316: Marybeth Alexander - Knowledgebase Secrets

Arvid Kahl
Welcome to the Bootstrap, founder. Today I'm talking to Marybeth Alexander. She is running Knowledgeowl, a knowledge based business, and today she will share all her knowledge with you. This episode is sponsored by Acquire.com dot. More on that later.

Now let's talk about customer service, customer success, building knowledge bases, internal, external, what AI has to do with this and what a sustainable, calm business can, can do for you. Here's Mary Beth Meredith. You're the chief executive Owl at Knowledge Owl, and I love this phrase. And you have a software business that helps your customers, help their customers. Also love that in the indie hacker world, indie hackers often have this love hate relationship with customer service, or at least they start out with it, because it's one of those many things that are quite overwhelming that a founder has to do.

Yet one more thing, deal with customers. Maybe let's dive into this. What kind of tools do we have as founders, as solopreneurs, as people just starting out to make customer service a joyful and impactful part of our founder journey? Well, I come from a support background, so I'm going to be heavily biased in this cause. I love helping people and I love helping customers.

Marybeth Alexander
But as a business owner, I think it's just good business to help your customers and give them great service. So the number one thing I think I would say as like a tool is like, to make it fun for yourself. And you know, how you make it fun is like, use a fun tool. Like use a tool that's fun to use, like as a founder. And there are tons of different help desk tools out there.

Like I'm a huge fan of help scout, right? And I like sort of the gamification of like getting through things and they give you a little reward when you get to inbox zero. And it's just sort of a delightful product to use. So not only is it like sort of an all in one solution, so you can do your customer support through there, you can set up your docs through there, you can do chat on your website through there. You can have these sort of all in one solutions, whether it's help scout or intercom or Zendesk.

And then you don't have to be juggling multiple tools. And if you find one you really like, not only is it going to help you help your customers, but you're going to have another tool to say like, oh, how did they do things right? Like how did they build this? So like one of my early phrases I would use when building knowledge, what would help scout you, right. So I got a lot of ideas and inspiration from my UX and my UI and like how to, how do I deal with GDPR?

Do things. There were two companies I used to look at a lot and it was help scout and Mailchimp. Yeah, that makes sense. Those definitely are players that a lot of people get inspired by. Even intercom.

Arvid Kahl
I think just even their visuals inspired a whole generation of these little chat bubble things like the direct chat communication tools. I find this very interesting because two things. First off, it's fine to be inspired by existing tools. I think that's a message here that a lot of founders who have this disruption approach to stuff may not be interested in hearing too much. But I think it's important because that's something that is proven to work with people, for people.

Right. There's a budget that people have to pay for stuff and this tool gets part of that budget. That means there's something there on the other side. What you just said was you saw this big tool, like this big suite of many tools, all the different things. There's a knowledge base in there, there's the chat thing, there's email marketing and whatnot.

There's lots of stuff in help scouts. And yet you chose to stuck to one thing with knowledge all that is also very interesting. You kept your scope creep under control, you kept your targets very aligned on building a knowledge base. Can you tell me more about the intentionality of that choice? Sure.

Marybeth Alexander
So way back in the day before we were knowledgel, we were a tool called help Gizmo. And it started as an internal startup. We were attached to a larger company called, it's now called Alkamer, but it was called survey Gizmo at the time. Sort of like surveymonkey was surveymonkey on steroids. That's how we used to frame it.

But help Gizmo was like an internal lean startup within that company and we envisioned it as a full service helpdesk tool, just like Zendesk or just like help scout. And we were going to build it the way we wanted to build it. And that never got off the ground. But I was in charge of the support team and my support team brought it back to life and then repurposed it for documentation. And then it sort of that sparked the idea maybe we could bring this to market.

And at that point in time we were, I think we were, we were maybe using Zendesk and like the built in Zendesk thing, but we had hired a technical writer and she was running into all these things. And she said, I want to use this for our customer facing knowledge base. So we're like, okay, so what if we just focused on this segment of the market, right? Like, just doing the knowledge base thing? Because at the end of that, when we started looking for tools to do this, there didn't seem to be a lot of other tools doing this exact thing, just doing this part.

Lot of knowledge based solutions were either, like, high end help authoring documentation for, like, technical, technical writers, or they were, like, built into an existing help desk system. So we figured we could just focus on this aspect of it, make it play well with these other tools, but just focus on doing this one thing really well. And that that was sort of our scope. And we said, we're only going to do this part of things, and we did. So worked out for us.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that's really cool. I think that that is a lot of constraint that you show in that moment. Right? Because it's only, like you said, like, these integrations with other tools, it's easy to then kind of take it and build something for yourself because that's just so much easier to maintain than an integration where you have to deal with a partner or something like that. It's nice to see you kind of staying in your lane, and I mean this in the best sense.

Marybeth Alexander
We did it for a long time. Yeah. But it made it easier to say when to say yes and when to say no. So, like, people often are like, oh, you should build forums. And we're like, we're not a forum tool, right?

That's not what we're doing. Or people would say, like, can we just do, like, some light ticketing? Or, like, nope. And it's interesting because you think, you think, I'm just gonna do this part of this little part of this thing? And, like, how easy is this?

It's so specific. And then you realize, this is actually really complicated as the more you focus on something, the more you realize how complex it could actually be, even if you're just doing one piece of it. Yeah. How do you deal with customer, like, feature requests that are in this kind of gray zone between. It's kind of still knowledge base related, but it's kind of inching a little bit outside of what we want to build.

Arvid Kahl
Like, how do you consider these requests? We track it. So, I mean, there's things that, like, over time, we said, okay, we're not. We're not going to do that. Like, we'll never going to do that, but we still track, like, how often because I think should never say never, right?

