I have alot of experience with ‘guided tours’ using libraries such as Intro.js, and would much prefer a tool like your that’s plug-n-play and can even be used by non-engineers. Needless to say, I will be taking it for a test run post-haste :smile:

I’m kind of surprised that this is my first time running into something of the sort, are you guys alone in this space?

#11

Hi @akevon,
there are plenty of competitors of ours, but I would say we are the most advanced solution and also most active, well, probably second, after VC backed WalkMe who are charging enterprise pricing.

Here is a list if interested: http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-alternatives-to-WalkMe

Let me know when you will be trying it out, even here, open in public. :slight_smile: Curious to know what we can improve and also what was your experience.

Must admit, it is a challenge, to try to make it work for at least 80% of the use-cases, since every application is different. But we are making big progress and we are already covering most of it now (after 2,5 years). Which is nice.

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#12

We are looking for something which is a cross between Appcues and Inline Manual - anything in the pipeline to share?

The bit I think which is “missing” from your offering which we need is the ability to display modals, whole page modals and slideouts etc - we would rather not have to use two tools if we can avoid it.

#13

Yes,
we will be adding full screen steps in 2 weeks. We already have modals. Also every step can have it’s own class defined, so you can style it as you wish. Slideouts, might come later too. Tomorrow we are having a release of more detailed analytics, which will allow you to identify where your users are being lost within application, where they are dropping off in the tours, etc… We have gathered quite a lot of feedback on the different step layouts our customers want, but feel free to share some mockups or designs if you like.

And within a month and a half we will introduce segmentation (right now it is possible to use javascript API with logic on your end).

It is all coming together as a really powerful tool and we can see it is helping our current customers, which makes me super excited. :smile:

#14

Hey @sotak,

I will let you know, I’ve put it in our asana as something to evaluate so hopefully we’ll get to it soon and I can give you some good feedback. I’m excited to test it out!

and I can imagine it must have been painful incorporating all those use cases :grin:

Good luck and will reach back out soon.

#15

Perfect, looking forward to your feedback @akevon

#16

Any reason this wouldn’t work with self hosted web apps?

I noticed the pricing is “per site”.

#17

Hi @gravelld,
no reason why it shouldn’t work. There is also an option to download the standalone player as one file, that you can upload to your server. Or you can use API to fetch the data. We are not really checking URL/Domain of the site.

#18

Ok, but how does the pricing work in that case?

The player, is that just a JS file? So it could just be bundled in a self hosted web app? That’s actually not so important, we could just download the player and data because we generally do have an Internet connection.

#19

@gravelld the player is just a JS file, if the content (the tutorials you want to have on your apps) is same for all the apps, then one site is enough, think of a site as a folder with tutorials. As long as it will fit all of the sites, you can use just one.

#20

Thought I will send a little update. We released more thorough analytics - https://inlinemanual.com/analytics
and further control over step layouts - this is what you can create (will launch a tour on our site) https://inlinemanual.com/?imTopic=2549