Episode 86
· 39:59
These guides should be written by developers, by people who are actually writing these writing code for these and not be overwritten by, the the so to speak marketing people who are trying to get this from an SEO perspective or trying to get this from, like, oh, we just want views on this.
Jack Bridger:Hi, everyone. You're listening to Scanning DevTools. I'm joined today by Amit Jotwani, who's the founder of HelloDx. They help developer focused companies create great products, and one of the things they do is audit documentations, APIs, quick start guides, and stuff like that. And that is how we actually I came across Amit because I was writing a quick start guide or a guide, for Streampart, that some of you may have seen.
Jack Bridger:And I came across a great article, about how to write quick start guides. So I really wanted to get Amit on the show to talk about quick start guides. So, Amit, thank you so much for joining.
Amit Jotwani:Hey. Of course, Jack. I'm super super excited. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to talk about all things, quick start guides.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. So one of the things we should first talk about is, like, what is a quick start guide?
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. So we were chatting about this, like, a little while ago, before we started recording. To me, a quick start guide and people will have probably different definitions for it. But to me, a quick start guide is something that's very focused on getting people from 0 to 1 for a very specific thing. It has step by step instructions, and it's very, very focused on doing one thing.
Amit Jotwani:That to me is a definition of it, and it should have and we'll talk more about this, but it should have a clear result already specified in the introduction of that guide. And I should know exactly what I'm getting myself into, and what I expect to get out of it. That, to me, is, like, the definition of a big start guide to me.
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Jack Bridger:And, what I actually now that I finished the article, I'm actually not sure if it was a quick start guide or not, and that's such a question I have, because so what it is is to give context, I wrote this, I've built this thing, stream part, that helps, is like a API for processing videos. And I wanted to write this guide on how to build a AI video editor using Streamplot and a couple of other tools. And, I shared it on Devto and a few other places. Does that count as a quick start guide?
Amit Jotwani:I I think it does because, again, I'm I'm cheating a little bit because I've I've seen your article, and I know that there were steps to it. So to me, that qualifies as a step by, step by step guide for a quick start. Now there there could be different elements that I I think would make it a better quick start guide. There's a lot of and we've we've all seen these. Right?
Amit Jotwani:I mean, you you go to any framework. You go to developer API products and all of that, And you've seen these guides. But half of them, you feel like like pulling your hair out because they just assume a lot of things. They expect you to go do the hard work, which adds friction. So the idea would be to make it in such a way that it reduces a friction as much as possible.
Amit Jotwani:You give them exactly what you want them to have at that moment of time. That simplifies the process of going from 0 to 1. And in my head, quick start guides to and this to me, a lot of this goes back to writing clean code. The principles of clean code of, like, if you're writing a method or a function, it should do one thing. Like, you can obviously write functions that do a gazillion things, but it just becomes harder to maintain and harder to follow and difficult to read.
Amit Jotwani:The same is true for a quick start guide. Like, we can, of course, write quick start guides which do, like, 5 things. So this is a quick start guide that will introduce you to super API, and it will also show you how you can do under 20 things as part of one quick start guide. But it it becomes difficult to follow. They obviously become long.
Amit Jotwani:They become complex. And I still don't have the gratification of checking a box that I did this one simple thing. So all of those things, I think, make the elements or the tenets of a quick good quick start guide, if that makes sense.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. But I it feels like that's quite a hard thing to get right because often, like, your product might do quite a few things, and then there might be, like, a decent amount of setup involved. And so how yeah. How do you get that balance?
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. So let's let's start with, say, a hello world of sorts. Right? So the hello world would be essentially a quick start guide, but it does one specific thing. So let's take an example of AssemblyAI, for example.
Amit Jotwani:The the basic premise of, what I understand of AssemblyAI, I have played around with a bit, is that it's at its core, it's a transcription API. Right? That's the basic hello world experience of AssemblyAI. You can give it an audio URL or an audio file and it transcribes it. So that to me is the basic step for it.