Marybeth Alexander
You should leave your doors open. And you talk about this sometimes in your pocket. Like, don't close doors, right? Like, leave the possibility open. You know, you might sell your business sometime, even though you might not.

You think it's a forever business. You know, maybe don't create a forever free plan because it might not be wise for you to always have it be free. So, like, don't say nevers, but we track everything. So, you know, and at a certain tipping point, it might be, you know, we always said, like, we're not doing a chatbot, right? And now here we are in, like, 2024.

Like, maybe it makes sense for us to actually have a chatbot, even though for years we're, like, we're not doing that. That's, like, out of scope. So I think we track things and, like, I think there probably is an inflection point for certain features or functionality that we might say, like, okay, this makes sense to be in this core offering because over time, products evolve and, like, what it means to do a knowledge base. And knowledge, knowledge management evolves. And I think, especially now, it's so hard to even envision, like, two, three, five years in the future, like, what a knowledge base is.

Will you always need a knowledge base? Absolutely. But the knowledge base just might in the future be fodder for an AI tool, right? You might just be using it to teach the knowledge base and not directly for the end users, whether they're like customers or employees. Yeah, that's an interesting point.

Arvid Kahl
I feel very similarly about most things that are text related, like any kind of text interface. Even the browser feels like there is a change in input medium. Like the chat GPT question that you ask, the prompt that is the new input where before it was like a search query on Google or a particular term, like a keyword. A specific keyword. And either you found it in a knowledge base or you didn't.

Now it's kind of a more nebulous thing. And I guess that also explains why a chatbot would be interesting for you to actually figure out the meaning of a request. Right, right. Because, I mean, like, people are used to search, but now people aren't used to search. Like, I've replaced most of my searching, my Google searching with, like, chat GPT.

Marybeth Alexander
Like, I go to chat TP first. Like when I open a browser tab, I use my phone. That is my first thing I do. And then if I need to, I'll go to Google. But now Google is not my first line of defense for finding information.

Arvid Kahl
Isn't that crazy? Like, 20 years completely evaporated over this new technology. That's bizarre. But do you see this in customer expectations too? Like, both in your customers and their customers?

Like, do they request this kind of interface, or do you just think they might? I think we're at a very, like, polarizing time, so we do an annual customer survey every year. And, like, the big thing we asked about was like, what do you think about AI? Do you want us to do? Like, what do you want?

Marybeth Alexander
And it's polarizing. Like, there are people who are like, I don't want to touch with a ten foot pole. I think that's a lot. And then there's the people who are like, give it to me. Like, I want AI to help me create content.

I want AI to help me with search. Like, I want to augment things. I want a chatbot. I want, like, chat GPT for my knowledge base. So I think there's, there's two sides of things.

I think it's less, I think there are people that are adult, like us, that are, like, just using AI all the time, but I think a lot of people still aren't, and they're not used to it, and they're not comfortable. So I, I don't think we're quite there yet. Like, I think a lot of people just, they don't even have a knowledge base, right? This is like a lot of businesses, they don't have a knowledge base for their product. They don't have a knowledge base, you know, documentation for their staff members or people coming in.

They don't have documentation. So they're not even to that point yet. Right. They just need, like, having documentation would be great. So I don't think we're quite there yet where it's, like, pushing, but business owners like us founders are like, I want AI, right?

Like, that's what's pushing it, I think, more so than other things. Like, I think people are still willing to go to a knowledge base and search because most people want to self serve. They don't want to have to contact you, and they don't want to have to figure things out through trial and error and waste their own time. I guess the chatbot is also a potential friction point for this, right? Well, a lot of people have had bad experience with them.

So you see a chatbot, you're like, I don't want to chat. Like, this is going to be horrible. Human. Human. I want to talk to a representative.

Zero. Zero. It is similar, right? And every time I pull up an intercom on a site, I'm like, are they actually using fin? And then you see and you're like, nope, it's pre programmed because they have, like, the chat pot that is just really like a big decision tree.

Arvid Kahl
And you're like, nope, that's what I used. AI, and I used the term loosely here for the first time with Intercom back in the day, like 2017, 2018, when they had this kind of fuzzy keyword matching and then would pull articles that you had pre written and suggest them before they actually got to the representative. That helped us massively at feedback panda. Back in the day, we had thousands of customers. They had the same question that would just pull up the article we would quickly write so that we wouldn't have to answer it anymore.

And it was right there for them. So, yeah, and I think that type, we would call that misfortune. We call that ticket deflection. Right? So when you have a form, whether it's on your website, like, or in your product, and someone's trying to reach out to you, it doesn't hurt to just take, like, ask them what their question is and then do a quick search and present them with a few information because you can not only give them a great experience or like, oh, that is exactly what I want.

Marybeth Alexander
Right. But you save yourself the time. So I'm a fan. And this, I think, for anybody starting out is this concept of sort of just in time documentation. So whenever you do get a question from a customer and you haven't answered it before, rather than just answering that one customer and, like, sending them an email or sending them a chat, it's just write the quick article and then send them a link to the article.

And then anybody else who has that can find that article now when it can be searched and it's there, and then you can slowly build up your knowledge base over time and that, you know, will save you time and, like, make your customers happy, it's just a win win, but it takes some discipline. Yeah, exactly right. It takes the disciplines to not just quickly answer and hope that that never happens again. Yeah. And it hurts if you like helping people and you just, like, interacting with people.

Like, it just, you don't have the desire to, like, write it down. Like, I don't have that urge. And I think something that helps a lot of founders early on is they despise doing the customer support. They do not want to get on the phone. They do not want to help people.

