- The product (what is it, use case, who would want it)
Mintlify gives you the power to search through your codebase with plain English. Currently, Mintlify is supported on VS Code and allows you to ask clarifying questions about your code and search for code snippets without the restraint of guessing exact keywords. Beyond keyword search, Mintlify supports fuzzy search, semantic search and search by description. We made it for all developers, but we think it’d be especially useful for engineering teams and specifically junior developers (for quickly onboarding onto their teams).
- The market (size, competition, dynamics that we should be aware of)
Size: Everybody who uses Cmd+F in their codebases are people we think could benefit from Mintlify.
Competition: Sourcegraph and GitHub both do code search.
A dynamic to be aware of : Developers are picky and don’t adopt tools quickly.
- Product analysis / comparison against competition
Sourcegraph gives you the power to search through all of the repos under an organization. GitHub has been starting a lot of initiatives to improve their code search capabilities. Their most recent code search tool allows you to search using regex. One thing that both Github and Sourcegraph don’t have is semantic search.
- What stage are you in? Do you need money? Are you raising?
We’re in private beta right now, testing an MVP. And we don’t need money and we aren’t raising right now.
- Customer conversion strategy (where do you find them, and how do you make them buy shit from you)
We initially made
Figstack and had a lot of people transfer over to Mintlify from there. We’ve also been reaching out to open source developers on Twitter and Discord. We also plan on reaching out to mid-sized companies because we think that the value of Mintlify increases proportionally to the size of the team and codebase.
- Why you? Whose your daddy and what does he do?!? err, wait. never mind. I mean, why are YOU the best person for this job? (experience? good team? rich daddy who can't bring himself to pull the plug? what?)
My co-founder and I are both developers and both resonate with improving code search a lot. We also have worked on a lot of projects together and know how to work together. Moreover we have a lot of experience with the technology used to make all this possible. The world of program synthesis and programming languages is one I’m very familiar with. And we’ve familiarized ourselves with the space quite a bit when building Figstack and Mintlify - both in terms of technology and the market.