Amit Jotwani:So I would start off with a quick start guide that just essentially just that. That it allows you to go step by step to take a URL. And then how do you transcribe that using, say, Python? And that would be the step by step process. Now along with this, as you go along, there will obviously be new terms or terminology or jargons, if you may, that will get introduced.
Amit Jotwani:So it's it's job of the quick start guide to make sure that those things are introduced on a on an as need basis. So don't overload on things that are not required for that thing. So once you're done with that first step, you can add more things to it. That becomes a new quick start guide. So at the end of this one, you might say that, oh, by the way, you can also do speaker recognition.
Amit Jotwani:To do that, we've written another quick start guide. And that can pick up from where this one left off. But now the job of the second quick start guide is very specific about speaker recognition. And they should be connected. Like, if you're not familiar with this transcription, you can go back and read this one.
Amit Jotwani:So it almost becomes like, they're they're piling on each other, but they're still doing one specific thing. It should be very you should be able to define what this quick start guide does in, like, one sentence. If you find that you're writing a couple of sentences for it, it's probably it's probably doing too much. Again, I go back to the the the way of writing functions. But if you were to define what that function is doing, it should be returning one thing.
Amit Jotwani:It should be doing one specific thing.
Jack Bridger:Should it be in one language? Like, you're you're doing, like, how to transcribe the title, I get I don't even know if you need the title, but, like, how to transcribe audio in Assembly with Python.
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. So, I mean, there there are couple approaches. I I've seen I I think, AssemblyAI does it to a certain extent that you can you they have tabs that you can click on and it switches the the complete guide to adapt to that specific language. So I've seen a few companies do that. But if you're writing for a dev to if you're writing in a in a in a individual capacity on some of these publications, you're not gonna have that kind of, tooling available to you.
Amit Jotwani:So in that case, I think it makes sense, to to have it very specific to Python, which again goes back to be as specific as you can. Like, niche out or niche in, whatever that term is. Like, go very specific, into that specific language or framework. And you can obviously write multiple of those as you go for different languages.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. You've got some actually some examples that are really helpful. So you say, like, not so good example is this guide covers the super API. And a better example is by the end of this guide, you'll set up and make your first call using super API.
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. So, that's another like, the the introduction clarity is super important, and we've seen so many of so many guides. And I've I've been a culprit too where I've I don't have the time or I I just need to get this thing out quickly. And, it starts with something like, welcome to my guide. Nobody cares nobody cares about you welcoming someone to their guide.
Amit Jotwani:What they care about is what exactly am I going to get out of this guide, what APIs will I be using, what specific endpoint, if that app that's applicable, will I be using. And at the end of this, what will I learn from this guide? So in your case, it would be that you would be able to craft your own podcast clipping system using AssemblyAI. You will learn what AssemblyAI is. You will learn some of these other, other tools that I'm using.
Amit Jotwani:But that that sort of clarity is super important, and it doesn't need to be super long. In fact, the shorter it is, the better it is. And a lot of this comes down to respecting the time of developers. I almost think that it's it's criminal to to let and and I'm I'm gonna sound a little controversial here. But these guides should be written by developers, by people who are actually writing these writing code for these and not be overwritten by, the the, so to speak, marketing people who are trying to get this from an SEO perspective or trying to get this from, like, oh, we just want views on this.
Amit Jotwani:Because the minute you do that, the minute you dilute that value, people see it through. So that's another thing. Like, it should be as straightforward. Just talk to the developer kind of language as you can. Make it very super clear, at the introduction itself.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And, one of the other pieces of feedback I got on on mine was to put in, like, prerequisites of, like so for instance, it was like, my I I'm improving this, but the first guide I put out required Docker. And so, like, I got advised to put in, like, you need Docker. And, like, if you don't, then that's the whole Yeah. Thing.
Jack Bridger:Is that something do you also recommend for your access? Or
Amit Jotwani:as long as we make it clear, in in our guides, at the top of the guide, that this is what you need, it should not be at the in the middle of the guide or at the end of the guide. You realize that, oh, I guess I needed my credit card out, and I I don't I don't wanna do that. So as long as again, it goes back to respecting the time of the reader. So Yeah. Put yourself we should put ourselves in those situations and, like, okay.
