There is a specific kind of workplace misery that ScreenSteps was built to erase: the moment a new employee freezes. A member is on the phone, the screen is full of fields, and the person who knows the answer is on lunch. In 2003, two brothers named Greg and Trevor DeVore were consultants who kept watching that moment happen. They went looking for software to fix it. They could not find any good enough, so they wrote their own.
That homemade tool became ScreenSteps. More than two decades later it is a small, stubbornly focused company - roughly fourteen people - whose knowledge base runs the operating procedures for banks, credit unions, farm-credit lenders, and a scattering of larger names like Cushman & Wakefield and Baxter Healthcare. It never raised a splashy venture round. It just kept solving one unglamorous problem: getting knowledge out of people's heads and into a form the next person can actually follow.
01 / WHAT IT DOESA manual you follow, not one you file
Most "knowledge base" software is really a nicer place to store documents nobody reads. ScreenSteps went the other way. It sells what it now calls a Knowledge Operations platform: step-by-step guides, decision trees, and checklists designed to be followed live, while the work is happening, rather than studied during onboarding and forgotten by Thursday.
The company's own name gives the game away. It is literal - screenshots, arranged into steps. The bet underneath it is behavioral. Instead of training employees to remember a hundred procedures, ScreenSteps trains them to find the right guide in seconds and follow it. The framework has a name, Find & Follow, and the company sells it as a method as much as a product.
Capture
An expert records a walkthrough; AI turns it into a written guide.
Certify
The guide is reviewed, approved, and marked as the single source of truth.
Find
Employee searches or opens Sidekick in the app they're already using.
Follow
They complete the task step-by-step - no memorizing, no guessing.
02 / THE CUSTOMERSWhy credit unions, of all people
ScreenSteps' customer list is not the flashy end of the software world. It leans hard into financial services: Glacier Bank, Altana Federal Credit Union, Desert Rivers Credit Union, High Plains Farm Credit, Heritage South Credit Union, AgVantis. That is not an accident. These are organizations where a frontline employee handles regulated, high-stakes tasks, where a wrong step is expensive, and where the senior teammate who knows the answer is a scarce resource.
It is also a smart place to plant a flag. A credit union's operations look a lot like the next credit union's operations. Solve it convincingly once and the guides, the language, and the reputation carry from one to the next. The focus is the strategy.
03 / THE PROBLEMThe tax nobody puts on the balance sheet
The most expensive line item in a lot of operations is invisible. It is the senior employee who spends the day being interrupted with the same questions, and the new hire who sits idle waiting for an answer. ScreenSteps' entire pitch is that this tax is optional. Put the certified answer where the work happens, and the interruptions stop.
The numbers customers report are the argument. One lender says it cut time-to-proficiency from 60 days to 15 - 87% faster. A Fortune 500 contact center reported deflecting 4,500 employee questions and saving $2.3 million. The company frames those as outcomes of the method, not just the software.
04 / THE PRODUCTSidekick, and the death of "go look it up"
Two pieces of the product tell you how ScreenSteps thinks. The first is Sidekick, a browser extension that floats the relevant guide on top of whatever web app an employee is already using. It is a small idea with a large behavioral payoff: nobody has to leave their work, open a separate tab, and hunt through a wiki. The answer comes to the task.
The second is the AI layer, branded Clarify AI. Its most interesting trick is not answering customer questions - plenty of tools do that. It is capture. Record a good employee talking through a process, and AI Create turns the voice walkthrough into a written, step-by-step guide. AI Transform takes messy, inherited documentation and reshapes it into something followable. The unglamorous, valuable problem - getting the SOP out of the expert's head - gets solved first.
05 / THE COMPETITIONNot trying to be a wiki
On paper, ScreenSteps competes with a crowded shelf: Guru, Confluence, Notion, Document360, Helpjuice, Bloomfire, Tettra. But most of those are built to store and search knowledge. ScreenSteps is built to make someone good at a task right now. It is a different job, and it explains why a fourteen-person company can hold its ground against products with far bigger logos.
| Capability | Typical wiki / KB | ScreenSteps |
|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Store & search docs | Perform the task now |
| Format | Static pages | Guides, decision trees, checklists |
| Delivery | Go find the page | In-app via Sidekick |
| Method included | No | Find & Follow workshops |
06 / THE BUSINESSBootstrapped, brother-run, deliberate
ScreenSteps sells the way it builds - plainly. Published plans start around $6,000 a year for Operations Standard and $9,000 for Operations AI, with custom Enterprise pricing and separate implementation packages that bundle coaching sessions and Find & Follow workshops. It is subscription software with a services wrapper, aimed at teams that want the method installed, not just the tool switched on.
The origin story stays visible in the culture. The company grew out of the brothers' consulting work - research into how the ultrasound industry trained technicians - and it remains a family affair, with Greg as CEO, Trevor running product, and Jonathan DeVore leading implementation. Two decades in, it is still chasing the same moment it started with: the employee who freezes, and the guide that keeps them from having to.