Alex MacCaw

Scribe by Cursive - Create step-by-step user guides, with a simple click

Know how to do something cool or useful?
One click, Scribe will watch you work your magic and automatically turn what you do into an easy-to-share guide. Create user guides for onboarding, training, product documentation, remote support, edu, and more.

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Jennifer Smith
Hey everyone! First off, thanks @maccaw for hunting us! We’re super stoked to be launching Scribe here on Product Hunt! We’re the team behind Cursive, a no-code automation platform. We originally built Scribe as an internal tool to document workflows to be automated. In working with our customers, we’ve seen that oftentimes documenting workflows is a challenge in and of itself. Here’s what we’ve learned: 🚫 Most process know-how is not written down - it lives in people’s minds as tribal knowledge 📓 What has been written down is static and stale - think of the training manual that no one opens again after on-boarding 🤯 No one likes creating user guides - it’s annoying and tedious to write up process steps in a google doc, create and import screenshots, paste images into emails, etc ℹ️ Yet, it’s more important than ever - with the rise of remote work, sharing “how-to” knowledge (digitally) has become a critical business imperative 💁‍♂️ We need a simpler way to share what we know with others - that doesn’t add to already heavy slack/zoom/email/communications overhead. Content needs to be easy to consume and even easier to create; ideally, it’s asynchronous, reusable for the creator, skimmable and digestible for the reader at their own pace, and referenceable for everyone. We realized that what we’d built with Scribe could be a solution to this problem. With this beta release of Scribe, we’ve made it easier than ever before to capture and share your “how-to” knowledge. One click, Scribe will watch you work your magic and turn what you do into an illustrated, shareable step-by-step user guide. Create guides for product documentation, training, on-boarding, remote support, and more. Download Scribe beta now to start creating. And best of all - Scribe is free to beta users! Check it out - we’d love your feedback 🙏
Dave Smith
@maccaw @jennifersmith6 This is a really good idea! I think it can be used for nice user guides. I'm building www.textasync.com and we will need some form of user guide to teach our customers during beta testing. Scribe likely will fill that need. Thanks for posting!
Jennifer Smith
@dave_smith10 that's great, and congrats on textasync!
Burak Gül
Looks useful. A few questions though: 1. Is it just the PDF output? Do you have any other formats in the roadmap? 2. I guess it's free for the beta, but do you have any specific pricing models in mind? One thing that is usually concerning with such products is that you can use the beta with full features and after the beta, the product suddenly becomes paid in a way that your invested time and effort is wasted.
Nikola Milev
@burakg Thanks for your feedback! 1) We have our own file format (.scrb) for saving the recorded workflows, so you can edit them or add to them any time. 2) As a developer, I can't speak for the pricing plans.
Aaron Podolny
@burakg We've started with PDF but we're definitely considering other formats accessible via a sharable link. We're particularly intrigued by an interactive step-by-step video, where a user can click/tap through each step at their own pace. Do you have formats you'd like to see? Re: pricing, we're imagining that this feature set will always stay free.
Jennifer Smith
@burakg what output formats would you like to see? most common request we've heard so far is for a live link to share
Burak Gül
Thank you for the response. What I am looking forward to is either a video or picture-based interactive walkthrough.
Rajiv Ayyangar
So it's easy as recording a loom...but instead of a video it outputs docs? (I hate the slowness of fast-forwarding through video...this seems elegant).
Jennifer Smith
@rajiv_ayyangar yup, exactly! you got it. for the times when you'd rather have a written doc to refer back to, at your own pace. (like for me, learning to cook right now, i always read recipes, never watch videos - so i don't have to constantly ffwd and rewind)
Aaron Podolny
@rajiv_ayyangar Exactly :) Although video is powerful for storytelling, it's not a great medium for sharing a task, where the user is following along at her own pace. Imagine building IKEA furniture with only a YouTube video. How-to guides are the right tool for the job.
Rishi Roongta
@rajiv_ayyangar @jennifersmith6 ahh.. the cooking example is so true!
zain allarakhia
I've been using this a lot recently, my sweet spot is when customers have issues that are not common enough for FAQs; I can quickly create personalized guides and send them over. The PDF output is really well designed and looks super professional.
Aaron Podolny
