Build Club Spotlight #4: 📃Userdoc with Founder Chris Rickard

🚀 Every tech person from Melbourne to San Francisco understands the struggles of:

• poorly written user stories,

• vaguely defined acceptance criteria,

• and uninspiring, shallow user personas.

User documentation forms the bedrock of most software tools worldwide, yet it's often a tedious task that takes time away from building and innovating.

Welcome to the Build Club Spotlight Series, where we highlight some of the most promising Aussie AI startups!

This week, we're featuring Chris Rickard, the founder of Userdoc —a tool designed to streamline the creation of detailed and valuable user documentation for your software.

Take a sneak peek at what Userdoc can do below👇. Then, we'll chat with Chris about his journey and the inception of Userdoc.

Let’s dive in!

What is your background and your story of founding Userdoc?

I ran a software consultancy for 8 years, building big boring solutions for big boring businesses. Don't get me wrong - I loved it, it's just the stuff we built was not "sexy" - it was mission-critical, with lots of business rules-type software. When I started the business I was a software engineer, but as I grew out of our team I played the role of business analyst mixed with a product owner - as our clients needed help with building great software requirements, so that became a passion of mine.

A couple of years ago I sold my consultancy, and took some time off to travel Australia with my wife. When thinking of what I wanted to do next, I wanted it to be a SaaS product, and I wanted to use unique insights I felt I had - and that's how Userdoc was born.

How would you describe your product offerings to a new customer and to an AI engineer?

New customer: Userdoc helps you build detailed software requirements in minutes - not days. Use our AI copilot to collaborate on what needs to be built, integrate with your existing tools and knowledge - and build the source of truth for your systems.

AI Engineer: Userdoc builds software requirements leveraging a bunch of RAG and some knowledge graphing. Two core sources of knowledge: customers' existing business knowledge, and industry best practices (there is a lot of this historically published with software requirements)

How has the journey been so far - how has Userdoc evolved?

Version 1 didn't have any AI - it was purely a Requirements management tool, that centralised where your software requirements lived, and integrated into your project management tools. That took me around 4 months to build, and I had about 5 paying customers.

I then integrated some basic AI with GPT-3 to generate user stories, it was super basic, I did it in one weekend. But it had a large impact, a bunch more customers signed up - and so augmenting software requirements with AI became the focus.

Userdoc now has many customers, ranging from small startups to very large enterprise consultancies. We've recently been accredited with SOC2 data security and privacy certification, as many of our larger leads have requested it.

In 2023 I was part-time on Userdoc, and one large enterprise client took a lot of my time. But in 2024 Userdoc has been accepted into the U.S.-based TinySeed accelerator, which comes with a cash injection, and it's a perfect time for it. This not only allows me to go full-time but also hire some integral resources to accelerate growth - so I believe things will look quite different again in 6 months' time.

What advice would you give to aspiring AI builders?

AI is no different to any technology, in that you need to get fast feedback from end users and keep experimenting until you find what works.
What is different, is that AI is moving so rapidly, so if anything, you need to move faster and make the smartest use of your time.

How can our audience help you build and grow Userdoc?

Any introductions to large software companies are appreciated, as Userdoc really helps bigger companies the most, those who have complex software systems, where the low-level details of existing features are just too much for people to keep in their heads. This is where Userdoc's AI can act as a business analyst copilot and truly shine.

Follow Userdoc’s Journey:

Website: https://userdoc.fyi/

Chris on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrickard/

Userdoc on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/userdoc/

Liked this post and want to be featured next? Reach out to Daniel Malkinson or [email protected] 

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