Effectiveness of Help Centers

Being an independent developer, one wall I came up against was explaining procedures to users.

The project I have been building has a fairly difficult setup process for users.
They have to setup Twilio and copy over the API keys. This may sound simple but I saw a lot users sign up and never complete the account setup process.

As I have a full time job, I do not have the time to hop onto calls with users and explain how to setup accounts or perform other actions. The obvious solution for this was a Help Center with articles on how to perform common actions.

Instead of going with a paid solution like intercom, I decided to roll my own basic Help Center solution . And I was pleasantly surprised by the result.

Till December I saw that no user had completed setup and zero orders were placed via the app. I added the Help Center on 28th December. In January I saw 15 orders placed. The number might be low, but at least it's not zero anymore.