So, like, I'm making videos. I'm writing this down, don't talk to me. And that actually is beneficial because it helps people, you know, build up that knowledge base. And like, incidentally, because they don't want to do customer support, they're giving a better customer experience. They have documentation.

Arvid Kahl
I love that you can leverage your own dislike of the activity to not have to do the activity as much in the future. I think that's. And it makes your customers happy. It's like, it's strange. It's kind of an investment into your own company too, right?

If you want to look at it, if you need to convince yourself that this is a good idea after what we've already just presented as a pretty solid idea, like the creation of a video, creation of an article, or even just anything really. That is something that you can link to an artifact, really, that is value that is added to the company. Both for the interactions with customers. And in my experience too, this is super useful if you actually want to sell the business later. Having this codified, you have every business book everywhere.

Marybeth Alexander
Like emeth you like to talk about. This one is write down everything. Just write it down, document it. That's the thing. Like, you have standard operating procedures.

Arvid Kahl
They're not just internal, they're also external. This is how a customer should operate in a standard fashion. Right? It's really cool. And this brings me to a point that I really want to ask you about, because you probably have the data on how many people, or when people start using knowledge bases for their products and thinking specifically about indie hackers, people who are just starting a business, when is a good time to start using such a product for your customer service communication?

Keeping in mind that these people are still kind of trying to figure out their product and their market and their customers at the same time. So what would you suggest? So I can say, like, for us, and we are more mature, knowledge based solutions. So when you're first starting out, like, you know, I'm for new folks, I'm like, what are you using for your help? Desk tool?

Marybeth Alexander
Why aren't you using the built in one? It'll make your life easier. So, like, I usually am like a proponent of that when you're first starting out, but especially when you don't know exactly what you're building, like there is, it's not always, and this is like an interesting thing to say as a documentation. It doesn't always make sense to write it down if it's going to change next week. So how much time are you going to spend documenting all this?

If it's just going to be different in a month or two months. So you have to balance that. So for us, when we see more mature people, we just did a bunch of ICP work like you did. And when we talk about our ideal customers and about 50% of our customer base are other software companies and others like SaaS companies, they're more mature, right. They've been around like five years.

Right, they're plus years. Like they've, like, they're established, you know, SaaS companies and they're like, okay, their product is mature and it's not changing as much. And, right. They just need to get everything written down so that people can understand their product. Because after five years in business, you're going to have probably a pretty complicated product that is not necessarily easy to just pick up and learn how to use.

So I think that balance between, like, you don't need to document everything, but the things people are asking about, you absolutely want to have them documented because you don't want to be answering the same questions over and over again. So, and I think it's a helpful tool for you to sell things because most people, they don't want to contact you. They don't want to spend a lot of time figuring it out. And I know everyone wants to build the tool that's just so intuitive. It doesn't need documentation, which doesn't exist.

But we try, we try. But having that little bit of documentation to like answer those questions, like, even if you start out with just like ten things in your knowledge base and just start to add to them over time, it helps build trust with your customer. It's a sales tool also. So, like, if people go to a site, something that will, if you have two products that are very similar and one's documented and one's not, think about this as like a developer too. If there's one API that like, you'd have to like read the code to figure out how it works and one that's actually documented, you're going to go with the one that's documented.

So it's a sales tool. So like, I think thinking about it as not just a support cost and like something like you have to do, that's sort of a burden. You can think of it not as also a way to deflect that customer support and give like your current customers a great experience, but it's also a way to sell new customers and help onboard people and like, you know, get them into the tool in the first place. Can it be a marketing tool as. Well, it's 1000% a marketing tool, I think, like, so I think a lot of people will go look at a knowledge base.

They're like exploring a tool. You don't necessarily want to do a demo. You don't want to get sign up for the sign up yet and get on the demo and they start getting hard sells and all these emails. You just want to know if a tool is going to do what you need to do. And oftentimes marketing websites aren't going to go into the depth.

So those customers are really looking for a tool that does x, y and z often end up in your public knowledge base and then they're there and they can search and see can I do the things that I look to do? And if they like your knowledge base, it looks good. It's a great customer experience for them and it does the things that might just mean, like, well, maybe I'm going to try this tool and that might get people into your funnel to start with. We see it a lot as we've been like sort of really paying attention now, like trying to figure out who our ICP is and like how they get theirs. A lot of our customers, before they sign up for trials are in our knowledge base.

They're looking for things they're seeing, like they can do what they want to do. And they're also incidentally exploring our product at the same time because it's our knowledge base. So they're getting a sense for what it could look like for them. That's cool. That's a nice, well, first off, good for you.

Arvid Kahl
Do you actually use your own product for these purposes? Not everybody does. I mean, I can understand it for like a status page if you built. Can I tell you just a side note? I was trying to get some help because we were looking at OpenAI and we discovered their recaptcha.

Marybeth Alexander
I don't know, or their captchas are ridiculous. So I was going to their support and then I realized that they were using fin, Intercom's fin, like the AI tool and not OpenAI for their support, which I was like, this is really interesting. So who's that? It feels in many ways I can see it as a way to kind of reduce the risk of catastrophic failure. Right?

Arvid Kahl
Like if your thing fails, then your help tool may want to be something else. I think status pages is an example here. Like you're not hosting your own status page, status page on your status page business because if it's down, then that will be down. I think AWS has this problem occasionally, right, that their status page is hosted on s three sometimes, and if that's down, then you can't really see what's going on. But that's, I think it makes sense for certain services.

I think for yours, it makes sense to actually use it as this tool. It's great. Thank you for explaining how this is a marketing tool that makes absolute sense. I never thought about this before. I never thought about that people might find it.

