Carl: Hello and welcome to the SaaS Growth podcast This week we are here with Dominik Sobe. Dominik is an Indie Hacker, and a digital nomad, and the founder of HelpKit.so. Helpkit is a knowledge based tool that lets you manage your content through Notion. In this episode, you'll learn about why you should have a knowledge base and how to make the most of them to bring value to your customers. 

We also go through some of the challenges of starting a business as an Indie Hacker. And a digital nomad and how to navigate things. As a solo founder, I hope you enjoy. We are here today with Dominik Sobe, the founder of HelpKit. How are you today, Dominik? 

Dominik: I'm doing great. 

Carl: Well, let's start from the top.

How did you find the idea for HelpKit? 

Dominik: Man. I feel like the way. Was like a multi step approach, I would say, like I've been in the hacking. For those of you who are listening and maybe don't know what indie hacking is, essentially the idea is that you are usually a solo founder who is trying to completely bootstrap.

A software product from scratch, like not getting VC funds or anything and trying to do everything yourself. Doing the marketing, doing the development. Of course. And once I was still in my bachelor's, actually, I was finding out about like people that were doing this and my whole goal was always to become like a management consultant.

I wanted to work at, you know, these big management consultancies. And while I was preparing for these job interviews, I was like making an app, like a mobile app because I was teaching myself how to code. The mobile app that I was making was actually like a little interview helper, like it was a app that helps you to prepare for the job interview for each management consultancies.

And while I was making that app and teaching myself how to code, I needed a knowledge base. And back then I wanted to use like a very simple solution because I had this mobile app and I had to have like a knowledge base. It was easy to update, but also. Something that I can just plug in into the app, like don't really worry too much.

And I looked at all these existing solutions and they were either super complicated, super expensive, or just wouldn't like fit what I needed. And then I was like, wait a second. Like back then already I was using Notion, even though it like this note taking tool, right, that a lot of people are now using as well.

Companies are using it. And back then I was using it for my personal stuff and I realized that with Notion you can expose like a public webpage essentially when I. Found out about this, I was like, Hmm, that's actually a pretty cool idea because I can just write my content in Notion and then expose it as a mini website and then embed it into my mobile app.

And I did that and it worked. The only problem was that the interface, that Notion kind of exposes is very janky and it's just not really made, especially for like mobile and like, it just, it doesn't look like an know base at all. You ha kind of have to design it in a hacky way to make it look like it.

And ever since I did it. I had it in the back of my mind of like, hmm, this could maybe be like an interesting product of like, I write all of my docs. Have set the docs in Notion where I'm super fast, you know, I have this editor that's already amazing and I can collaborate with other people if I need their help, but then have something that exposes it in a more professional way.

But I haven't really acted up on it because I have jumped onto another idea after the management consulting app. I, I don't wanna say it didn't succeed, but it didn't make like that much money and I was still studying. And my whole goal was to reach like ramen profitability, which is like earning enough so you can like live off of ramen and just basic rent and like of your own products.

I only did my master degree essentially 'cause I like, I gave my parents an excuse to like continue working on my products. I. Whether disguise of study, like it was horrible to accommodate both things, like trying to make a working product and then also like doing the crazy maths on the side. And all I did is was just trying to build a product to find that like sweet spot to have around profitability.

And I built another product. Completely failed. Spent like five months basically on this like super, like over-engineered app. Just thought it, it's gonna work out. I launched it without even asking someone if they ever pay for it. And then I, I, I realized I reached like $200 MR and that was the peak. I just couldn't go further.

If I like, Big, big drag to get customers. One day I was like waking up and I'm like, I spent like four or five months on this building. Nobody wants to buy it. Like, duh. Of course. 'cause like I haven't done any like sales or marketing. I just thought people would flock into my app and I'd be a millionaire.

And like the crazy indie hacker mistakes, you know, like you read about all of this online. I read about like all these like, oh, don't make this mistake. Don't make this mistake. And then yet somehow I still found myself exactly in that position after like. Waking up realizing I can't even look at my computer anymore, which lasted for like one, two months.

All of this, like I just want to have a round profitable app. And essentially what then happened is, I was on a little trip in Portugal where I'm residing and I was like my friends and we were like in the south of Portugal, beautiful scenery. And my friend also a indie hacker, he was like. If you wanna build something in like three days, like an MVP, minimal viable product, just like something we ever, always wanted to like talk about or like build, and I'm like.

