Create user manuals and training guides way faster than ever before
StepShot is a powerful and yet simple to use tool that enables you to create detailed step-by-step procedure guide or manual. This tool brings creating manuals to the new level, when each step of the procedure can be edited within one program and then the whole story bulk can be exported and saved as a document.
Kevin William David interviewed Sasha Reminnyi, Founder at Stepshot to know more.
Hey Sasha, Let’s get started!
So tell us about StepShot?
Currently, our team is working on a few products and its future versions. We have two major software solutions — StepShot Guides and StepShot Manuals. While the last one is a solution for the enterprises, the first one — StepShot Guides, is a new product we’ve launched just in October 2017 and it’s targeted to the individual users.
Imagine, you have to explain to your new colleague how to use your company software. Probably, you’ll try to capture every screenshot separately, then annotate them in some image editing tool, and after, try to make them stick in let’s say, Word. Sounds too long, right? Here’s where StepShot Guides come into play. It’s a software documentation tool used for creating tutorials, workflow walk throughs, and step-by-step guides. StepShot produces manuals and reference guides for clients, customers, and employees in just minutes, not hours. It captures the screen on every mouse click automatically and allows you to annotate the screenshots right in the program. No more piles of separate screenshots, trashed memory, inconvenient or expensive tools.
An entrepreneur running a remote team or dealing with customers and clients, busy blogger, web developer or marketer — everyone will find StepShot an efficient solution.
In June 2018 we plan to release StepShot Guides PRO, a new version of the product with several cool features such as inbuilt process diagram editor, point-and-click UI explain tool, or a possibility to publish a guide to DOC, HTML, and a video format.
Tell more about why you are building this?
Historically StepShot was started as an order on a freelance website. A guy was making software tutorials for his company and wanted to speed up the process. So that’s how the product was born originally — from the actual problem our first customer wanted to solve.
Every business regardless of the size has to create a bunch of documents (legal, educational, software, etc.). On average, documenting corporate knowledge can take up to 80 % of employee’s time, especially when we talk about the creation of screenshot-based guides, manuals, etc. That’s quite a lot, isn’t it? The major problem is there’s no ultimate tool to automate this process, thus reduce the time on documentation and make the process as simple as ABC. So, our team decided to take this challenge and change the way screenshot-based documentation is done.
How is StepShot different from what already exists in the market?
We can surely say that our tool is a documentation enabler. This means that always busy subject matter experts now can create a draft of a document without even switching to other tasks from their day-to-day work. Secondly, our tool is super simple, affordable and solves a specific problem — makes documents creation at least 2x faster than is a usual way. There’s no other tool on the market allowing its users to produce screenshot-based guides in PDF format so fast. Some tools publish screenshots to GIF format or allow to make explainer videos, but step-by-step guides — it’s our thing.
Who uses StepShot? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?
StepShot’s audience is quite diverse — software developers, IT consultants, product managers, marketers, designers, software trainers, teachers, and many more. Majority of them are from USA, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Spain, etc. They work for or own tech companies, software product startups, digital agencies, consulting firms, financial or healthcare institutions, etc.
Among our customers are Deloitte, Microsoft, Hershey’s, Societe Generale and 200 more awesome companies that benefit from our solutions.
How are your customers using StepShot? Could you share a few different use cases?
StepShot covers very specific jobs to be done. Our customers develop, design, teach, promote, document or explain software on a daily basis. StepShot Guides help them stay more productive and save up to 90 % of their time on this routine.
For example, our customer Lori, a Creative Director at digital marketing agency creates quick walkthroughs she can hand to her clients during the demos. Her clients don’t have to worry about taking notes during the meeting; they can just follow along with the instructions.
Another client of ours, Daniel, a senior software developer use the tool to write software documentation. Also, with StepShot Guides, he can produce tutorials for customers in just 15 minutes (before, it took him hours to create a simple guide).
Our clients who are website designers create on-the-fly tutorial documents for their clients on how to edit a website, how to change images in the slideshow or change the button color.
Have there been unique use cases for StepShot that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
One of such unique cases is when our customers, marketers, in particular, use StepShot to create ‘lead magnets’ (freebies in exchange for prospects’ contact information). “I’ve been looking for an easy way to create freebie downloads. This software fits the bill!” — one of our clients said. That was like an ‘aha’-moment for us, as it opens up a new way for product enhancement.
Also, there’s another case. Just recently another happy client wrote to us that she used StepShot to create teacher’s guides. To accredit their continuing professional education courses (with the US state licensing agencies), the US teachers have to submit a specific guide. She said it much easier for her to create such type of document in StepShot than in PowerPoint, for example.
It’s quite interesting cases as we didn’t expect that our tool can also come in handy for such specific purposes.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
I’d say our primary challenge was always building the right outbound sales process. Now, we are experimenting with it wildly, using the practices from “Predictable Revenue” book by Aaron Ross. It’s a tough task and the issue is that there is no silver bullet. Specifically for sales, for each new company even with existing sales frameworks, you have to explore new horizons on your own. Moreover, as the time goes by, sales process should constantly evolve.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
The most exciting story was connected with Atlassian. Those folks were very open for external vendors to come into the ecosystem and supported us a lot. We literally entered their front door office in San Francisco, showed our solution and just in half an hour, we were invited to showcase our product at Atlassian Summit in a few weeks with a slot on a stage for promising products. And that’s not the end!
While we were showcasing the product, a man in the first row shouted out “Shut up and take my money!” That guy was a Head of IT Department of a large US retail chain. In a few months after the event, his company became our customer.
Before we end, What are the top 5–10 products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
Probably, the most essential tools for our company are:
Intercom — all the communication processes with our clients happen here. It’s simple and has a wide range of functionalities that make customer messaging smooth and easy.
Slack— for team communication. It’s very convenient for instant communication, quick calls, files exchange, etc. User-friendly interface & simplicity are the key benefits why we are using Slack.
Trello — is a virtual space where we plan our weekly and monthly tasks, keep our ideas for the future (backlog, product roadmap, etc.) and give feedback to each other on some specific tasks like landing page design.
Leadfeeder — this tracking tool is the greatest find for our Sales Manager as it provides us with daily reports which companies visited our website. One of its key benefits for us is that it integrates with our CRM and email marketing tools.
Hotjar — for tracking the customer behaviour on our website. It provides a real-time data and insights helping us define what issues a person encounters while navigating our website and quickly fix these problems.
Hubspot CRM — helps us to keep all the data about our lead safe and sound in one place. Thanks to it we don’t have to use dozens of spreadsheets and tools. It makes our sales team far more productive, and work more accurate.
Originally published at siftery.com.