I mean, I know that people, you. Can also, if it's public too, it's also indexed for like SEO wise, people are looking for like knowledge base tool that does this. And I had like the best customer support call the other day because their marketing team was not upset that their knowledge base wasn't getting indexed, they were upset that it was outperforming their dub dub dub. People were getting to their documentation. I was like, isn't that a good thing?

Marybeth Alexander
Isn't that good? Yeah, I think it's a reframe that you need to do in yourself to see this is not like the manual that nobody wants to read that comes with every piece of electronics. This is a living document that helps people do the thing they need to do. It's easy for, I don't know, a dishwasher, even though it's a complicated thing, maybe a vacuum. To be easy, you press, you press play and it starts doing the vacuum stuff, right?

Arvid Kahl
That's, that's the function of a tool like this. But our software tools, the way they're integrated into more complicated workflows and they're internally structured, they are complicated things. You said this after a couple of years. Honestly, for most indie hackers, their product is probably complicated after a couple of weeks because they're just building, building, building, right? And at that point, we talked about this.

It's probably a good idea to not comment everything immediately or not to document everything immediately if it's still changing. But at some point you need to at least do barebone documentation for it. So it's nice to have that be really accessible in SEO. I was just thinking about this. Do you need to write it then as you would write like an SEO optimized article or.

Marybeth Alexander
It's a good idea to do that because the same things that will optimize something for like Google SEO are going to optimize it for your knowledge base generally, right? Like having keywords in your title and making sure it's in the URL and like using the words you like. I mean, it's, it's the same concept right. You want it to be optimized for search because that's what people are generally going to do. They're going to search for something.

So it's a good, it's a good habit to get into. Now, what's really interesting about software companies and that we just discovered this doing our ICP research because like, to me it was just like, you know, okay, so like a lot of people want a private knowledge base. They do not want their competitors seeing their documentation. They only want their paid customers to actually see how their product works and like get in behind the scenes. So, you know, for years and years I was like, make it public.

It's actually, it's marketing. Like, you want people to be accessible, you want, people are going to Google for it. And if it's private, Google's not going to have your content index. But it is a huge concern for many software businesses, their IP, right. And, you know, being able to create a private knowledge base, like, that's a big reason people come to us, right.

It's because they can create that like locked down knowledge base. It's only accessible through their product. They can segment who can see what. And I didn't realize it before, like, how important that was to folks, but it makes sense. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
I mean, in a world of copycats, having your full manual GPT, indexing all your stuff, honestly, I'm really, and I think we should talk about AI a little bit more because I think it's everywhere, right? It's not just a tool that people talk to to get their problem solved, but I've seen like auto GPT and these kind of independent agents that can you effectively tell them, build me a clone of this product, and then they scrape your website, they might scrape your full knowledge base, get all the screenshots of the UI and all of that stuff, and just comprehensively built a clone of the whole thing from all the data they can ingest all by themselves. There's no person involved. I can see AI being a threat to public information if no control over it. That's unfortunate because I think it has so much potential in this.

Right. We actually, we were chatting earlier and we talked about how you could just write your comments, here's the comments in my code, and then you would give it to AI and like write the code. Here's what I want to do. Write the code for that. And I think there's this concept and I've heard it before in the technical writer community, but it's the idea of documentation driven development.

Marybeth Alexander
So you write the documentation for how something should work and then you give it to the developers and they build it. And now you can just write the documentation for how something should work, give it to AI and they're going to build it for you. Yeah, then it works. And I think even more so now the private knowledge base is going to be a thing because copycats, I find it. I haven't thought about this until right now.

I'm like, oh God, that's, it's more important than ever. I think it's, you usually concerned about your competitors seeing what your features are and building, like similar features, but now it's more like anybody could like see what you're doing and build it. They can quickly. I mean, at least on a product level, I don't think any software is really safe, right? Like it's to rebuild something or build something that is very similar to another thing becomes easier and easier with the advance.

Arvid Kahl
Just the progress that AI has right now, the tools that come out every week, there's something that does coding even better. That's how it works. And it's hard to build a product that cannot be cloned because building a product just gets easier. So by definition it's just easier. But what does not get easier to clone is the business.

It's understanding your ICP, it's understanding the needs of your market. So as long as you keep this information safe, I think cloning the product. Sure. You now have a competing product that has zero customers. That's fine.

I think that's okay. But internally, I think using a secure knowledge base is an important part. Maybe we should talk about this too, because initially we had this little chat about selling business and it being useful as well for that, having your sops encoded into a knowledge base, do you see among your customers, do you see that people who use this external knowledge base also use an internal knowledge base? Is that a common thing? That's a big thing that you can do with knowledge.

Marybeth Alexander
And this is one of the things we discovered that people want to do is they want to have one place where they have both their customer facing documentation and their internal thing. So if internal person's there, they're going to like look up some documentation and they're going to get information that only they can see as like a staff member, which you can do that in something like knowledge. L because it's, you know, we have the features and functionality to have these different levels of access and have like one source of truth versus having the internal knowledge base and the external knowledge base, which some people will still do with knowledge. L. You can have multiple knowledge bases, so some people get really granular and even have them for different teams and departments.

But sort of the holy grail is just having the one place and then depending on who you are, you get the right information at the right time for the right person. It looks like contextual. Yeah, I love this. It feels like it's one brain, right? It's the brain that thinks and the brain that speaks.

Arvid Kahl
Like the externalized part and the internal part. And they're connected obviously through the knowledge storage medium that we have. That is an interesting approach. I wonder how synthesizing new knowledge will, or just finding connection between things, how that will progress over the next couple of years with AI looking into the whole of the knowledge and not just the knowledge base itself with the architecture. Because there's informal knowledge bases too.