@zallarak Thanks, Zain! Glad to hear to that it's been useful for you and looking forward to making it more powerful over time. Our next steps are thinking through how editing can be streamlined and how the content can be more easily shared, with a focus on letting the person using the guide decide the exact format that makes the content easy for them to follow.
zain allarakhia
@aaron_podolny That literally nails what I want! Will leave it to you guys to filter my comment, but another "nice-to-have" down the line is the ability to have collaborative editing, e.g. how Figma does it.
Aaron Podolny
@zallarak Perfect! Yeah agree that for documentation to stay relevant, it really has to belong to a team rather than just an individual.
Jennifer Smith
@zallarak agree - since the idea here is all about sharing, collaborative features would make a lot of sense. if we see enough interest here, we'll build them!
Ryan Kennedy
Nice! As a PM, I often need to document how new features work in detail or train Operations. That takes either lots of screenshots/gdocs or videos. This looks like it solves that problem nicely. Kudos Cursive team for building something useful, simple, and intuitive.
Aaron Podolny
Thanks, @ryandelkennedy! Those are the exact types of use cases we had in mind when building. As someone who's tried to do plenty of coding tasks based on video tutorials, I've found that it can be quite painful. Hoping that this is the start of being hyper-focused on a good experience for both the guide creator and the guide user. Let us know what improvements you'd like to see as you put Scribe to use :)
Jennifer Smith
@ryandelkennedy thanks ryan - helpful feedback on use-cases for scribe...we are so curious to see what everyone uses Scribe to de-Scribe (bad pun?)
Stefan Pavlovic
Generally, the app is cool. I find it useful and easy to use. However, I found some things that didn't seem like a good UX to me. Here is some feedback about what you can check and maybe change: * Not everything in the application should be selectable. * Double-click to select is followed by the cursor being at the beginning. All text should be selected when the action is selected. * When the action description is deleted (set to an empty string), upon unselecting it, there is still the default text. This seems weird. * It would be nice if the window was larger, to accommodate the sometimes large actions. * The Welcome screen should be a bit more interactive, maybe with some screenshots/images. There is too much text. * The default workflow name should perhaps contain a date or something to make the user able to save it without renaming it. Perhaps you can create a default name for saving based on the workflow title.
Nikola Milev
@stefan_pavlovic Thanks for the feedback!
Aaron Podolny
@stefan_pavlovic Thanks for such detailed comments! These can go right into our Asana :)
Jennifer Smith
@stefan_pavlovic great UX feedback. i don't see any reason why we shouldn't do literally all of these. (the larger window should be addressable in the product now - you should see a +/- magnifier in the bottom right of each screenshot now)
Alex MacCaw
Scribe makes it easy to document anything in a jiff. Sharing what you know > keeping it to yourself. And now, it no longer requires macgyvering gdocs, screenshots, and illustrations together into something legible.
Aaron Hanson
What a great idea. Could middleground between loom videos and fullblown onboarding docs.
Aaron Podolny
@crixlet1 Thanks! We've noticed that there are so many processes that aren't well-documented right now because of the heavylifting required to make guides by hand. At the same time, we've found that while videos can be easy to make, they are often difficult to consume, especially if you're trying to get a task done in real time while watching. It's a lot of back-and-forth between the video and the work you're trying to get done. Hoping that Scribe is the happy medium here :)
Jennifer Smith
@crixlet1 like how you framed that. our hope is this leads to more people sharing what they've learned / know how to do...
Brian Adamovich
Easy to use, intuitive, overall great!
Jennifer Smith
@badamovich thanks! excited to see what you create
Aaron Podolny
@badamovich Awesome to hear! Thanks for giving it a try.
Vinayak Ranade
This is sweet ?makers! Any plans for integrations with HelpDocs etc? Would be killer if you could export to the system that hosts documentation.
Jennifer Smith
@pseudovirtual that's a great idea. where else should we integrate / export to?
Vinayak Ranade
@jennifersmith6 I'm not sure what the largest contingent would be - some set of zendesk / drift / hubspot / tettra? I'm sure some people just use wordpress too - so some kind of generic html or richtext / markdown export that you can feed into a CMS might be the way to go
Jennifer Smith
@pseudovirtual yeah that seems right. let's do a quick poll here - better to ask than have us guess!
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