Actually, I don't, but you know what? Like if it's three days, that's a good constraint. Let's just, you know, let's just build something. And that was a moment when I just built an MVP for HelpKit and that kind of changed everything because he motivated me like in these three days to just like try to get it work, expose the Notion, API, like, you know, make a little website out of it, see if that works.

And once I found out that that actually works, I was like, huh. Okay. That is very interesting. And that's a need I had for like a year prior already. This seems like something that actually can take off, because also I was thinking about there's this, like, I have this like little story where I was in Lisbon on a, like a nomad cruise.

We were on this little ship, you know, with like other nomads, like very romantic, even though they were only dudes and like sunset, you know, and we were on this boat and. Essentially I talked, there was this Russian guy and we, I talked with him about like my fake product kind and he was like, and then he was like in this like very thick Russian accent.

He was like, man, like why are you swimming? Like why should your product swim like against the river when you can actually build a product that is like. Going with the flow, getting traction, having like wind behind your sail. And I was like, what do you mean? And he was like, if you build a product on an existing trend or on a growing trend, there is already baked in marketing for you.

You don't need to like push so much to get your first like eyes on it and like consumers on it. Which essentially is also, I guess the whole idea about like a red ocean versus blue ocean market, right? Where you have like either completely another new idea. You're gonna try to be the next Elon Musk and like probably will fail to ninety-nine percent.

Or you have like this red ocean market where there's already a product existing that doing the exact same thing, but you put a twist on it. And I knew that Notion was a growing trend and I also knew that knowledge base is already existed. Every company needs a knowledge base. I was like, these are two things that I'm at least so confident on to dedicate more time in.

And that's how everything got started then. 

Carl: So for you, a lot of the pain around knowledge base was just how difficult. It was, and you are like, Hey Notion's easy. Knowledge base. It's necessary. Merge. 

Dominik: Yeah. Literally. 

Carl: We'll dive into knowledge bases a little bit. Why should companies have knowledge bases? 

Dominik: If you ever used a product and you realize that you wanna get like an answer pretty fast.

Without having the pain of reaching out to customer support, you quickly wanna, like, you wanna have the solution to this. Right? And the quickest way for this are knowledge bases. Now, previously, all of these knowledge bases were kind of made in a way that are very hard to navigate. They're not like nicely designed.

They're not, I, I feel like they're just like an afterthought, you know? But if it's done in a good way, the UX is pretty nice. You know, people wanna navigate the search works like this can just save you so much time because you as a customer just have, you know, a resource where you can actually find questions and answers to like what you have actually, and you don't need to reach out to support.

And like, sometimes, you know, especially with like bigger companies, like you can't wait like three days and then you get like an automatic response. Like there's things, for example, I mean right now I'm in, in this process where I, I have like. Twitter blue, or now it's like X premium and essentially they grant you ad revenue share.

And because I kind of blew up a little in the past few months with like a couple of tweets, I made like 12 million impressions in like less than 24 hours with like a silly meme. I'm more than negligible for these ad revenue shares, which probably would be like a few hundred bucks. And I've been now in the, chatting with the support for like two months.

Emails going back and forth. It's always an automatic response and they always say, read my knowledge base, read our knowledge base. But the, first of all, you don't have a knowledge base. They only have like a really like function FAQ on their website. Nothing in this FAQ even says something about what I should be doing.

And so there you have it. Like that's the reason why your company should have a help center or like documentation page. 'cause you want your customers to just like fix their problem the themselves before they reach out to you. Obviously you as a company also save bunch of, bunch of time in like customer support tickets and like just a support load.

It's just a win-win. I, I wouldn't see why you should not do this. Unless you're very, very, very early product and you're doing this on purpose 'cause you wanna find out like really the pain points your user is gonna have if you have your first 10 users. I don't think it makes a lot of sense to build a fully-fetched knowledge base.

Maybe you wanna have people reach out. Like that's also what I always like when people ask me like, how do I write good help articles? Where the best way is you listen to your customer. Requests and then you just jot them down, you know, that's the best thing I think. And, yeah, that, that's why you need a knowledge base, I would say.

Carl: So you did talk about some of what makes a good knowledge base. 'cause it does seem like even massive companies can really struggle. So what do you, what do you think is the most important parts for a successful knowledge base. 