Amit Jotwani:So how would I feel if, if there was no prerequisite or there were no dependencies mentioned right at the outset? So that's that's definitely very important, setting expectations.
Jack Bridger:Yep. Yep. That makes sense. 1, I I putting myself on the spot here. I don't know if you wanna, like, roast my the kind of intro that I went with, because I think it might it might I can share my, my tab so that Oh, yeah.
Jack Bridger:You can see. Yeah. So this is what I went with. So I've had, like, the title was, like, build your own AI video editor of Node. Js assembly AI and stream part.
Jack Bridger:And then the intro was, you may have seen AI start startups that magically turn long podcast videos into viral clips for TikTok. To do this, they use LLMs like GPT 4 to find the best bits. In this guide, you'll learn how to build your own AI video editor. Yep. Feel free to roast.
Amit Jotwani:No. I mean, I I so what I don't want this to be a roast session. I think there's, I really like, the the title, and also the introduction. I think it sets up the expectations very clearly. I'm in fact excited, which I feel is is another thing that the the quick start guide should do.
Amit Jotwani:Like, if I'm if I'm not getting the the reader excited about it, why why am I writing this? Right? You obviously want people to read this. You want people to do the thing that you, you, you, you're, you're, you are excited about. So this definitely gets me excited about it.
Amit Jotwani:And that's also because I'm interested in this, which I guess is also fine. You're not gonna get everyone excited. Everyone is not gonna be the the right audience for you. But, this this is good. I I like it.
Amit Jotwani:I I'm I wanna read more. Like, I wanna scroll down and see how exactly I'm gonna do this. And the first question I obviously have right now is immediately, what do I need? Like, do I have the skills, or do I have the the tools that I would need? And yeah.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. My my intro is actually quite long. I'm not gonna read it out because people people on the podcast, but, like, I say, like, you will use this.
Jack Bridger:Here's an example of what you get and what you end with. What is assembly? What is stream part? Prerequisites. And and maybe I I should actually, like, clarify because this is, like, something that I was always planning to post externally, and, like, it sounds quite different to when you describe, like, quick start as, like, how to transcribe audio with Python is, like, quite simple, whereas this is more, like, trying to be exciting.
Jack Bridger:And I I actually, this is a broader question of, like, and something that I asked Adam Duvander about as well of, like, I think I was kind of hoping that this is just gonna do everything for me where it's like, it's gonna get people excited to try out this thing, and then it's gonna show them exactly how to do it and how to get started. And Yep. It got, like, views and stuff, and I think maybe, like, some kind of cool reactions.
Amit Jotwani:Yep.
Jack Bridger:But I don't think they really well, I'm pretty sure it didn't lead to anyone really or many people trying it. Although, I don't know. And I I think, like, maybe I was trying to get it to do too many things.
Amit Jotwani:What do you like, how would so how would you simplify this? Like, what do you what do you think was the the 0 dot one for this? Like, I I see Docker, and I my first instinct is that this is, oh, this is a bit complicated because I don't have Docker set up on my machine. Right? So there's an immediate first thing that I would need to do.
Amit Jotwani:But that's just me. Not everyone's gonna run through the same same, debate in their heads. So I I'm just looking at just the prerequisites and the step one. I'm genuinely curious to know how this works. So if it was me, I would go ahead and start doing this because I already have AssemblyI account.
Amit Jotwani:So I have a bias. Like, one one step is all checked in for me. The s three bucket should be fine. I have some, AWS experience. I've not done any Cloudflare stuff.
Amit Jotwani:So that I know that that would be a bit of a learning curve there for me. I like that you have a guide that you're referring me to for the cloud care stuff. So it it's it's doing a lot of the right things. But I think now looking at it, maybe it's maybe it's a it's trying to do too much, for that. It'll it's it's a pretty elaborate thing, it looks like.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think that's the conclusion that I came to as well. That ish I probably something that Adam said to me was, like, I should have something that's, like, to capture people's attention and then send them to, like, a more, like, specific thing. And I think yeah. I mean, partly it's just because the product was early and we didn't have like, you had to, like, self run it.