Marybeth Alexander
And this is where it gets complicated. When we think about doing AI is like, yeah, we could add all this stuff in for AI. Search for your affiliate official knowledge base that you have hosted in knowledge all. And that might be your internal sops, that could be your customer facing like product documentation, but then you have informal knowledge bases, like your entire history of all of your support conversations, your code, your company, Slack. Like these, all the website, these are all like different types of knowledge bases that ideally all of this content could be indexed and used and then, you know, to give you the right answer.

But you know, that's way bigger than the knowledge base. Like that's like outside the scope of like what we have envisioned doing. So, but that's what people are going to want to do. So like who's going to be doing that? Right?

Arvid Kahl
Like it's outside the scope now and it feels kind of like shifting and kind of even scary, I guess, because you don't really know, like is this going to leak secrets out there or are there things that you know, you don't really understand and then it's something is said that shouldn't be said and it's on the record because it's part of a support email, you know, like all of this is, that's quite, quite complicated. How's your approach to this? Like how, how much experimentation do you do with these kind of things before they actually become part of your feature set? Tons. Like we, I think we are probably more cautious than anything.

Marybeth Alexander
Our customers are very conscious about security. And this is something over time because a lot of companies, you know, there's the people who use this for, you know, the product documentation, but there's this whole segment, including some of them that use this for their internal proprietary knowledge and like, they are very concerned about security and they do not want things going, getting out. So the idea of like using third parties and like indexing content elsewhere is a scary prospect for a lot of folks. And so, you know, we are taking a very measured approach and being like, okay, for people who want to do this, how do we integrate, like with OpenAI and other AI tools so that people can do this? Are there tools out there that will provide these sort of indexing of multiple places and give you the sort of enterprise like chat, GPT style search for your organization?

You know, that. But again, like, can we integrate with them in a way that we are a piece of the knowledge, then we can feed that knowledge in there without being responsible for, you know, all of this information. Because I think that's the other thing. We're in the business of building the knowledge base software to create these knowledge base websites. Right.

But like, we're not like search experts, like, we're not like, you know, content retrieval experts and there are tons of tools. And this is where like a really interesting thing that's happened in the past with AI is if you wanted like an enterprise federated search across multiple things, you were paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for these high end tools. And like with AI now, like, this is just, it's now becoming expected. So what happens to all those like big enterprise search tools? Yeah, I don't know what's going to happen.

Arvid Kahl
I hope they have long term contracts. I hope for them that they got their 20 year contract lockdown, you know? Yeah. Otherwise they're going to be in trouble. Yeah.

Marybeth Alexander
No idea what's going to happen. It's very, yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing this developer building something with Potscan right now that is also kind of in the AI space, but more as a little side snack. Right. Not that I offer AI, I just use it to offer the things that I do. It's nice to see these developments and to see like the foundations of these big incumbent enterprise businesses shake a little bit because I think that's where innovation really can do a lot and I believe that some of them need to be shaken up a little.

Arvid Kahl
Let's just say this, right? Totally, yeah. And I think there's a lot of fear around AI. Like what's it going to do our business and how it's going to do that for us. The great thing about AI is it needs data, it needs a knowledge base.

Marybeth Alexander
So I think the knowledge base and having things documented is going to be more important than ever in these years to come because people come and they're like, yeah, I want AI, I want AI search. I want it to write my documentation. Wanted to, but I'm like, how is it going to write your documentation if it doesn't know? So, like, you need something to feed the ad, you need to train it. And like, most people's knowledge bases do not have the depth to create anything close to, like, a good generative AI experience.

And I think that's what people, that's the expectation because they're used to chat GPT. But the reality is most people do not have enough information to train generative AI to give a decent experience to their end users. So we're still in that chat bot experience where it's still a lot of decision trees and if then, and yeah, praying that they're not totally hallucinating when they're telling your customers what to do. Yeah, I think that is a problem. Right.

Arvid Kahl
If they are, they're actually actively lying without knowing that they're lying because they have no confidence. They're just very confident about it too. Exactly. That's what it is. Honestly, Chad should be from the start.

To me, felt like the world's biggest gaslighting engine. Like it knew exactly how to make you feel like it's right, but it wasn't. You just changed something. You just changed a variable name in this code. That's wrong.

That's all right. But you just said something really interesting. Along the path of this conversation that we had about integrating data or sending data somewhere, you were talking about people's need for security. I kind of want to back down or backtrack to this a little because you, on your pricing page, which I find very interesting because you effectively have one plan, you have one feature set that you sell, and then you kind of have upgrades to a bigger SLA and a bigger compliance set and using your own certs for SSL, all that kind of stuff. Really interesting pricing model that you got there.

You have a lot of compliance stuff there, a lot of HIPAA stuff and all of that. That feels very corporate. I mean, this is the best sense. When did you start getting into compliance? Like, when did this matter to you as a business?

Marybeth Alexander
Very early on. And this was the surprising thing. So the pricing model was as much for like, like our ease, too. So like, as, like, when we started, it was just two of us, you know, built in for many years and we're still Pete and I. The co founders.

We're still the own, we're the only employees, we're employee owners, and everybody else who works with us is a contractor. We have about ten people total. But very early on we're like, do we want to do the plan levels and have feature getting? We're like, that seems complicated, let's just give it to everyone. And then we'll just price based on how many knowledge bases and authors people have.

And we've been doing it that way. We originally had packages, but again, the packages were not features, they were just like, how many authors and knowledge bases do we get? And then we're like, people wanted different numbers and we're like, whatever, we'll just do everything a la carte. We started doing that I think sometimes in 2016, 2017, and we've just been doing that ever since. But it was as much for us to make it easy for us so we can just focus on like building the product for people and like, you know, you know, building functionality and doing this without having to worry about feature gating, which gets really complicated.