Dominik: I feel like the most important thing for your knowledge base is that you structure your content in an easy to follow way.

You don't hide a lot of categories, you know? I always feel like if you have like two levels of hierarchy, I. Probably better than having more than that. Like I've seen sometimes like people wanting like have hundreds of like sub-hierarchies, but the problem with that is just as a consumer, it's just so hard to dive through this.

You know, you wanna just click on a category and then maybe have some sub-categories and see on a quick glance like, okay, what's the problem? Like what's my category? And then boom, go into a help article. Also when it comes to this, like one of the most important things is like search. If your search, you know, works really well, it does like good full-text search.

That's like a big, big, big thing with that. Also, now these days, you know like you have as well the possibility of like ai, you can chat with AI as well, which is trained on your knowledge base, which is in theory even much better 'cause it can give you like answers right when you want them. I. 'cause HelpKit is literally like in that space.

I also build an AI feature That exactly does that. You know, I feel like these. It's like having structured content first, obviously having good search or I guess search ability in whatever way, shape, or form. And then third is just like, you know, writing articles that are easy to skim and easy to follow.

What I mean with this is like, have pictures in there, like multimedia, whatever it is. You know, videos have like some like gifs, like whatever it is, just have something that like is very. Visual and easy for people to follow. 'cause nobody wants to read like a blob of text, you know, it's just super boring.

Yeah. These are like the three big pillars, I guess. 

Carl: So you say that HelpKit does actually assist your users with that. So you have, well you've got your AI tool that it seems like you just released like last year, is that right? . So it's ChatGPT for your own knowledge-based articles. and then have you got any sort of resources around helping people set up knowledge bases?

Dominik: We built like last year, resource, like a free resource for people that I call, like the Help Center Academy, which essentially is just a free website where you can, easily like learn about how to build your own knowledge base if it's your first time and it just goes along like all these things I just mentioned.

And, just tries to give you a bit of tips and tricks. 

Carl: Have those been really helpful for you as a business and like acquiring new customers? 

Dominik: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a great question, right? Like how do you, how do you attract customers? How do you like, like in terms of acquisition channels, one thing that has been going really well for me is like the whole idea about engineering is marketing, which is like a term that's getting thrown around in like the SaaS community now.

Essentially what it just means is like building free utility tools for users as a lead magnet. And this can be like a free calculator. If you are like a real estate company and you bid a little free calculator to calculate the average price of a certain area, what it is, you know, that can be very easily found on like search engines.

It's good, like as you optimize. This can be really helpful because essentially you are providing free value, but you're also obviously plugging your tool in a way. And that's what I've been actually doing for HelpKit in a lot of different ways actually. And like this Help Center Academy is one of them.

I've also built a couple of other like free tools around Notion that help people that they like people just use now for free. But there's always like a, some sort of plugging HelpKit in one way or another. 

Carl: Something I've definitely heard before is you have that, is it like a user hierarchy in a way.

You put all this effort and the free effort into this low tier and eventually they'll graduate into needing a knowledge base. And then you are the guy, you're the guys who's been helping them the whole time. They're very aware of you when you, make these new features and grow your product. So how do you go about deciding what to build and where to keep developing HelpKit 

Dominik: I feel like the most important thing. When it comes to like building new features. Like obviously listening to users, but also like listening to users in a way that makes sense. And what I mean with this is that sometimes you will have people reach out to you, especially, especially people that are not even, you're paying customers yet, people in a trial phase, et cetera, that are like wanting to have like very, very niche features.

That like work exactly for them. Like one thing I know, like I told you, is like having 10 sub-hierarchies. Like I once got a ticket for having 10, specifically 10 sub-hierarchies. And like they need that amount, you know? And when you read this at first you're like, oh, I wanna help everyone, you know, I wanna help all my customers.

I wanna make this available, I wanna make this available. And. With one of my previous products, that's exactly what I did. You know, I just built all these little ways and vessels that people wanted, but I realized that it's usually just one of them that wants it, and then they, they themselves don't even really need it.

So how I go about like building features is that I just have a Notion board. Which gathers the demand for certain features that I mentioned. Helpkit right now is, I would say pretty feature-complete in terms of it does everything that a, I guess, professional help center knowledge base tool should do. It has an like built-in analytics feedback, article feedback.

