Building for Developers: Lessons from Mintlify's Journey Through Seven Pivots

In this episode of "Why Work Here," Amit Matani sits down with Han Wang, co-founder and CEO of Mintlify, to discuss how they built a thriving developer documentation platform through multiple pivots, the importance of founder passion, and what makes Mintlify a unique place to work.

Watch the full interview on YouTube | Listen on Spotify

From Seven Pivots to Finding Product-Market Fit

Mintlify powers documentation for some of the most innovative companies in tech today, including Anthropic, Cursor, Replit, and Perplexity. But the road to success wasn't straightforward. Han shares that before landing on its current product, the company went through seven pivots in its first year and a half. However, these weren't dramatic shifts between industries—it remained focused on building for developers throughout.

"When we started the company, [we] very simply did it on the premise of not an idea... We just want to build for people that we really care about... other developers, other builders, people who are like us," explains Han. "The cheat code of building for something that you care about was just building for yourself."

Focusing on the audience rather than a specific solution became their anchor through difficult times. Han recalls how a previous startup failed partly because he woke up one day realizing he didn't feel passionate about the people he was building for. With Mintlify, they "pre-optimized" against that failure mode by ensuring they were building for a community they deeply cared about.

The Weekend Project That Changed Everything

Interestingly, Mintlify wasn't an obvious winner from the start. After their previous idea "flopped the hardest," Han and his co-founder revisited a problem they'd heard about during customer interviews: documentation platforms. Despite their initial skepticism, they decided to dedicate just a weekend to building something they'd always wanted as developers.

"Let's give it two days, you know, for a weekend because we weren't sure about it," Han recalls. "Let's just, as developers, build the thing that we would have always loved."

That weekend project would become Mintlify, and their unique insight was simple but powerful: a focus on "developer obsession." While other platforms tried to remove developers from the documentation process, Mintlify bet on them, creating a platform that embraced developers as both the creators and consumers of documentation.

Getting the First Customers

Mintlify's first customer was literally Han's roommate, another YC founder. After building the prototype, Han ported the roommate's existing docs to Mintlify, showed him the before and after, and then—without waiting for a lengthy decision process—simply installed it for him by changing his DNS settings.

What's remarkable is that at this stage, Mintlify lacked even basic functionality. "It was at the time, the most crappiest version it could possibly have been, which was just like a static site basically," Han admits. They didn't even have functionality for users to make updates—that took another three weeks to build after launch.

Scaling with a Tiny Team

Today, Mintlify serves over 5,000 companies with just 16 employees. Han notes that their small team size is "very small if you're working with 5,000 different companies," making recruiting one of their top priorities.

How do they manage this scale with such a small team? Han believes it comes down to product fundamentals: "You build a good product, and you focus on the fundamentals of the product. And turns out you really don't need that many people to do it."

They're also leveraging AI for efficiency. Han shared an experiment where they hired one technical person who set up AI agents for customer support, becoming "not only the first but also the last hire" for that function. "A lot of the support now is partially, if not fully, automated," he explains.

Why Work at Mintlify?

When recruiting, Han describes Mintlify as "a startup on steroids" that takes the typical startup characteristics—high ownership, high responsibility, and moving fast—and turns them "into overdrive."

Han elaborates: "We very much also believe in having a small team. We believe in having individuals who, when they come in, they're able to own products and own projects."

Beyond ownership, empathy forms a core part of their culture—both within the team and toward customers. "We're a very customer-obsessed company. We take each and every customer that we work with very seriously, and we prioritize their requests," Han explains.

This customer focus isn't just a nice-to-have; it's essential to their business. Han compares Mintlify to "a white dress shirt" for companies—it needs to look perfect because it's the public face of their products. When something goes wrong, even minor incidents can feel serious because documentation is so critical to their customers' operations.

"Your communication strategy of your product is part of the product," Han says. "Imagine what happens if Stripe docs go down for a day... It's like a step degree away from the product not being there at all."

The Future: AI and Self-Maintaining Content

Looking ahead, Han believes AI will fundamentally change how documentation is created and maintained. "Docs are 50% for humans, 50% for LLMs," he notes, and predicts it will shift to "20-80 by the end of the year."

Han has "a very strong belief that by the end of the year, the idea of self-maintaining, self-updating content is gonna be a thing." This shift is influencing Mintlify's product roadmap as they aim to lead this transformation.

Lessons for Builders

Han's journey with Mintlify offers valuable takeaways for founders, job seekers, and recruiters:

For Founders:

• Build for an audience you deeply care about—it will sustain you through difficult times
• Don't dismiss weekend projects or ideas you're skeptical about—they might become your biggest success
• Focus on product fundamentals, and you may need fewer people than you think
• In rapidly changing markets, stay rooted in the problem you're solving, not the specific solution

For Job Seekers:

• Look for companies where you connect with the mission and the users
• If you value ownership and impact, smaller teams often provide more opportunities
• Ask about how companies are adapting to AI and automation—it could affect your role
• Consider whether a company's pace and level of responsibility match your preferences

For Recruiters:

• Candidates who show passion for the end users may have more staying power
• Small teams can offer candidates unprecedented levels of ownership
• Technical candidates who can work effectively with AI may replace entire traditional teams
• Empathy for customers can be as important as technical skills in customer-facing products

Final Thoughts

Mintlify's success comes from being "rooted in a problem less so than a solution." As Han puts it, their mission is about "empowering builders," with documentation being just one aspect of that broader vision.

In a world of rapid technological change, this flexibility is crucial. Han explains that Mintlify focuses on the core problem of empowering developers, not just their current solution: "In a world where people can just telepathically get all the information about how to work with Stripe's SDK... maybe that's what we would be building then." This metaphor illustrates how Mintlify stays ready to evolve as technology changes - even if future solutions look radically different from documentation as we know it today.

By staying focused on the developers they serve while remaining adaptable about serving them, Mintlify has positioned itself at the forefront of a rapidly evolving landscape—making it not just a successful company but an exciting place to work.