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Customer story

Dub scales support for 48,000+ customers with Mintlify

For Dub's founder, performant, in-depth docs are vital to building a great developer experience and scaling an early-stage company. Learn why Steven Tey chose Mintlify to build it out.

About

Open-source link management infrastructure for modern marketing teams. Founded in January 2024.

dub.co/docs

Backed by

Undisclosed.

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From a personal side-project to a fast-growing company, Dub's founder and CEO, Steven Tey, believes in building a great developer experience (DX) — and it starts with documentation.

Key takeaways

Why Mintlify?

Mintlify's documentation and API playground allows Dub to easily provide its users with a great developer experience.

Benefits

  • OpenAPI-compatible interactive docs
  • Cross-language support
  • Pre-built UI components and AI chat
  • Seamless integration with GitHub
  • Dark mode

Impact

  • In-depth documentation made easy
  • Increase developer experience
  • Enable community contributions
If you're building an API, Mintlify is the perfect docs platform to provide stellar DX to your users.
Steven Tey, Founder & CEO

Building a stellar developer experience since Day 1

When Steven Tey launched Dub, the vision was ambitious: reimagining the role of links – one of the most foundational pieces of the web – from being a simple "resource locator" (URL) to a full attribution engine – visualizing the user journey from the first click to the final conversion event.

The logical next step was to enable users to programmatically create short links via a REST API.

So, when Steven started working on Dub's API, he immediately built out the documentation and API playground with Mintlify.

Mintlify provides a stellar experience for your users that you don't need to spend a month building and polishing.
Steven Tey, Founder & CEO

Early on, Steven fell in love with some features:

  • OpenAPI-compatible interactive docs
  • Cross-language support
  • Dark mode

"Best part? Your users can test out your endpoints directly in the docs, Postman-style," Steven added.

Dub's Docs — powered by Mintlify.

Challenge: scaling support for 48,000+ customers

The personal side-project turned into a business in January 2024 and has scaled since to over 48,000 customers and more than 4,000 active companies.

Documentation remains vital for both technical and non-technical users.

Building a performant, in-depth documentation site is vital to scale support as an early-stage company. We invested in it early — it has returned dividends for us.
Steven Tey, Founder & CEO

Solution: building a performant, in-depth documentation site

From Steven's perspective, building a performant documentation site can be boiled down to three main features:

  • An API playground
  • Pre-built UI components
  • In-depth integration with GitHub
From precise anchor links to code snippets to dark mode, Mintlify provides everything you need to create delightful docs.
Steven Tey, Founder & CEO

API playground

"An API playground is indispensable for us," Steven said, yet building it from scratch and maintaining it could be extremely time-consuming. Mintlify makes it easy.

Mintlify's OpenAPI-compatible interactive playground is an environment where you can make requests and preview endpoints. This enables users to interact with your API.

Ask AI.

Pre-built UI components

The pre-built UI components help you set up beautiful documentation out of the box. Most recently, Steven particularly enjoyed using the <Steps /> component for a self-hosting guide. "You can create gorgeous step-by-step instructions for your docs in just a few lines of code," Steven said.

<Steps>
  <Step title="First Step">
    These are instructions or content that only pertain to the first step.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Second Step">
    These are instructions or content that only pertain to the second step.
  </Step>
  <Step title="Third Step">
    These are instructions or content that only pertain to the third step.
  </Step>
</Steps>
Step-by-step guide on how to self-host Dub.co.

GitHub integration

For an open-source company like Dub, enabling community contributions is key. Steven explains: "GitHub issues and discussions are like a feature request board for us." The team recently moved Dub's API docs to a separate monorepo for faster deployments, and Mintlify's in-depth integration with GitHub makes it seamless. The feedback buttons enabled in the structure of the documentation site allowed 150+ commits in a month.

Dub's Docs on GitHub.

An API playground, pre-built UI components, and a seamless GitHub integration are core features of Dub's API docs. To sum up, Steven puts it simply: "I'm absolutely loving the product and experience."

If you're building an API, Mintlify is the perfect docs platform to provide stellar DX to your users.
Steven Tey, Founder & CEO

Wrapping up

Want to set up docs like Dub? We'll migrate your docs for free as a part of our Pro plan — get started here.