Awesome People - Ep 105
writing with ChatGPT, technical writing, documentation
Hi founders and fellow VC Friends!
We deliver awesome people to your inbox. These are the people you need to know—the marketers, sales gurus, engineers, and ops wizzes— who give your startup superpowers 🚀. The best part is, everyone is hireable.
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Please meet Yiren Lu, Your Technical Writer ✍️
Yiren founded Frindle, a technical writing agency that helps developer-facing software companies with technical content. Throughout her career, she’s built infrastructure at Uber and Google, written long-form pieces for the New York Times Magazine and Wired, and traveled on the Transiberian railroad. She was referred to us by Shre Shrestha, our Awesome People Fellow (yay for two awesome people intros, two weeks in a row!).
She's trusted by companies like Microsoft, ServiceNow, Bigeye, and First Manhattan Capital.
You can hire her to produce technical blog posts, tutorials, how-to’s, and whitepapers, or refresh your documentation.
Want an intro to Yiren? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
She was gracious enough to share some pro tips with us here ✨
Tip # 1: Know your content marketing basics
Many startups come to me because they think they should publish technical content. But they don’t understand why or how. Here are some technical content marketing basics you should know before you publish a blog post. Blog posts aren’t the only assets you should create, but they’ll likely be a majority.
You can start producing technical content as soon as you launch your product.
Long term, you have to assume that most people will find your blog posts through search. The probability that any post goes viral on HN or Twitter when you post it is not high, so don't anchor yourself to those metrics.
For the first few years, the primary way of measuring impact will be views — if you have the manpower, you can do some simple attribution modeling with Segment.
There are two types of content: brand content and direct response content.
Brand content is content to build awareness that your company exists. This includes things like "State of MLOps," CEO thought leadership pieces, and market research.
Direct response content is content that's actionable for your audience. This includes technical tutorials, guides on how to accomplish a specific task with your software, product demos, and anything SEO related.
To come up with blog topics think of your customers’ search keywords. For example, “ML for movement tracking” or “measure glucose levels.” Then find the volume for each keyword and if it’s possible to rank for them. There are tools to help you and you can learn more here.
Blog posts aren’t always the answer to fulfill keywords — sometimes you need to create new pages on the site or new documentation.
Tip # 2: Keep the feedback loop between sales/CS/product and content marketing/docs tight
As a corollary to tip # 1, don’t brainstorm blog post topics in a vacuum. Account executives and sales engineers will have the best content ideas and the most pertinent feedback. They have a lot of exposure to customers, their problems, where customers get stuck using the product, and what’s holding them back from purchasing.
Regularly ask your sales engineers and account executives what kinds of content would be helpful for them to sell or help customers. Since they are probably busy, you can also comb through Gong.io or other sales call transcriptions. For example, the sales engineers at one of our clients informed us that the most helpful content was content explaining how to use the software with specific data sources, like marketing data and Stripe data.
Similarly, if you have a Slack or Discord community, regularly comb through the channels to find common questions. Lift the questions into documentation or blog posts.
Something I’ve seen work well is having a PM of docs, someone who is explicitly in charge of the documentation site. This PM should hire a helper or a technical writer who is in charge of consuming everything on the documentation site every month to ensure all the commands/code examples work.
Tip # 3: Use AI, but in the right way
AI tools like ChatGPT are excellent at generating code and text, which makes them especially powerful for my line of work. I believe the best “content team” is a knowledgeable technical editor + ChatGPT.
If all you do is ask ChatGPT for a “technical blog post about React,” without any further context and prompting, you’ll get a low-value blog.
My process for original, high-quality technical content is as follows:
Write a detailed outline for the blog post, including the key questions you want to answer. For example, if a blog post is about Ethers.js, one question might be, “Why can you not connect to an Ethereum node directly, without an intermediate library?”
Interview a subject matter expert on the chosen technical topic. Follow the outline for the blog post you created in step 1.
Take the interview transcript and have ChatGPT rewrite/restructure it, according to the original outline.
Prompt ChatGPT to produce code samples and other details.
Note: without prompting, ChatGPT tends to be highly general. However, if you prompt ChatGPT to be specific, it tends to make stuff up, so you must check everything.
Do a final human edit to remove anything repetitive, inaccurate, or awkwardly phrased, and to add in additional details or insights. Here is an example of a finished output.
Want an intro to Yiren? Respond to this email and I’ll connect you!
As always, please let me know if you have any questions and if you want an intro to Yiren!
Stay awesome,
Founder of Awesome People Ventures & Talent
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Awesome People Continued 🤩
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