Hey there,

Welcome to this week's edition of SaaS Hill, where we discuss the latest trends and predictions in the SaaS industry.

Let's discuss How-to Guides and Visual Step-by-step Guides 📝.

⭐️ Intro

As businesses and individuals continue to seek out easy ways to explain processes, workflows, and guides, the demand for SaaS products offering these features is set to rise. How-to guides will fill the gap between text-based guides, screenshots, and short videos by providing a more engaging and immersive experience. They will become a valuable tool for businesses and individuals looking for an easy way to explain complex processes and workflows.

Here is what we will discuss today:

  • 7 predictions about How-to Guides

  • 7 products in this category

  • 5 examples of How-to Guides

  • 6 stats about Images

  • 2 experts to follow

  • How Tango went to 200K users in 14 months

🤔 Predictions

  1. The demand for SaaS products that offer how-to guides and visual step-by-step guides will continue to increase as businesses and individuals seek out easy ways to explain processes, workflows, playbooks, guides etc.

  2. How-to guides will become increasingly popular in the next few years as more businesses seek to engage their customers and provide a more immersive experience. Video-based or image-based offer a more engaging experience than traditional text-based guides.

  3. PLG and self-service products will widely rely on How-to guides:

    1. add a how-to guide to an onboarding experience

    2. add a how-to guide to FAQs

    3. add a how-to guide to support documentation

    4. share a how-to guide with a community

  4. With the rise of remote work, the need for self-service tools and guides will become even more important.

  5. All departments will widely use how-to guides and visual step-by-step guides: customer-facing roles, IT, and operations. It will also speed up time to document processes.

  6. How-to guides will occupy the niche between screenshots and videos:

    1. for example, they can easily share a screenshot to explain how to update a Salesforce record

    2. they can record a short 1-min video using Loom to explain how to update a Salesforce record

    3. or they can create an interactive how-to guide. It’s interesting how Tango explains its value: Faster than screenshotting. Easier than video editing

  7. How-to guides and visual step-by-step guides will be widely adopted for:

    1. documenting internal processes (e.g. how to pull a report from X)

    2. onboarding new employees (e.g. how to install X, Y, Z)

    3. training teammates (e.g. how to implement a new playbook)

    4. support documentation (e.g. add How-to guide to support documentation)

🏢 Products

  1. Scribe > Turn any process into a step-by-step guide, instantly

  2. Tango > Create how-to guides with screenshots, in seconds

  3. dubble > Documentation done while you work

  4. Minerva > Install browser extension and create guides anywhere in seconds

  5. Float > Turn any process into a step-by-step guide in seconds

  6. uphint > Create step-by-step guides instantly

  7. iorad > Create tutorials and share them at lightspeed

How-to Guides Examples:

📈 Trend Chart

Scribe reached 300K installs:

Tango users created 1 million how-to guides:

📊 Statistics

  1. 90% of the information processed by the brain is visual (Source: ifvp)

  2. The human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text (Source: ifvp)

  3. The human brain is able to recognise a familiar object within 100 milliseconds (Source: Science Daily)

  4. Posts that include visual content (images or videos) get 65% higher engagement. Newer research, however, showed that Facebook posts with images get 2.3x more engagement than those without images (Source: Photutorial)

  5. Similarly, tweets with images receive 35% more retweets than tweets with no visual content (Source: Twitter)

  6. 12.4 trillion photos have been taken throughout history. By 2030, this number will increase to 28.6 trillion (Source: Photutorial)

📖 Experts to Follow

  1. Jennifer Smith > CEO @ Scribe

  2. Ken Babcock > Co-Founder & CEO at Tango

🔗 Useful Links

  1. From 0 to 200k users in 14 months (Inside Tango’s PLG journey)

🤝 Related SaaS Trends

  1. 🏔️ Interactive Demos and Product Tours > Experience products like never before - interactively

  2. 🏔️ Images as a Service > Create better looking images of your work

Thanks for reading. See you next time 👋

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