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Launch HN: Theneo (YC W22) – Generate Stripe-Style API Docs

154 pointsby arobakidabout 3 years ago
Hi HN, we are Ana and Maria, co-founders of Theneo, an AI tool that generates Stripe-like API docs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theneo.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;theneo.io&#x2F;</a>). Our ML models take care of tedious manual work in generating and publishing API docs, making them much easier to produce—less technically demanding for writers, and less writing-intensive for developers. Here&#x27;s a demo video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467</a>.<p>I’ve been working with APIs for the past seven years, and the documentation process has been consistently the most painful. Nobody wants to have to do it, it’s filled with gruntwork and repetition, and takes a ton of time. Developers are not technical writers and documenting is never their priority, let alone making docs look nice. But for the reader—often the very same developers, when they’re consuming others’ work—it makes such a difference. How many times have you just looked at the API doc and decided “nope not going to integrate”? That was the case for me and my team many times. Developer communities often complain that even the most well-known companies’ public API docs are incomprehensible, and internal API docs are neglected even more.<p>The gruntwork and repetition are clues that there’s room for software to do a lot of this work, and particularly for ML models to help produce the content.<p>We want to allow anyone to create great docs without having a whole team of writers and designers, so we researched what makes Stripe, Square, and a few other API docs so great. First, it was definitely the content. Second, it was the user-friendly interface: layout, colors, scrolls, how easy it was to find information and give feedback. We talked to developers and technical writers to understand their pain points. Then we took all that research along with Maria’s experience as an ML Engineer at Microsoft, Deepmind, Google, and Facebook to come up with Theneo, a Technical Writer AI Assistant.<p>Theneo is like having a technical writer next to you. You upload your API collection (JSON, YAML, etc.). Our models automatically load and analyze API requests, methods, endpoints, request body, parameters, etc., then run some quality checks (e.g. for grammar errors) and give you content suggestions for the section names and descriptions.<p>API docs generated by Theneo are user-friendly, beautiful and interactive. we automatically generate all of your API requests in multiple languages and make it interactive for the reader. Here is an example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.theneo.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;theneo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.theneo.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;theneo</a><p>For internal API docs, we created several integrations that make it easy to create and maintain API documentation: Postman Integration - you can pull all of your collections and use them in Theneo; Github Actions - you can define how and when you want API docs to be updated automatically (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marketplace&#x2F;actions&#x2F;theneo-api-documentation);" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;marketplace&#x2F;actions&#x2F;theneo-api-documentat...</a> Visual Studio Code (coming soon) - by the end of this month you will be able to create and preview your API documentation right in your IDE. We do not use your private API docs for ML training.<p>You can see a quick overview of how our setup works here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.loom.com&#x2F;share&#x2F;792fc6008a914d068ff8b34994fbc467</a><p>We are coming up with a lot of new integrations and features to make it easy for developers to generate and maintain internal or public-facing API docs. We would love to hear from you, what you are currently using, what you love or don’t love about those solutions, what stops you from having high-quality docs for your APIs, and anything else you’d like to share!

31 comments

csmpltnabout 3 years ago
Could you add a way for people to test the product without paying you anything or providing you with any details? A section in your website where I can paste some API declaration I have laying around, and can see the docs you&#x27;ll generate for me?<p>I really need a quick way to test whether this holds any water, and I don&#x27;t want to provide you with my details to do it. If it doesn&#x27;t work for my simple example, it won&#x27;t work for my larger project - and I don&#x27;t want to waste that time to begin with.<p>The best way to beat skepticism is to let people try the tech out and see for themselves that it actually works. There&#x27;s too much &quot;hotdog&#x2F;not hotdog&quot; tech in this space already.<p>Edit: I see there&#x27;s a tiny &quot;try free&quot; button hiding at the bottom of the page. After clicking that, you&#x27;re asked to provide your personal details. Then you&#x27;re redirected to a page where you&#x27;re suddenly asked to pay 20$ and sign-up with your credit card. This is pure nonsense. Enough with these dark patterns already.
