Two years post-launch, Mintlify now powers developer documentation for over 5,000 companies, reaching more than 2 million unique monthly visitors. Nearly all of the fastest-growing companies in AI are customers, including Anthropic, Scale, Cursor and Pinecone, and true to their roots, Mintlify is consistently ranked among the most popular products for fellow YC companies.

What should be an open secret: Mintlify’s trajectory is no overnight success, but rather directly attributable to the decades-long track record that Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee have of building products to solve problems.

Build, Iterate; Build, Iterate

In middle school, Han realized his classmates were having trouble managing their class timetables. He tuned in to YouTube coding tutorials and pieced together a simple first mobile app. Fourteen days of App Store review later, Han helped classmates download it in the cafeteria at lunch.

For Han, that moment was vivid magic: people were using something he built – and their lives were a little better because of it. A cavalcade of apps followed in the years after, that helped cover parts of his high school and college tuition.

Hahnbee grew up with a similarly strong motivation to help others, which she credits a religious upbringing. However, it took several attempts as an ambitious teen to figure out what professional form that would take: Hahnbee thought she would be a doctor, for example, but volunteering at a hospital quickly clarified that path wasn’t right. It wasn’t until college that she discovered how software brought joy and opportunity – including at Duolingo, where she could see technology helping people learn and communicate.

Those experiences taught both of them that you can solve problems by building, and sometimes you just have to try again until you get to the right answer. Those early lessons were–and remain–foundational to how both Han and Hahnbee approach Mintlify.

Developer Helpers

Han and Hahnbee met in the Cornell Design & Tech Initiative, where they built a course planning app together – still available and used by ~50% of Cornell’s undergraduate students every semester. Han left school for a semester to build Foodful, a cloud-based monitoring system for dairy cows; the idea quickly ran dry, but Han took away the lesson that he wanted to work on problems he personally experienced. The two reunited to launch Pe•ple, a community management platform that they ultimately sold to a venture-backed company.

Along the way, Han and Hahnbee found themselves constantly encountering challenges that would impede their progress as developers; as graduation approached, they decided to commit to solving these problems for others. According to Han, “I’d go as far as saying that Hahnbee and I started with an audience that we wanted to serve rather than a category, or even a market. We cared about developers and we cared about empowering them to build something because that's how Hahnbee and I came to be die-hard builders ourselves.”

Landing on Documentation

In the process of bringing Mintlify to life, Han and Hahnbee started with a list of consistent problems to solve for fellow devs. From there, they ended up zeroing in on the frustrations tied to writing and maintaining documentation, not to mention reading and understanding that documentation as users.

They launched several approaches, starting with a copilot (“the original GPT-wrapper” as Han calls it) which could compose documentation when provided with sections of code. They also tried to create a CI/CD system for documentation, which would run tests and flag when docs became out of date due to changes in the underlying sections of code.

Despite taking a practical, methodical and strategic approach to building, most products felt tough to sell. Han and Hahnbee went to great lengths to provide all of the setup – with white-glove service throughout – and users still wouldn’t really use it. They suspected acquaintances and friends signed up to be nice, rather than because it solved a real problem.

They didn’t see light at the end of the tunnel until Han and Hahnbee began building a platform for hosting documentation. Not long before, Stripe had set a new standard by custom-building deep, usable and high-quality documentation. It rocked the world with a better user experience, and collaboration and discoverability built in, but few could afford the same time investment in an in-house platform.

Han reflected, “We quickly went from building stuff that we had to beg developers and engineers to use to, suddenly, offering a demo for something we built where the same group said ‘yes, how do we get started tomorrow?’”

Developers First

Early on, Han and Hahnbee made a product bet informed by their own experiences, and designed for engineers first. Rather than building a what-you-see-is-what-you-get editor for non-technical team members, for example, Mintlify focused on allowing developers to write and edit everything in markdown, while leveraging version control in GitHub.

They’ve continued to move quickly in the years since launch, adding deep functionality including signed-in personalization, customizations and interactive API playgrounds. An ideal documentation experience is the core platform every developer-centric company needs, but there are many more features and products, such as analytics, that help teams drive more and deeper customer adoption. Recently, they shipped “chat with docs” AI features and introduced the ability to use Mintlify as a knowledge base.

Not every new release will hit the mark immediately, but the key is to keep trying. In Han’s words: “The beauty of trying many things – and failing many times – is that success is put into sharp perspective. Successfully delivering for builders will happen, but it will manifest in small things like the way users react, how quickly they swipe their credit cards, how excited they are to talk to you about it and how swiftly they return to try something else.”

Today, Han and Hahnbee are also applying their experience to engineer their own company culture. Their engineering team has just a single recurring meeting each week. They regularly draw value from more informal communication gleaned from being in the office five days a week. Han and Hanbee co-host regular “docs + donuts” sessions, where everyone gathers around a table with donuts (or cake) to review user requests and test Mintlify’s product suite. The main goal is to surface opportunities to resolve bugs, be responsive to customer needs and explore their own product from a customer perspective.

Looking Forward

Hahnbee and Han are founders who “get” engineers. Hahnbee explains, “We’re resonating with devs and engineers beyond the hard-won use and testing of our products because that’s who Han and I are at our core. You simply can’t fake that because in addition to coding and bug fixing, sniffing out inauthenticity is a top dev skill.”

Over the next five years, we look forward to seeing how Han and Hanhbee double down on improving the lives of developers. Coding and software development will take countless forms in the future, and AI will enter the picture in new ways throughout the development cycle, but the one guaranteed constant will be Mintlify’s culture of understanding what builders actually need, shipping products to solve their problems and iterating until they get it right.