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Creating a Knowledge Base from Scratch

Jarratt Isted Updated by Jarratt Isted

It's great making the first step towards help users with your product, but knowing what to write when you've got a blank knowledge base can make it difficult to make progress.

In this guide, I'll give you some examples so you can start helping users right away.

If you're interested in reading a long-form version, check out our guide here.

Starter Categories

The categories you create will depend wildly on what your product is and what it does. Luckily there's major similarities in all businesses:

  1. All customers are new at some point
  2. A team will answer customer questions
  3. Businesses charge money for services

So whether you sell car wash liquid or language subscription software, the following three categories should help. Feel free to create these in HelpDocs, including the descriptions.

Category

Purpose

Example description

Getting Started

Helping new users get up to speed with how your product works so they're more successful.

New around here? Let us get you up to speed with how everything works.

FAQs

A place for your customer service/success reps to put answers to questions that don't find anywhere else.

Read answers about the things customers ask us through support.

Billing

Users will find it easier once they know your payment policies, like how you handle cancelling and refunds.

Learn how we handle billing, cancellations, and plan related queries.

Starter Articles

These articles will depend on what industry your company is in, but they should be enough to help you start scaling your support with self-service help. Just copy, paste, and adjust.

Subscribing to a plan

It's fantastic to hear you're looking to subscribe—we can't wait to welcome you as a customer. It doesn't take long to start your subscription.

Note: You'll need to be an administrator to subscribe to a card.

Subscribing to a plan
[Enter instructions here about how customers subscribe to any of your plans.]

How we take payments
We use [Provider] to process payments. You can read about how they secure your data over here: [LINK].

How we handle cancellations

First off, we're sorry to see you go. If you've got some time we'd love to hear whether we missed the mark somewhere.

You can cancel your subscription by [INSTRUCTIONS].

It usually takes us [TIMEFRAME] to get everything cancelled. After cancelling, you'll no longer be able to [FEATURES] so you may want to export your data beforehand.

Exporting your data

Whether you're taking the data to a meeting or moving platforms, we've made it easy to export your data. We provide your data in [FILE FORMAT(S)].

[EXPORT INSTRUCTIONS]

Next steps

Creating useful documentation for users is going to take some time. Getting into the habit of writing new content when questions are asked and then answered by your team can reduce the time to making it successful.

To make this process a little easier, here are integrations we've made that allow you to create articles directly inside their software:

  • Front plugin. Answer emails and write draft articles straight from the sidebar.
  • Slack integration. Discuss new product features or feed support into your workspace, and write new Drafts inside a modal.

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Clearing the Cache in Your Browser

Writing Clear and Digestible Knowledge Base Articles