And it seems like something that sales and marketing do, which is like, okay, we don't care about that. We just want to give people the tools that we build. And I fully realize as a founder that we are probably leaving a lot of money on the table by not having this and not charging a lot more for single sign on and charging a lot more for private knowledge bases. But it made it a lot easier for us to build the business and for our customers, we think it's a great experience. So the only thing that we start charging extra for is when people are like, okay, this is all great, but I need you to sign this custom contract, or we need you to indemnify us, which we wouldn't do for years because we didn't have IP insurance and all these things that we want a security review.

So very early on, and I think this is the nature of the type of businesses who want a dedicated knowledge base solution. They're looking for it and they're concerned about the privacy there, so they are going to want to look into the business and audit them and do vendor security reviews and such things. So very early on those businesses started pushing us and we used to just do it for free and be like custom contracts and all this. And finally there was that customer, and I think I've heard this from other founders too, that was like, basically we need you to charge us more money. Like, we're not going to be able to sell this internally unless we have like a higher level package.

So that's how we first, like, became like, okay, maybe we do need, like, an enterprise package. And, you know, realizing that they're, you know, our functionality, our software product was attractive to see in these larger organizations, but, like, in order to actually sell to them, we needed it to be more expensive, even though they'll get the exact same features in a lower level. But other things that they needed. Custom terms are a big one. The vendor security things, you know, the HIPAA compliance and Vaa.

Like, those things are now dpas, right? Like, people want custom dpas. And that goes back and forth. You know, that is something people are willing to pay for. And, you know, we had the choice.

We could just say, like, no, we're not going to do those things and say no to those customers. Or we could, you know, say yes to those customers. But that was a question is, are we going to charge for it or not? So we decided, like, to charge for it because people wanted to, and I think that came the customer service thing. Like, these people wanted to use our product, right?

These people, these companies, and these individuals were like, we really need this, but, like, we need you to do this thing. So in order to make that work, we created these other, they were originally just plan levels, right? So, but it wasn't really features. So that's why we just recently sort of revamped the pricing page to really present it as one plan. And then those other services are add ons for the businesses that need them.

Arvid Kahl
That's a very, very interesting approach. It sounds like you're okay with doing this kind of work because it pays for itself, right? It kind of has the feeling of there, right? It does, it does. It's like, it's a lot because, you know, we're founders, we're not lawyers, right?

Marybeth Alexander
We're not used to doing this thing, but I guess you have to wear all these, you wear all these different hats as a founder, and one of the things you end up doing is compliance and, you know, contract reviews and you figure out what you're able to live with and what helps you, like, what you can sleep with at night. So. Yeah, well, I guess that's what it is, right? You make a choice. And I think that also impacts, like, where this business goes, because you might just as well have stayed with all the small customers that don't need these kind of requirements and just go, go broad, try to serve as many as them as you can.

Arvid Kahl
But now you're getting into a level that maybe requires more handholding. But also has bigger, you know, bigger checks that are written, like bigger, maybe more secure connections over time as well. Is this intentional choice? Are you kind of moving upmarket very slowly? Is that what.

Marybeth Alexander
No, I think we've really recently tried to not move upmarket. We've discussed even removing the enterprise from the website at some points. But I can tell you, so of our legacy customers, our 1st, 100, 5160 customers, so we have 450 customers. So like 150 or 180 of them are what we consider legacy. Like, they signed up with us before, like 2017, and we've never raised our prices on them.

Right. They pay us those 170, about the same amount as our like 20 enterprise customers. Right. So that's sort of like the balance. And we don't want to get to the point where those enterprise customers have so much weight that like, we feel like we have to do what they tell us to do.

Like every feature request is like, you know, is needs to be them. And we don't want to be in the position where if we lose one of those enterprise customers, it really hurts us in terms of cash flow. So what we'd really love to do is just grow that base of like our, you know, monthly, what we call them, like, DIY customers. They like, come to knowledge, they look at us, they sign up, they never like, never even talk to us. They just use it because it's documented.

They can use the tool, they can use the API, they don't need to have a conversation. And I think that's the dream, is to have enough money from those monthly DIY customers that you're just covering your expenses. And then those enterprise customers are sort of like icing on the cake. And we're doing it because they want to use knowledge. And in order to use it, they need these extra things.

We're not quite there yet. We're not there where those smaller customers do cover our expenses. We do need those 20 enterprise customers. They do make a big impact. But yeah, I think it's a risk and it's a risk I don't like.

And I think we could make the decision as a business to just go after them and we could probably make a ton of money, but it would, it would substantially change our business model and, like, how we run our business and, like, who we cater towards and, like, while we give everyone great customer service. But like, this idea that we're like, only building it for this small group of people and, like, needing more customer success and needing more salespeople and doing all that, that's not the stuff that we like and enjoy. Like, we like helping the small software companies, like, and the individual tech writer team of one help build their knowledge base and run their website. So, yeah, I think it's never say never. Like, we might end up going up market, but right now we're intentionally trying to focus down and get more of those DIY monthly customers.

Arvid Kahl
Really cool. Thank you for sharing your thought process on this. I find a lot of stuff that I can relate to in here. Like not wanting to just overdo it in one direction, generally a good idea. Just, you know, like covering your bases.

And the fact that you don't want whales, you don't want whale customers because they all of a sudden we call them. So we're like, we're not calling them whales. We were trying to figure out what to call them because we like animals. Obviously, we're knowledge all, but we're like, they're not whales. Are they big fish?

Marybeth Alexander
Are they manatees? Like, we've been trying to name this group of customers you don't know yet. So if anyone has any ideas for what to call these customers, they're not quite whales, but they're. If you want to stay with, like, the bird theme, you need a really fluffy, fat bird that just, like, wobbles around. Like an OSHA.

