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.

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.

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>‍


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.

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.