The software company that teaches other software how to explain itself

There is a particular kind of silence that follows the sentence "just read the documentation." Nobody reads the documentation. They open the app, poke at three buttons, get stuck, and file a support ticket - or worse, quietly leave. Inline Manual was built on the wager that the fix for that silence is not a thicker manual, but a thinner one that lives inside the software itself, tapping you on the shoulder at exactly the moment you get lost.

The London company has been making that wager since 2012, which in software-startup years is roughly a geological era. It sells what the industry now calls a Digital Adoption Platform - a phrase that did not really exist when founders Marek Sotak, Riki Fridrich and Vojtech Kusy started. Their pitch is unglamorous and durable: drop a small snippet into any web application and you can build interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, announcements and searchable in-app help without shipping a code change for every guide.

01 / What it doesAn operating manual that follows you around

The core idea is deceptively simple. Most software is perfectly usable once you know it, and baffling for the first twenty minutes. Inline Manual compresses those twenty minutes. A new user logs in and a walkthrough highlights the first thing to click, then the next, then the next, until the task is done. A tooltip explains the field that everyone always asks about. A checklist quietly tracks whether someone has finished the steps that make them likely to stick around.

None of this requires the customer's engineering team to be involved every time the copy changes. A product manager or support lead can build a guide, target it to a specific audience, and publish it - the way you might update a help article, except it appears in the live product instead of a knowledge base nobody visits.

Every support ticket is, in a sense, an onboarding moment that failed. Inline Manual's whole business is closing that gap before the ticket gets written.

02 / Who uses itFrom a two-person SaaS to UNICEF

The customer roster is the most surprising thing about a company this size. Inline Manual guides users inside products at eToro, Pipedrive, Sage, BigCommerce and Freshdesk. It also turns up in places software companies rarely reach - Toyota, Snap Inc, the engineering consultancy Currie & Brown, the Belgian document platform Doccle, and UNICEF. The same in-app guidance engine that a scrappy startup uses to onboard its first hundred users is running behind logos with global recognition.

Inside those organizations, the people actually building guides are rarely developers. They are product owners, customer success and support managers, marketers, and training teams - the ones who feel the pain of confused users most directly and who, historically, had to beg engineering for help.

03 / The problemThe cost of a confused user

Confusion is expensive in ways that do not show up on a single line of a spreadsheet. It shows up as support tickets, as churned trials, as features that get built and then never used because nobody discovered them, as training sessions that have to be repeated every time a new hire joins. Inline Manual's argument is that all of these are the same problem wearing different hats: the gap between what software can do and what its users understand it can do.

The company splits its work into two familiar worlds. On the customer-facing side, it handles user onboarding, feature adoption and in-app marketing - getting outside users to value. On the internal side, it handles change management and employee training - getting staff comfortable with the tools a business rolls out. Both come down to the same trick: guidance delivered in context, at the moment of need, instead of in a document read months earlier or never.

"I launch things every week through Inline Manual, saving a lot of time and money."Monika Stekrova, Customer Success Manager, LMC

04 / The productsA toolbox, not a single trick

What began as a documentation tool has grown into a spread of formats, each aimed at a different moment in a user's life inside an app.

The version control and analytics matter more than they sound. They are what turn a pile of pop-ups into something a serious team can manage - guides that can be edited, rolled back, translated, and measured, so a support manager can see exactly where users abandon a walkthrough and fix that step instead of guessing.

05 / The differenceThe quiet third option

The Digital Adoption Platform category is loud at the top. WalkMe pioneered it and went public; Pendo wraps guidance around a heavy product-analytics core; Whatfix chases large enterprises rolling out CRMs and ERPs. These are capable, expensive, enterprise-IT tools, and they sell to buyers with budgets to match.

Inline Manual sits deliberately to one side of that fight. It aims at product, support and customer success teams rather than IT procurement, and it competes on being approachable and affordable rather than exhaustive. It is the option a mid-size SaaS company reaches for when WalkMe's price tag is a non-starter but a knowledge base is not enough. That positioning is not an accident - it is a consequence of how the company is built.

06 / The modelBootstrapped, on purpose

Inline Manual has never raised venture capital. In a category defined by nine-figure rounds and an IPO, it is the founder-owned outlier - built and funded by the people who run it. The business is a straightforward B2B SaaS subscription: a free trial with no credit card, paid monthly and annual plans, and enterprise tiers for larger deployments.

That independence shapes the product. The values the team lists for itself - helpful, flexible, human, curious - read like the values every company claims, until you notice they describe a company that answers to customers rather than a board with a return to hit. Features roll out gradually, as MVPs shaped by feedback. Support is a selling point rather than a cost center to be automated away. When customers describe the company, they tend to talk less about features and more about being cared for.

"We went for Inline Manual because it's the company that most cared about Doccle."Vera Martins, Product Designer, Doccle

07 / The expertiseThree skill sets, one problem

The founding team reads like a Venn diagram drawn around the adoption problem. Marek Sotak, the CEO, is a developer, designer, illustrator and UX researcher - the rare founder who can build the thing, draw it, and study why users fumble it. Vojtech Kusy brings the engineering depth, a Ruby programmer with a systems-engineering background. Riki Fridrich rounds out the technical bench. Between customer service, employee training and application development, the team assembled the exact mix of disciplines the job requires: you cannot fix the gap between software and people unless you understand both sides.

There is something fitting about a documentation company that started with a founder introducing himself, plainly, on a bootstrappers' forum as the maker of "a new documentation tool." No fanfare, no fictional origin myth - just a problem worth solving and the patience to keep solving it for more than a decade.

08 / The market fitThe layer nobody notices when it works

The best digital adoption is invisible. You do not remember the last walkthrough that worked, because it simply got you where you were going and stepped out of the way. That is a hard thing to market and an easy thing to undervalue, which may be why the loudest companies in the category compete on dashboards and enterprise checklists instead.

Inline Manual's bet is that the invisible layer is exactly the durable one. As long as software keeps getting more capable - and therefore more confusing - somebody has to stand between the product and the person using it. For 500-plus companies, from a two-person startup to UNICEF, that somebody has been a small, self-funded team in London that decided the manual should come to you.