We’re a small team with a big heart

2018

Marybeth, Pete, and Stephen start the year off with a bang with a mini-company trip to Disney World. Catherine and Marybeth meet up in May for Write the Docs Portland. The entire team of five meets in London and train hops through Europe for Write the Docs Prague.

We hire Kate, another former customer and evangelist, who just completed hiking the Appalachian Trail. She takes over from Lakshmi.

We're now GDPR compliant and Privacy Shield certified. We start offering an Enterprise plan and paid professional services.

We also branch out a bit and start sponsoring Jacob Moses’ The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast. We love the title as well as Jacob’s excellent focus on issues that matter to a lot of our users.

We release a total rewrite of our search functionality, built on Elasticsearch.

Customer count mildly increases; enterprise and paid professional services increase revenues.

2019

Again, we start the year off with a bang with a partial-company retreat to Disney World (Marybeth, Pete, Kate, and Stephen), where we meet Jerrard, who we hire later in the year to help with support and professional services.

We hire our first additional developer in March. Spicer is from Portland, Oregon, adding another time zone to our owl parliament’s reach.

Catherine, Kate, and Marybeth meet Spicer in person at Write the Docs Portland.

The Write the Docs community keeps on giving; Marybeth hires our first information security owl from a local Write the Docs meetup. (They prefer privacy, as security owls are wont to do, so you can call them OwlSec for short!)

With the 2019 hiring, our parliament is up to 8 owls. And we officially reorganize and retitle a little, with Kate taking over the support knowledge base, release notes, and a more formalized QA process and Stephen officially becoming the head of professional services.

This year sees exciting changes on the product side as well, including the release of three major new features:

• Subscriptions: daily or weekly email notifications that your readers can opt into to receive information on new and updated articles in the categories they care about
• Version Notes: a freeform notes field available for article versions, allowing editors and reviewers to leave notes on what’s changed or what still needs to be done
• The Widget 2.0 beta release: a total rewrite and updating of our embeddable contextual help widget, with a tabbed layout and full navigation support

2020

Oh 2020, what a year you were. We like to keep things positive, so let’s begin with the best part: we have our company retreat in Steamboat Springs with nearly the entire parliament present!

The year has seen some adjustments in some of our owls' roles, and some new faces added to the parliament:

• We hire Sorin, a full time support engineer from Romania.
• Catherine starts our guest blogging program with help from Deborah, Swapnil, and Nick.
• Jerrard becomes Master of Coin and takes on ownership of our billing processes. If you've had an invoice or payment issue, you've probably talked to him!
• We hire David from Pennsylvania to help increase our development velocity.
• Deborah officially comes on board to help with our blog, social media, and (coming soon) updated API docs!
• We hire Zach, a full time support developer in New Hampshire.
• We start working with CloudButton to better streamline and scale our AWS infrastructure.

It’s a year of important milestones for us as a company, too:

• We start our B Corp journey in the midst of the pandemic.
• KnowledgeOwl turns 5! To celebrate, we conduct our first annual customer survey and are amazed by the responses.
• We also officially become a multi-media company by buying The Not-Boring Tech Writer podcast from Jacob Moses.

We consider ways that we can use KnowledgeOwl for Good, beyond the B Corp certification. This includes:

• Posting publicly about Black Lives Matter and racial equity in the United States
• Our new 2% for People and Planet donation program
• Creating a mission statement and working on a five-year vision

On the product side, the additional hiring has allowed us to focus on a number of great features, including:

• Major updates to the cookies we use and how we set them, to abide by Chrome’s new tighter cookie enforcement
• An integration with Let’s Encrypt to provide free, auto-renewing SSL certificates to all of our customers
• Ongoing improvements to Widget 2.0, which gets ever-closer to its permanent stable release (too many to reasonably link to release notes on--just trust us!)
• Creating a Recently Viewed Articles widget for use on your homepage/righthand column
• Adding KnowledgeOwl release notes and blog posts to the app dashboard, so you can keep a better eye on what we’re up to
• Tag Library updates (hidden tags; merging/creating tags in the library) and the creation of the File Label Library

2021

This year seems to be the year of structural/infrastructural changes. This includes:

• Hiring Will as a fractional COO
• Completing the first of several major infrastructure improvement projects, successfully transitioning our development and production stack to Docker

On the product side, we've been focusing on enhancing some existing features, including:

• Splitting out the hide from navigation options to have more detailed options (such as hide from home page and hide from table of contents)
• Smarter welcome emails for SAML/SSO readers
• Showing glossary terms in search results
• Creating an archived publishing status
• Adding filtering to the Readers page
• Expanding the tags filters in Manage Articles to support filtering to articles including some tags and excluding others
• In Manage Articles, adding a category filter as well as a category column
• Majorly upgrading our revision history difference comparison