Now also, obviously as ai think what I do now is like very, like very strictly just listen on like when feedback comes in, I just categorize it and see, all right, there's a. You know, there's a recurring pattern in like, oh, we want this one thing, for example. Was that why more people want to maybe have a different way of gating access?

To their HelpKit knowledge base, like protecting the access. And I only had like a single password feature so far, but now I ventured into like the fact that you can have email, like a email list restricted, like gated access. So you just can have like different email addresses and they have access to like the resource and there's like multiple things that I'm gonna build on top of that as well.

'cause that's something people wanna do. Maybe they wanna sell content, you know, because like. Previously it was really hard to sell Notion like just Notion content because you need to give away your Notion link. The problem with giving away your Notion link is just that, like you give away the Notion link and then it gets just shared around and everyone has the same link, and then you know your resource is not really protected anymore.

And if you have like a email. Based auth, for example, yes, you can share your email, but you always need to like confirm the login with your email inbox. And you know, that just creates friction. It's a hassle. And if someone goes that far, obviously it's just a, that's just, a technical detest that you have to deal with.

But it's a more, much more like bulletproof way of, of like getting access. 

Carl: You did say you're an indie hacker and a digital nomad, right. How have you managed building HelpKit? 

Dominik: Well. Moving around the world, honestly, like in the beginning, it's really hard now. I've been like nomading for like, multiple years now, and I've been nomading ever since.

I am building HelpKits, so I do have like a lot of experience trying to really bootstrap like a full, you know, full-fledged, like SaaS product, where're doing it. It honestly, if I, like, if I really think about it. Like, especially the beginning of HelpKit, the first few months where I needed to really like listen to so many customer, so much customer feedback, have onboarding calls.

You know, back then what I did is just, I, like, I stayed in one place for like multiple months. It was like four, four months I think, where I was like, I was still in Lisbon at that point and I needed that. Like I just could not travel. At that point in time because it just, it required so much like time and like effort spent.

However, like after things got rolling a bit, I did start traveling a bit more. I went to Bali, then Bangkok, and then I got places in Southeast, Asia. And one thing that I found for myself, like one, like a very easy. I guess digital nomad mistake if you are building your own product, is the concept of like traveling too fast.

I mean, now I came to the conclusion that I don't wanna spend less than a month in a single place. Like, I prefer one, two, like multiple months. But like when I started, I was like going to a place for like two weeks, you know? And it takes like, just on average, it just, you know, if you, like, if you're an entrepreneur, you should have a routine.

I strongly believe in this. And like, parts of your routine should be, you know, exercising like physical health and eating somewhat. healthy and man, everyone that traveled have, has ever traveled, you know, and like stayed in a place for two weeks. You're not gonna eat healthy. You're gonna eat like the nicest, unhealthy stuff you can find.

You're also not gonna work out 'cause you don't know where gym is. Also, all these gyms are like hostile AF not, not even gonna let you sign up for like a two-week contract. So you just, you know that your options are really, really limited and you also, like, you have this fear of missing out. You wanna like explore.

So what I came to the conclusion of like this whole, you know, digital nomading, is that I think you should call it differently. And like, I guess just be aware that like if you go to a place for like two weeks, just go there with the state of mind of. Your work is not gonna be a priority. You're gonna do what you need to do, but you're gonna be there to explore, to like embrace the cultures here, new stuff, which is amazing and just like don't feel guilty 'cause that's exactly what I've been like falling into.

I always felt like guilty 'cause I didn't do enough. Well, I couldn't do enough work and so gradually I just realized staying multiple months in a single place. What people call like slow matting, you know, or whatever is much, much of a better way to be a digital nomad. It, it will help you like socially, like you find French that you're not gonna lose in like a second.

And like, even though that's even hard if you do it for multiple months, to be honest. So all of this is like, I, I wouldn't say like an easy thing, but one thing I have to say. That I do recommend people to do is trying to travel a bit when you're building your company, because it really opens up the thoughts that you have.

Like obviously just traveling alone like brings your brain into like a different state of mind. It's like the kind of shower thought thing, you know, like. Times you spend on the airport. Times you just spend alone not looking at your phone. 'cause you need to wait in a queue. Like these are the moments where sometimes like really interesting ideas come up that are otherwise really hard to find.