Jack Bridger:But, like, also
Amit Jotwani:Right.
Jack Bridger:Maybe I should have had, like, look how look what I built in 10 I don't know, actually. How how could I get somewhat like, what kind of would an article look like that captured someone's attention and then sent them to, like, a quick start to actually do it?
Amit Jotwani:So I'm I'm I'm looking at the prerequisites for this specific one. So there's obviously s 3, there's Cloudflare, there's Docker, and there's AssemblyAI. I and I I'm imagining that you have one more called StreamBot. I'm guessing that's maybe a Python package or something that I need to install. Is that what it is?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Well, JavaScript. So
Amit Jotwani:look looking at all of these, I am wondering if any of these are optional. Like, could you provide, could I just have the file locally somewhere on my machine as the first step instead of putting it on an s three bucket? Like, can I avoid that completely?
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Amit Jotwani:Because I'm learning. I can always add more complexity to it that, oh, I would like this to be in the cloud. But maybe that's not the 0 dot one version of it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think that was partly our challenge was, like, we wanted to show that you could easily, you know, Right. Run run this in the cloud and have it on s 3 and, but
Amit Jotwani:Right. But could that be a 0.2?
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Could
Amit Jotwani:could you start off with might not
Jack Bridger:have involved stream pot, which was what we were trying to, yeah, promote,
Amit Jotwani:I guess. Got it. Got it. Got it. Okay.
Amit Jotwani:That that makes sense. Yeah. I mean, that's the approach I would try to look at it. Like, are there any of these things optional in the sense? Can I get to the hello world first and then add the name, like, hello, Jack to it?
Amit Jotwani:Right? Dynamically, if you may. And the I don't know how you like, a lot of this goes back to how I even write the quick start guide. To me, if I'm trying to learn a new technology, it and I and I use I'll admit I use AI tools quite a bit now, to to write that goal for me, or at least the initial bit of it. But the way I go about it is I wanna write the first basic version of it.
Amit Jotwani:And then I start adding the bills and vessels to it. So my quick start guide, the ones I even write for myself so I can reference them later, generally start with that that, here's how you can get started with this one. And then I wanted to add this specific thing to it. So then I changed these bits. And then sometimes it also leads to, modularization of your code.
Amit Jotwani:Like, when I'm starting off if I'm starting over the Flask app, it's a huge one single file thing. Right? But by the time I'm getting to the 4th or the 5th version of it, I'm starting to break it down. But if I if that's the version I start off with for my quick start guide, it immediately comes across as very complex. So I I don't always start with that 4th or 5th version where I have it looks like I've got everything in place.
Amit Jotwani:I'm okay with having it being a little, code and code dirty code. It's not nicely refactored. It's not beautiful, but it's it's easy to understand, I guess, and easy to follow for that as part of that quick start guide.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think that that makes sense. Because then it's like, you've gotta every time you introduce, like, a new file, you gotta say, okay. This is I don't know. Like, I feel like people might panic of, like, oh, did I is there something else that should be in that file that I haven't got?
Amit Jotwani:Or Right. And so, honestly so I I was chatting with my my, cofounder, Kunal, about this the other day that you obviously want to encourage best practices as part of your quick start guides. So for example, if there are API keys that are being saved, you wanna say that, oh, make, like, a dotenv file and make sure you're not you're you're saving this there because it's best practice. Don't hard code this into your main, main, Python or JavaScript file. But that adds a little bit of complexity to it all already.
Amit Jotwani:Right? Now you
Jack Bridger:It's not really the scope of the tutorial. Exactly. Because, like,
Amit Jotwani:yeah. So you you have to sometimes make that, judgment of, like, do we want to do we want to play, like, good practice here, or do we wanna make this simple? And I I I don't know if there's a right or wrong here, but just you just have to know what you're trying to achieve out of that and just play to that crowd, I guess.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. It's a tough one.
