HubSpot moved from a custom docs platform to Mintlify, cutting publishing time to two or three times faster. The shift prioritized content over infrastructure, optimizing docs for both developers and AI agents through shorter paragraphs, structured headings, and consistent terminology. Integrated API references reduced context switching and freed engineering teams to focus on developer growth.
Chapters
The world of developer relations and just enabling developers is fundamentally changing. What's changed in just the past few years is that now it's a matter of both enabling the developers, but also LM agents, which in turn goes ahead and enables and empowers even more developers.
Documentation is the first impression. It's the first place that developers will interact with us, no matter where they are in their developer journey. And so we have to get that right. My team always prioritized documentation, but we did it kind of in a responsive, reactive, passive way.
We were spending about 90% of our engineering efforts on building and maintaining a DOCS platform. And that meant that any feature we wanted to have on the Doc site is something that we would have to build ourselves. Which often meant that onboarding content or other content wasn't as prioritized. We often just had like static homepages and checklists, but they weren't used that much.
Hi, I'm Han, I'm one of the co founders of Mintlify. When we started working with HubSpot, it was very, very obvious that there was quite a bar for us to hit in order to deliver an exceptional developer experience that exceeded what they had before.
If I had to explain to a developer in one sentence what I'd say is this project allowed us to make the content a priority versus the platform, and it's as simple as that.
Without needing to maintain a documentation platform, our team is able to increase our scope from just documentation and onboarding to the new developer growth team.
Companies are pioneering things like LLMs Txt, which is a new protocol for helping documentation or content be really well optimized for LLM agents. So if you're asking a question about HubSpot stocks in ChatGPT, in Claude, even in cursor, it will pull the latest documentation leveraging the automated elements. Txt.
Our documentation needs to be set up to satisfy journeys as they are today, but also thinking about how it looks when somebody is consuming documentation in their IDE via MCP, etc. Or wanting to ask questions or have conversations with AI to determine even what they're going to build.
We're writing documentation to be consumable by developers directly, but also easy for AI agents to use as context. That means things like shorter paragraphs, structured headings, code examples, consistent terminology, things that are valuable to developers that are skimming the site for content, as well as AI models that are ingesting the content.
The one thing that we saw from HubSpot that after working with now over 10,000 companies, I have Never seen. Actually built into a bespoke custom platform was the intricacies towards the details of the API references. It actually used our search API endpoint to actually leverage their own MCP servers so developers can directly go ahead and make queries, not even test out the APIs using the API playground. And the advantage you get here is again, there's no more context switching. You can stay in like the same workflow that they're already in. You can talk about an AI chatbot or you can talk about an MCP server, but really, really what makes a big difference for enabling developers are the accumulation of the thousands of details that go in together to make something great. And I think that's what HubSpot has really nailed.
I think for me a big aha moment was just hearing from our tech writers that they're able to publish docs two to three times faster on my than on our previous platform. We were able to support all of the betas we released this year so easily and we were also able to protect the site, keep our betas documentation confidential, while also giving our beta participants the most up to date documentation to support their building.
One way to know if docs are doing their job is if I have a conversation with somebody and I go, hey, did you see our new documentation? They go, yeah, I know I went there, but I didn't really think about it too much. That's the best compliment we could ever get.
We want this space to grow with developers, to be a source or a space that developers continuously come back to in their journey.
Documentation is a representative of how seriously how important the developer experience is to you. And developers, whether they know it or not, are forming an opinion about how you prioritize their experience through the documentation. So by making content a priority, by having a state of the art platform to deliver that content to our developers, we are going to increase the confidence and instill the sense that we are a platform and we are there for you as our platform grows and you are building for HubSpot end users.
