Turn know-how into how-to
Record the task. Clean it up. Share the guide.
· Growth product
- 7K+
- installs
- 14%+
- sign-up conversion
- 56
- beta NPS
Overview
Writing a process guide usually meant taking screenshots one by one, annotating them, writing every instruction and doing it again when the process changed. Guide Creator recorded the workflow and assembled the first draft automatically.
I designed the Chrome extension, editor and published viewer. The product also tested a Service Hub acquisition idea: a useful guide could introduce its readers to the tool that made it, without putting a HubSpot gate in front of the person creating it.
The acquisition idea
Service Hub acquisition costs had plateaued, so the team looked for a product people would share as part of doing real work. Tools such as Tango and Scribe were growing quickly, but there was still room for a fast freemium option with simple sharing.
I mapped the jobs people hired those products for, worked with product to size a first version and made sure success included completed, shared guides—not only HubSpot sign-ups.
My scope
I led the competitor teardowns, positioning, twelve discovery interviews, three moderated usability tests and two unmoderated Maze studies. I designed the extension, editor, web viewer, empty states and branding controls, then worked through the implementation with engineering.
With marketing, I shaped the sharing loop, launch story and measurement plan so we could see whether people were making useful guides as well as entering HubSpot.
Five useful minutes beat forty perfect ones
Interviewees repeatedly chose speed over polish. A rough guide they could share after five minutes was more useful than a perfect document that took forty. PDF export and an embedded viewer were expected; GIF export was a welcome extra, not the centre of the product.
The flow became three steps: record while the extension captures screens and cursor positions; tidy the draft by editing, deleting or reordering steps; publish the hosted guide and copy its link.
Small choices that changed completion
Making the recording state impossible to miss increased task completion by 18%. Drag-to-reorder made editing faster, multiline captions came directly from beta feedback, and ‘Copy link’ became the main sharing action after every participant in one test round reached for it first.
The published viewer carried the acquisition loop, but it had to stand on its own as a useful guide. HubSpot prompts appeared after publication, never before somebody had completed the job.
Results—and the gap I would address earlier
Guide Creator reached more than 7,000 extension installs, converted over 14% of installs into HubSpot sign-ups and recorded a beta NPS of 56.
Acquisition and satisfaction beat our goals, but deeper movement into Service Hub lagged. I would bring Service Hub PMs into the work earlier, decide where a published guide belongs inside the wider product and instrument what happens after publication from day one.
Key decisions
Do not introduce HubSpot until the guide exists and is useful.
Optimise for a shareable guide in five minutes, not a perfect document.
Make the published guide useful to readers before asking them to become creators.
Let’s talk about the work.
I’d be happy to talk through the project and the decisions behind it.
Reach out