Amit Jotwani:I I think there's just so many ways to do this, but the end goal is really you should have someone look through it to see if it's making sense. Can they follow it? Yeah. And, it's, you can obviously do this yourself also, but we, once you've written it, you have a certain, client spot because you're already familiar with the technology. Yeah.
Amit Jotwani:But the end goal is really, like, can can developers follow this from step 1 to step n and be able to do the thing that we are promising that they'll be able to do? And it should be clear at the outset. If there's a web page that they will see, then let's have a screenshot of that or let's have a ready code. Oh, that's another that's that's, like, one of my it annoys me so much when I I don't see a ready to go like, what what will the end result look like? It could be a screenshot.
Amit Jotwani:It could be a GitHub repo. It could be a demo version that you're running on it. It could be a video. But give me something that I know that I can I can essentially compare or also get excited for?
Jack Bridger:And should that go at the beginning?
Amit Jotwani:I think so. Yeah. I think so. And that could be, the the image could be something you start off with. So I wanted to build something like this, and here's a screenshot of what that end result looks like.
Amit Jotwani:And then you can go on with, like, the the the prerequisites, what you will need. And here's step 1. Let's just let's get started. And at the end of it, you can have that image or video or whatever again as to this is what you will see.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And I and and also on your point about, like, getting, like, making sure, like, other people actually look at it, I felt I feel like that was surprised me a lot where I kind of wrote this thing and then that I was probably, like, 20% done by the time. Because I got so much feedback, and then peep when people tried it, it was like, oh, and even when I tried it, like, again, like, I kind of started a new project and just tried to follow the steps. And, like, so many times where I missed things or didn't quite, you know this take a long time.
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. For sure. For sure. And this is what, like, we, like, we try to do with the the the audit reviews that we do of friction logging is that the the whole point of friction logging is really just that. That people who are familiar with the product or people who are writing the documentation for it have blind spots, and they have their biases, and they don't really see the things that a fresh pair of eyes would see.
Amit Jotwani:So the idea is saying that you have, like, someone who's not, not familiar with it, but technical enough, I guess, in the case of quick start guides that they can give you the feedback of where the loopholes are, where they fell off. The well, one of the examples that I, I'll I'll give you is that I've, the I won't take I won't take names, but, if your API needs some data to as part of the the, the the code that you're writing, If it needs some kind of asset, it could be logo images Yeah. Assets like audio, whatever. If you if you don't include that in the quick start guide, you're you're now making me work hard for it.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. 100%.
Amit Jotwani:And I'm and I will probably not do that unless I have, an incentive outside of that to do it. And also, this this actually can work in the the API favor also because when you provide them, you will provide them a really good use case data for it. If you leave it to me, I'm gonna find a stupid little JSON that I just have it handy on my computer. But if you give me that JSON, that'll have the key value pairs that you know exactly will work the way you want to demo that thing. So it's in your it's in their favor to provide that.
Amit Jotwani:But so many companies do not do that. They assume that I will just go and find some image on my computer that'll be exact specification that you want it to be. And chances are people are not going to do that, and you will you will see the the fall off, which is exactly the opposite of what most products want. You want to retain those customers. You want to get them excited and get them through that sign up.
Amit Jotwani:So, give them give them what what they need, proactively.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. Yeah. No. I completely agree with that. We provided, like, a video URL for us because that was required as an input.
Jack Bridger:And it's like, if you ask someone for a video, a public s free URL of a video, that's like something that everyone's gonna have to rummage around. And it's often not that simple to just, like, make it public.
Amit Jotwani:Yep. Yep. And and to be fair, I, like, I I I wanna I would definitely wanna mention, I know that you had, Zeno, on your, as you guess, like, couple couple weeks ago. I I think, like, recent actually does a lot of these things. They they just get it right, like, really, really well.
Amit Jotwani:In in their case, they obviously pay a lot of attention to the the documentation, but also how can we get people started quickly, including giving them the API key, as part of the code. Like, that's super important. I was playing out with Supabase, in fact, the other day, and their documentation does that also. If you're logged in, the sample code includes your API key. Yeah.
