Frends

At Frends, documentation had become a liability. Years of contributions from different people, minimal maintenance, and a platform that didn't fit the team's workflow had left their docs outdated, duplicated, and hard to navigate.

When Product Manager Mikko Sairo decided to start over, the goal wasn’t just a better editor, it was to build a sustainable documentation practice from the ground up.

Instead of migrating existing content, the team made a deliberate choice: rebuild everything on a platform aligned with how they actually wanted to work.

Starting from scratch — by design

The old platform had accumulated structural debt that was hard to unwind. Content existed in multiple places, pages were stale, and the tooling felt limiting. Rather than migrating the mess, Frends made a deliberate call: rebuild everything from scratch on a platform that would support how they actually wanted to work.

The criteria wasn’t complicated, but it was specific. Mikko wanted clean published docs out of the box — modern layout, good navigation, proper table of contents — without having to configure everything from scratch. He wanted an editor that felt natural, not one he had to work around. And critically, he needed a single source of truth: content written once, reusable elsewhere, with no duplication.

GitBook's reusable content feature, combined with the overall editing experience, made the decision straightforward.

"The choice really came down to small details — how easy it was to create and rearrange pages, copy-paste images into the editor. Small quality-of-life things. With well-working AI search and content creation on top of that, the choice was pretty easy."

GitHub Sync as infrastructure

For Frends — a modern iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) — the ability to integrate their documentation platform was a must.

GitHub Sync fit naturally into that mindset. It gave them easy content export and import, a built-in backup, and a foundation for automation. The team is currently building an internal pipeline that pulls externally managed, structured JSON data, converts it to markdown, and pushes it through GitHub into GitBook automatically. The result was a dedicated section of their docs that stays current without manual intervention.

For a company that sells integration capabilities to its customers, running their docs on a platform they can integrate themselves helps them be consistent with their product philosophy.

Rethinking what documentation needs to do

The most significant shift wasn't in tooling. It was about redefined documentation itself.

Early in the rebuild, the team realized they didn't need to document every possible combination of features and use case. Instead, they could write enough for GitBook's AI assistant to understand the product, and let it guide users from there.

"We can write enough to make the AI understand the topic, and let the AI assistant fill any gaps. The documentation writing process turned from creating the perfect set of documentation to something closer to teaching the AI our product."

That shift has changed how Frends approaches new documentation work. An upcoming project involves writing best practice snippets for their low-code platform — covering feature combinations, configurations, and what to avoid. Rather than expecting users to read through every permutation, they let GitBook Assistant surface what's relevant to them in their specific situation.

GitBook Assistant stood out in their evaluation by staying grounded in Frends' own docs: It answered with confidence when the answer was there, and was honest when it wasn't.

The impact shows up in the metrics

Since switching to GitBook, one number stands out: page views dropped. Visitor counts stayed flat, but users were reaching the right content faster, with fewer clicks.

That shift is visible in community behavior too. Repetitive, basic questions have largely disappeared. What's surfaced in their community now tends to be edge cases and complex issues — the kind of questions that genuinely haven't been experienced yet.

For the internal team, the experience of creating content has been a consistent point of feedback. With GitBook's review flow in place, Frends is expanding the number of editors contributing to the docs — something that would have been harder to manage on the previous platform.

“Our goal is to empower our experts to contribute more to our docs while keeping the established quality and style consistent. A review flow lets us open up the process to more of the team, with a collaborative step that ensures everything is sharp before it goes live.”

What came after the decision

One thing Mikko flagged as harder to evaluate before committing: the quality of support. It turned out to be one of the things he values most.

A few early bugs were resolved quickly, with good communication throughout. Feature requests were acknowledged and, in several cases, shipped. The roadmap continued to align with what the team needed.

That kind of experience is hard to price into a tooling decision, but it compounds over time.

Want to build documentation that stays accurate, reduces support load, and fits naturally into your team’s workflow?

Start your own GitBook space today and see what AI-powered documentation can look like.