But also if you specifically wanna bootstrap and are like some sort of like solo founder, maybe going to places where there are other like-minded people. And I'm talking now specifically like Bali, especially Chengdu for example, like. You will find a group of people there that are all in the same position as you that maybe like they're just struggling, you know, to get like the first hundreds of dollars in MRR and they are all there just to grind.

And you go there and you work with them in a co-working space twenty-four, seven. And it's like this like. Before I went to Bali for the first time, I never even knew that like this exists back then. I was always, you know, doing it myself alone at home or like with, with one friend. But he wasn't, he was an employee at the company, so I just couldn't share, you know, the hustle and the grind.

Sometimes it takes in the beginning and so going. To a meetup or like a place where there are other nomads or like any sort of entrepreneurs, it can be in your own city. You just need to find people that are also passionate and wanna grind and, yeah. So, so I don't know. Definitely don't regret it. I just say.

You gotta be a bit cautious when you start digital nomading because, you know, one thing I can tell you this misconception of people chilling under like a, like a palm tree on like some sort of like, you know, in, in a beach hut with the laptop. Like, it just doesn't exist. I mean, sometimes, like once, like every six months I see one person doing that and they probably have like, you know, 10, like 10 kilos of sand.

Their laptop. Can't use it anymore. Yeah, it's just ridiculous to be honest. But yeah, it's definitely an interesting journey, like finding out how to balance nomading and, and working. 

Carl: Now that you've sort of actually managed to go through that journey and you're, well, well past ramen profitability into actual profitability now, what's something that you think other SaaS founders should do that you do?

Dominik: Man, this is really hard to say, you know? 'cause every product is differently, every, quite frankly, I still don't know. I. Everything. Like if I'm, everything I'm doing is great. You know, I do think that having some sort of like ground principles to operate on are always a good first step, and with that I mean like just basic things.

You know, just being very disciplined working on a product that you're passionate about. Like, because the thing, the truth of the matter is if you're working on something you don't really like, like if you start a project and you cannot see yourself working on it for like three, five years, you know, or more, I guess.

Or at least like a year. I mean, these days, you never know, but if you cannot see yourself working on something for the long term, you just won't succeed. Luckily, the thing with HelpKit is because I'm dog-footing it, I'm using it for other projects of mine. You know, right now I just build a little city guide for people who wanna move to Bangkok, and guess what it's built on?

It's like build up on HelpKit and then I get motivated again to build new features and make HelpKit a little bit more suitable for like these content kind of stuff, you know, because I need it for myself. I guess that's another big part. Just be passionate about what you do. Sometimes it will feel like a dread and that's normal.

It will feel like a normal job and you will have like these lumps of like, you don't even wanna work, even though it's your own idea, you know? That's normal too. But you gotta start at least from like having product founder fit. I guess last but not least, I feel like maybe one thing. That at least I've seen like working is making sure that you're seen in the community with whatever projects you're building.

I've been building in public, meaning like being very transparent in like the ups and downs. I do. I think especially in the beginning, helps a lot and also gives you just a bit more credibility. Yeah, like don't hide from the world. You know the moment when you hide from the world, it just, as a founder throughout your journey, like even past drama profitability, like in order to stay motivated, you need this little dopamine rush.

You know, obviously getting new subscriptions is like the holy grail, but sometimes it like, it will be like a little bit stale. It won't like happen as fast as you want, so you need to get your dopamine hits. Like just confirmation somehow. And building in public is a great idea. Like even though it sounds stupid and like honestly like crazy, but like even like, you know, you put, you just share something valuable and people like it and comment like, oh, thank you for sharing.

You know, like as stupid as it sounds like this can help you as entrepreneur to just keep going. And I think that's something that a lot of people neglect as well. 

Carl: Cool. Thank you for this conversation, Dominik. It's been a great chatting. 

Dominik: Thanks Carl. 

Carl: Again, that was Dominik Sobe, the founder of HelpKit. 

If you wanna learn more about HelpKit, you can go to www.helpkit.so.

Be sure to check out the HelpKit Academy. I had a poke around that was full of very useful information for creating a successful knowledge base. And of course, don't forget to check out HelpKit's AI chat feature while you're there. 

As always, if you enjoyed this episode, you can sign up to the newsletter at carlanderson.xyz to be notified of every episode release as well as to receive articles on how to grow your SaaS business.

If you wanna be on this podcast or otherwise need help growing your SaaS business, you can reach out to me at carl@carlanderson.xyz. Thanks for listening.