Amit Jotwani:It could just it just makes sense. Right? So it's it's things like that under the under the bucket of just just make it easier to for developers to to get started and to do the thing that that guide's goal is.
Jack Bridger:And I feel like it's just like that attention to detail, isn't it? Like, it's like, Zeno was, like, just obsessed with it, and it's like, okay. If you actually just put a lot of effort into not just, like, writing this thing and putting out there, but actually, like, going and watching people try it and, like or just get their feedback. Yeah. It's probably gonna be a lot better.
Amit Jotwani:Oh, yeah. I mean, there's nothing no replacement for actual user feedback or developer feedback of people who are you you might think that they are doing things in a certain way, but watching them or getting feedback from them can really give you a lot of hints as to how you wanna design that for sure.
Jack Bridger:One more thing that you mentioned in the guide is, inspiring with contextual use cases. So you've got examples here such as, so not so good is use our platform for data analysis, and better is ever thought about predicting stock market trends using our super data analysis platform.
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. So the a lot of this was coming from the point of view that, you you have new developers coming onto your onto your products page. And they often have they probably heard about you through some friends or they've read about on Twitter or x or whatever. But they're not very familiar what what they can do with it. Like, in in resend or AssemblyAI's case since you're talking about them.
Amit Jotwani:For AssemblyAI, it might be though it's, oh, you can do transcriptions. But if if you can give them some inspirational use cases as part of those guides that, oh, maybe you wanted to transcribe your podcast. Maybe you wanted to extract all the speaker all these speaker names from this specific podcast that you listen to. That's a very specific use case that you just provided me. And that may ring some, excitement for me.
Amit Jotwani:And they may also get me thinking about some of the other use cases that, oh, yeah. I mean, it can the whole idea is to get their creative sales going. And if you can provide some use cases for that, that you think will are well, maybe if you already have those integration guides, that's even better. Like, if you can show off that you can send a URL, a YouTube URL even, and you can transcribe it. Now that's already making me think.
Amit Jotwani:It's not just an audio thing. And now you got more specific about, oh, so I can send YouTube URLs also? Oh, and then I can email the results of that using, say, recent API. Oh, that's which, by the way, is something I've I've I've recently done. I'm I'm sending, an audio file, to AssemblyAI using Telegram, and then it transcribes it and emails me that transcription.
Amit Jotwani:So it's it's things like it's things like this that if you include that, now you've gotten me excited, about a project. And oftentimes, it's just one developer kicking the tires of these APIs and then going back to the team and be like, so I hacked this over the over the weekend. And I think this is really good for this specific use case that our team has been trying to solve for. So it it's super important to give integrations or specific use cases which you think, could be a good good fit.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. And would you weave these into the article or would you put them at, like, the end?
Amit Jotwani:I think it could be a part of the introduction. A little bit could be part of the introduction that, oh, by the way, we've used this specific API or endpoint in these specific integration guides if you wanna check those out. Or, leave some ideas at the end of the guide also. So some of that would be, like, experiments to see which one makes sense in that scenario.
Jack Bridger:Yep. Okay. That makes sense. I think we have one more probably time for one more question. It's gonna be a hard one.
Jack Bridger:Probably the classic of, like, how do you know if you did a good job?
Amit Jotwani:Oh, I think this is a classic, like, I've I've been in the developer relations advocacy space for for some time. And that's like a classic thing of, like, how do you judge the success of this specific thing? And some of that will come down to obviously the the views or the clicks that you're getting on that, but that's like I I I don't know if that's a good metric, to be honest. But it it comes down to, our developers like, the the thing you wanna measure is that did did you create some value, using that piece? And some of the things that you can measure for is, like, is that getting mentioned, in, like, in whatever, social media or Twitter or x or whatever?
Amit Jotwani:Are people mentioning that? And if you are an API, you obviously wanna measure the, the usage of your API after that specific thing. So do you see a bump up in any kind of, API, API calls or, like, if you were using a specific endpoint, did that get any any more usage than it normally does? And as a writer of this, you should find satisfaction that, yes, I I think I did a good job leading people from a 0 to 1 situation here. And then have a few people read it.