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naivabout 3 years ago
You can easily generate API docs for free with Redoc (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redocly.github.io&#x2F;redoc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;redocly.github.io&#x2F;redoc&#x2F;</a>) , SwaggerUI (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swagger.io&#x2F;tools&#x2F;swagger-ui&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;swagger.io&#x2F;tools&#x2F;swagger-ui&#x2F;</a>) and many more so I am on the other side and think the the pricing is too high, especially the premium to use a custom domain.<p>What is the advantage of using your product to what is available for free except some CSS tweaks?
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rsstackabout 3 years ago
Do you support GraphQL APIs?<p>ETA: It would be helpful if you would have an example of the APIs where you highlight what was manually done by a person and what was automatically generated. The example docs (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.theneo.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;theneo&#x2F;theneo_api_reference" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.theneo.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;theneo&#x2F;theneo_api_reference</a>) look like any API documentation system, it isn&#x27;t clear what&#x27;s your product&#x27;s added value.<p>Edit 2: I just watched Ana&#x27;s video from your post here, that&#x27;s not on your homepage. It is 10x better than your homepage at explaining what you do :) I&#x27;m sold.
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nyellinabout 3 years ago
Hey, I&#x27;m possibly a target customer (not sure) and I don&#x27;t know what stripe-style means.<p>Just a single data point, but perhaps reconsider how you describe it.<p>We develop an open source observability and automation platform for Kubernetes and our docs are at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.robusta.dev&#x2F;master&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.robusta.dev&#x2F;master&#x2F;</a><p>Key questions for me:<p>* Can we easily migrate from Sphinx and RST?<p>* What do the docs look like?<p>* Can we make documenting non rest APIs more interactive? (E.g our yaml automations)
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Sp0tlight0about 3 years ago
Do you support on-premise deployments? We&#x27;re desperately searching for a tool which we can deploy at our internal servers that takes care about everything without connecting to the internet, cause every cloud operator is a no-go for our usecases &#x2F; our sector. Unfortunately the majority of tools that do more than displaying an API (swagger, redoc, etc.) is always 3rd-party hosted &#x2F; SaaS.<p>Maybe someone else is also aware of any tooling we might try to streamline our api doc experience more. The cost are no issue for us, but on-prem + api doc seems to be an rather rare field.
sdolidze3about 3 years ago
Theneo is beginning for something big and game-changing. I&#x27;m less interested in what it can do right now, but what its full-fledged version will be capable of.<p>API documentation has always been a hassle, no matter which tool or service I&#x27;ve tried they always tried to solve the small, isolated issue, instead of an end-to-end solution.<p>Theneo&#x27;s promise to use ML to automate the most painful steps of a technical document is refreshing and exciting. I wish you the best of luck and hope this is a beginning of a new platform of a full-stack solution instead of an ad-hoc one.
muzyahabout 3 years ago
Congrats on the launch. I often use specialized libraries that rely on hardware and constantly changing based on some development of both hardware or software. What is really frustrating is using code and then discover after weeks later it was deprecated, and the library developers didn&#x27;t bother to update the community about it. Having auto-feature like flagging an API as deprecated while coding say in visual studio would be of great help. Can your tool help with that?<p>thanks!
Hakeemmidanabout 3 years ago
Your pricing seems way too low (in my opinion). Creating API docs is not very common, so your customers might not be that many. So you need to be more aggressive on pricing to stay sustainable. But I could be totally wrong.<p>Also, on an unrelated side note, SEO seems very important here (for public facing API docs), so I&#x27;d put some emphasis on that as well. Good search mechanisms are also of great help in API docs. So I&#x27;d try to knock that out of the park as well.
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milaniabout 3 years ago
Headsup: The link to Github Action does not work.<p>The difficult part for me is maintaining the docs over time. I can generate 80% of what theneo does automatically in swagger style. The remaining 20% (manual editing, what your platform offers) is the missing part with my current solution, yet I cannot see how theneo solves updating most of the doc and placing back the manual edits.
