Earlier this week, I stumbled upon this brilliant marketing-slash-documentation idea from SingleStore — notebooks as a first-party page! There are a handful of nice things about this idea:

  • Very easy to fan out. You're not going to really run out of sample notebooks from which you can create pages.
  • Easy to share and 'productize'.
  • Lends itself obviously to both onboarding and existing users ("try it now" for people who aren't signed in, "use my API key" for people who are.)
  • Doesn't require narrative or cohesion in the same way the same content as a blog post does.

I wouldn't be surprised if this doesn't become much more popular across developer tools businesses in the next few years.

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About the author

I'm Justin Duke — a software engineer, writer, and founder. I currently work as the CEO of Buttondown, the best way to start and grow your newsletter, and as a partner at Third South Capital.

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