Amit Jotwani:That's my that's generally been my, gauge. Before I publish it, I'm gonna I have a few trusted sources, trusted friends that I will share it with. And I get a bunch of feedback. But there's no it's I'm trying I'm trying to so hard to give you, like, one specific thing that you can measure. But like a lot of things, it's hard to measure in numbers without just relying on, oh, it just got, like, just the Google Analytics of sorts.
Amit Jotwani:But I'm curious, like, what what's how do you how do you measure if this was good?
Jack Bridger:Well, I think it's, yeah, it's very easy for me in a sense because, Streamport has such a low, like, surface area right now of, like, stuff we've put out into the world. So I think that I know that some people heard about us on Reddit and then tried out. I know at least one person who heard about us on Reddit and then tried out the guide. And I know this because they were like, oh, the guide is this has changed. Like, because because it's so it's quite, you know, early.
Jack Bridger:And so and they had feedback on, like, how it should work and, stuff like that. And so it doesn't seem like any what, like so we published it on like equivalent, like dev.to and stuff. And I don't think that many people at all came to us from that. But, also we were pushing the self hosted version in that article, so that makes sense. Seems like more people came from like Reddit stuff.
Jack Bridger:Although, when we shared it on Reddit, actually we did get some people who like, kind of came to us, and I, yeah, it seems like it, it had some impact. And then we also put a, like, link to it on, like, the docs and stuff like that, as, like, a more, like
Amit Jotwani:Right.
Jack Bridger:A a bigger example of it within a existing setup. And I think it has kind of attracted people building similar things because that's why we got started was to help people build, like, AI video editors. And I think people building AI video editors have, like, kind of reached out to us, which is cool.
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. Yeah. So that's another thing, right, that you you can write a really good article. You can create some really good content, but it may not lead to anything or seemingly lead to nothing. But then fast forward 6 months and something will line up and that will just kick off.
Amit Jotwani:And the funny thing is you will oftentimes, you will not be able to relate even that that specific piece is what created that connection for me, over here. And we we see this a lot saw this a lot at, Amazon is that you go to these developer events. But how do you measure the success of speaking at a certain developer event?
Jack Bridger:Mhmm.
Amit Jotwani:And Yeah. And oftentimes, it's it's the same thing that you went and made some connections, but you can't measure it in numbers.
Jack Bridger:Yeah.
Amit Jotwani:But you spoke with the developer who went on to that company he works for full time, and they mentioned your API. And then 3 months later, that company started to use it. But you will actually never be able to connect that dot. So seemingly, you went on a flight and did nothing. But, it's it it it does it does happen, and that's what makes it super tricky to measure these things.
Amit Jotwani:But I'll I'll just mention one thing is that, at the end of the day, we we we are writing these guides to teach someone something. And as long as we feel we are doing that part, I I think it's it's it's a it's a it's a work in progress. Nothing is just complete quite yet that we are all creating these and improving as we go.
Jack Bridger:Yeah. I think that's probably a good, good one to end on, to be honest. Amit, thank you so much for coming. Where can people learn more about you and about HelloDx?
Amit Jotwani:Yeah. So I, I we have, our website, obviously. You can go to hellodx.co to learn more about what we do with, debugdx and friction logging and helping companies do audits and reviews of their APIs. They can also find me on twitter /x@amit, which is really my first name.
Jack Bridger:You you must get people trying to trying to get that one. Very good.
Amit Jotwani:Yes. Alright. It's
Jack Bridger:a story for another episode maybe.
Amit Jotwani:Absolutely. Yeah. There's there's definitely a story behind that. Oh, some some of the time. But this was great.
Amit Jotwani:Great fun. Thank you, Jack, for for having me. I, I I've heard a few episodes, gone back and heard a few episodes. I'm definitely a, a huge fan. I wanna go back and, listen to a few more.
Amit Jotwani:So great work on this, and thank you thank you so much for having me.
Jack Bridger:Thanks, Amit, and thanks everyone for listening. Let us know what you thought of this kind of a different format. So yeah. Hope
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