Arvid Kahl
Yeah, maybe cockapoos. Right. Those things that are just like, you know, like these parrots. Like things that don't even have any natural predators because they're just. They grew up.

Yeah, ostriches, maybe head in the sand. I don't know if that's the best analogy there, but it is a. Yeah, I know what. I definitely understand that you don't want to have so few customers that they can dictate terms of your business. That is super risky, particularly if you need them.

Right. Like all of a sudden the incentive structure changes significantly. That is really cool. I love the fact that you want to stay with the people that really need it. Like the people that.

I mean, businesses definitely need it, but smaller businesses that are just moving, trying to grow, trying to find their own footing, they also need it. And that you're still there for them is wonderful. And the fact that stands out to me the most here is that you're a small team and you want to stay small. That is very intentional. That's really cool.

Is that why? Is that, what's the motivation behind staying like this? Is it because you like what you're doing and that's all you want? Because that's perfectly fine, too? Or is there another motivation there?

Marybeth Alexander
Yeah, it's interesting, right? Like, would we like to grow? Yes. We are trying. We're trying to figure this out.

This is, like, the first time we've tried to, like, really figure out. And you're in the similar thing, sales and marketing. Like, we're trying to figure out how to, like, grow sustainably and intentionally, but within limits. Right. Like, our goal.

Like, we just want to do more good in the world. Like, and, like, money is a tool, right. And money is, like, freedom to do more of the things you want. Right? So, you know, we're trying to figure out how to sort of, like, unlock that and, like, figure out growth in a way that still feels calm.

I think I use, like, we. You know, we. I know people. There's. There's people that use the word like, lifestyle business as, you know, a criticism, derogatory.

But I think, yeah, it's not. And it's caused me pause over the years. It's like, is that what we are? Is that, like, what we're doing? And I think one of the reasons, and sort of, like, the why, like, the driving thing is to be able to create the life you want for yourselves.

And that's not just, like, for me, but it's like, everybody who works with us, it's like, how do we build a company that helps support the lives we want for ourselves, for our customers? And growing is part of the vision of being able to do more of that and create better lives for ourselves. But at some point, growing too much or growing too fast or, like, doing these things, like, changes, sort of your why. And, like, you leave that calm, right? Because there's something else, right.

That. And that calm is a big part of, you know, and, like, having it be fun, because I think you can be growing fast and it can be fun, and I think it can be calm and it can be fun. But if it's not fun, like, why do it? And I don't think I would have a lot of fun if it was, like, a super high stress thing. Right.

And, like, I don't want. I don't want a business keeping me up at night. Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

Arvid Kahl
That's. That's the. Not the work life balance. It's like the work sleep balance, you know, like something that way you can compartmentalize it into, this is business. This is great, and this is an important part of my life, but it's not my life.

It's not all there is. So I really appreciate you sharing this, too. I think calmness as a term of how uneventful a normal day is in the life of a business. It's a pretty good indicator for, you know, where decisions should go. Does it keep the thing calm or does it make it more crazy?

And I mean, this just in the sense of, like, activity you don't want to do or things that you don't want to deal with. So it's nice to hear you share all of this, and I definitely appreciate you just sticking with something that you like and not just chasing money. I think the fact that you, first of you, have a discount, 25% discount for B Corps, like, or for corpse. We call it the knowledge out, or ko, for good discount. So originally was nonprofits, but now it's nonprofits, B corps, and other businesses doing good.

Marybeth Alexander
Like, purpose driven business. Yeah, yeah. And I love this. When I read purpose driven business, it was like, yes, money is not a purpose. Money is a medium of exchange.

Arvid Kahl
That's what it is. Like, a profit driven business is not necessarily a purpose driven business. And the other way around right now, you don't have to find purpose exclusively in profit. I mean, profit enables you to stronger impact your purpose if you want to, but it's not exclusively the same that. Was that a choice from the beginning?

Because that's really cool. I don't really see this much in software businesses. You don't see it a lot of times in software business. So, like, I didn't know exactly what to call it early on, but I was always attracted by businesses who were doing things a little bit different. Right.

Marybeth Alexander
Like that, you know. You know, the idea of, like, an employee owned business, right. I've heard the idea, like, a few times. I'd heard stories of, you know, software companies that sell and then, like, split the funds amongst everyone that works there. Wow.

They didn't just take it for themselves. They actually gave it to everyone working there. So I heard these, like, inklings of these different businesses, and I didn't really hear too much of it in the software world, but I be. I became aware of B Corps, right. Because it's very big in, like, the B two C community, right.

Employee owned businesses, B corps, and, like, this idea of, you know, a triple bottom line business. So instead of, like, profit being the bottom line, it's, you know, profit people and planet, right. So you're looking at all things and you're seeing how, like, you impact on, like, the greater world. And that was, like, an attractive thing to me. So when I started, actually at one point, like, we were just sort of floating around.

It was like, a very much lifestyle business. I sat down to be like, okay, what do I want in the future? Like, what do I want this to be? Like, what is my exit plan? Because you don't live forever.

Your companies don't live forever. Like, how do you want to get out? And the thing that just was obvious to me is, like, I want to be an employee owned business. I want to be able to sell the company, but I want to sell it to the people that are working in the company so that then they can profit off the company, too, and that they can use that to build a good life for themselves. So, yeah, so I have this.

This is my big, fat, hairy goal is to figure out how to become an employee owned software company, which is not very common. But, yeah, I think, for me, the whole why and the whole. It's hard to say, like, exactly why, but I think it's the term I just recently learned was this idea of, like, people first, right? And, like, businesses are just collections of people. It's like, a thing we made up, right?