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dshainabout 3 years ago
Congrats! I&#x27;m just enjoying Theneo. Now I can use my API doc screenshot as wallpaper to my phone ;d Keep going! &lt;3.14159
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adamhearnabout 3 years ago
Do you own the url theneo.com? I noticed the documentation for the demo [0] uses this url, but the url doesn&#x27;t redirect to your site.<p>[0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.theneo.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;theneo&#x2F;theneo_api_reference" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;app.theneo.io&#x2F;demo&#x2F;theneo&#x2F;theneo_api_reference</a>
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vincentmarleabout 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve been looking for something like this, but it seems to be missing a crucial feature: automatic SDK generation. Writing and maintaining SDKs is a lot of work for a small team. Great documentation is one part of a good developer experience, the other one is creating easy-to-try SDKs. Is this on the roadmap?
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kazanzabout 3 years ago
I&#x27;ve been looking for a tool like this for the last month. I was going to use Redoc.ly but the interface is unintuitive to the point of being unusable. So I signed up for Theneo immediately...<p>Unfortunately whenever I import my Open-API spec to Theneo I get a success message, but it never becomes a usable collection.<p>Can you help me out?
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thiscatisabout 3 years ago
Congrats on the launch, we&#x27;re currently using <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoplight.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stoplight.io&#x2F;</a> which seems to be a bit more feature-complete but lacks the &quot;assistant&quot; bit I feel your team is focusing on more.
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wizwit999about 3 years ago
I like what you&#x27;re doing but, as your target customer, to be honest, your docs don&#x27;t look very beautiful, despite that being your selling point!<p>Also, I&#x27;m not sure what the ML does here, is it like input open Api model -&gt; output doc?. I&#x27;m sure you have to still add information manually.<p>Congrats on the launch!
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lyimeabout 3 years ago
Congrats on the launch. Interested<p>Our docs are at developers.terminal49.com<p>- I&#x27;d like to host the docs on our &#x2F;api&#x2F;docs instead of subdomain<p>- how good is your SEO?<p>- based on how we want host (see 1) how does deep linking work?<p>- how customizable is the design?<p>Akshay at terminal49.com
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Aeolunabout 3 years ago
Pricing this by user seems a bit weird. If you are going to do usage based pricing shouldn’t you price by size of the API?<p>I dunno, my API stays the same, but because we have 25 employees instead of 5 we pay a 5x premium?
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melaniaabout 3 years ago
Congrats on the launch! I&#x27;ve only used tools like SwaggerUI before and it was tedious to write and maintain documentation, so very keen to be trying out Theneo!
datvalabout 3 years ago
Do you guys plan on any more integrations besides postman? Migrating documentation is little challenging and streamlining this would be helpful.
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buttsmcbuttsabout 3 years ago
Damn these docs are gorgeous. Is there a free plan I can play around with? Would love to import some docs on this platform
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poshkmanabout 3 years ago
I love the product. And I have listened to the founders on several Georgian podcasts. They are super inspiring!
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samtukeabout 3 years ago
We are fans of the clean docs experience this produces. Works great with Postman.
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ninutsanabout 3 years ago
Way to go! Excited to see this tool going on scale for thousands of developers!
jaequeryabout 3 years ago
The demo page is just blank
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pypy1about 3 years ago
Great product and great customer service, Theneo 1 &lt;3.
leirbagarcabout 3 years ago
Really nice product! Documentation in a new level!
jn31415about 3 years ago
Do you happen to be hiring for customer support?
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Natikudaabout 3 years ago
Congratulations! Great work.
SudiptaDevabout 3 years ago
Congrats!
youdjidaneabout 3 years ago
love the product, highly recommend
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techtitan2000about 3 years ago
How does this compare to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readme.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;readme.io</a>?<p>Seems like a less developed version of it?
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