We created businesses. We created money, we created, like, our economy, and. But it's all about people, and it's all about community and these relationships you build. So, like, the idea for me is really that being able to have, like, a business and own a business is, like being able to create the life you want for yourself and other people and, like, being able to experiment with that and not necessarily have to do things, because, like, other people do them in other businesses is you can structure things and build things in a way that you like, that you find meaning in, that you find purpose in, that you find fun. And I think it's solidified in these past few years.

The type of business that we wanted to build, I just knew I wanted it to be different. And it wasn't just about money, but, like, figuring out what that thing is, I think, has really sort of, like, come into focus more recently. I'm like, yeah, I want to be a B Corp, which we just became B Corp in December. I want to be employee owned. Not quite there yet.

Still need to figure that piece out. But, like, that is sort of, like, the driving thing is, like, how do we do this and then do more good in the world, right? And, like, keep building a business that you want to work at and work with. Yeah, that's really cool. It's so nice to see the passion in what you talk about right now.

Arvid Kahl
It's so cool. Like, this is. This is such a founder thing, too. Like, you can. I can feel you you just can't stop wanting this.

It's really nice. And I love this. I love this. And I'm really looking forward to seeing this develop over time. Like, I know you're going to grow slowly, sustainably, and calmly into something bigger that facilitates this.

So I cannot wait to see where this journey goes. And for everybody who's listening to this and actually wants to also follow you on that journey, where would you like them to go? Where would you like them to check out you, the business and everything around it? Yes. So I'm.

Marybeth Alexander
I'm. I was off social media for, like, ten years, but I recently got back on, so, like, I'm most active on LinkedIn. So you find me. Mary Beth Alexander. I'm also trying to figure out Instagram.

It's a little weird for me, but, like, I'm the chief executive owl there. But, like, like, if you want to be my friend and help me figure out Instagram, that would be awesome. But our website is just knowledgel.com. Dot. We'd love to have you.

We just redesigned our website for our ICP. So, like, it's now, like a marketing website. So I'm really excited about our new website. So you can check us out there. I love.

I love chatting with folks, so feel free to reach out on any of these things. I'm just. Mary beth@knowledgel.com dot. That's awesome. Yeah, I think all of these places are worth a visit.

Arvid Kahl
Definitely your LinkedIn, just following you on your journey is super inspiring. Also, the website marketing website for any founder out there, I think it's a really good website. I love, like, when I look at the landing page, I just want to tell. I just want to tell you how great this landing page is. Right.

Let me just do this for a second. A new one, because we just released it, like, last week. Yeah, yeah. The new one that I. That I refreshed earlier today to check.

Marybeth Alexander
Okay. Yeah, brand new. What I love about this is it doesn't lead with features. It doesn't lead with, like, technical implementation. It leads with the why and it leads with the who this is for and who is using it.

Arvid Kahl
It's a lot of testimonials. A lot of this is. This is why people want this. This is why people need this. I think you're selling the proverbial better life after the product with this marketing page really well.

I think it's a very inspiring website. I think, again, your pricing system is so simple. It's surprisingly awesome for something that is so simple. I think it's great. It's very inspiring.

And I just have to hope the product website, it's really nice. I just want to tell you that because I think it's really nice. Thank you. I'm excited. I mean, I can come back in a couple of months and tell you how the website performs.

I'd love to catch back up because this feels like a journey that I want to be really listening close in. I think it's going to be really, really fun for you. I am really appreciative of you sharing all of your knowledge with me today in a knowledge owl capacity. So it's really, really great. Thank you so much for all these insights into customer service and into what company you're building and what company you want to be building.

Really appreciate that. Thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you. And that's it for today. I will now briefly thank my sponsor, acquire.com dot.

Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a really solid SaaS product. You acquired all those customers and everything is generating really consistent monthly recurring revenue. That's the dream of every SaaS founder. Right? Problem is, you're not growing for whatever reason.

Maybe it's lack of skill or lack of focus or lack of interest, you don't know. You just feel stuck in your business, with your business. What should you do? Well, the story that I would like to hear is that you buckled down, you reignited the fire, and you started working on the business, not just in the business. And all those things you did, like audience building and marketing and sales and outreach, they really helped you to go down this road, six months down the road, making all that money.

You tripled your revenue and you have this hyper successful business. That is the dream. The reality, unfortunately, is not as simple as this. And the situation that you might find yourself in is looking different for every single founder who is facing this crossroad. This problem is common, but it looks different every time.

But what doesn't look different every time is the story that here it just ends up being one of inaction and stagnation because the business becomes less and less valuable over time and then eventually completely worthless if you don't do anything. So if you find yourself here already at this point, or you think your story is likely headed down a similar road, I would consider a third option. And that is selling your business on acquire.com. Because you capitalizing on the value of your time today is a pretty smart move. It's certainly better than not doing anything and acquire.com is free to list.

They've helped hundreds of founders already. Just go check it out at try dot acquire.com arvid and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Your business at this time. You might just want to wait a bit and see if it works out half a year from now or a year from now. Just check it out.

It's always good to be in the know thank you for listening to the Bootstrap founder today. I really appreciate that you can find me on Twitter kahl a r v Eddie Kahl and you find my books in my Twitter course, tattoo. If you want to support me and this show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. Get the podcast in your podcast player of choice, whatever that might be. Do let me know.

It would be interesting to see and leave a rating and a review by going to ratethispodcast.com founder. It really makes a big difference if you show up there because then this podcast shows up in other people's feeds and that's, I think, where we all would like it to be. Just helping other people learn and see and understand new things. Any of this will help the show. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful day and bye.

316: Marybeth Alexander - Knowledgebase Secrets

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1. Introduction to Knowledge Bases

2. Integrating AI into Customer Support

3. The Role of Documentation

4. Future of Knowledge Bases

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