In this page
Three ways poor documentation loses developers before the sale
Time to first API call predicts adoption
Publication-ready API documentation in weeks
Dealing with documentation debt
Three situations we know well
Case studies
Example
Learning paths
Is your API documentation ready for AI-assisted development?
DevRel writing services
API documentation friction review
How to contact us
A developer’s first session with your API documentation is make or break. If they can’t make progress, they don’t open a support ticket. Instead, they quietly evaluate a competitor.
Cherryleaf can help you turn complex technical information into clear, accurate, maintainable content. This can be for a new API or an existing developer portal. We help developers understand your API, make their first successful call, and complete real integration tasks without relying on repeated support from your engineering team.
We’ve worked with companies based in Asia, mainland Europe, the UK, and the USA. They’ve ranged in size from small growing start-ups to large banking, technology communications, and logistics companies.
What we help your documentation achieve
Good API documentation isn’t measured by how many pages it has. It’s measured by what developers, decision-makers and support teams can do because of it.
Depending on where your documentation is falling short, we can help you:
- Get a new developer to their first successful API call quickly, with no dead ends.
- Let a technical decision-maker understand a proposed integration before they ever speak to sales.
- Teach a developer how several of your products work together, not just how each one works in isolation.
- Support customers migrating from a competing product, with a path built around what’s different, not a generic manual.
- Cut the number of support tickets on the same recurring setup or auth issue.
- Give experienced users fast, uncluttered access to reference material, without forcing them through material they don’t need.
We start by agreeing which of these outcomes matter most for your API, then build the documentation and structure around getting there.
Facts and figures
80%
80% of decision-makers evaluate API documentation before buying. Most documentation fails that test. (Source: State of Docs 2026)
Three ways poor documentation loses developers before the sale
1 No clear path to a first success
A developer’s first experience with your documentation can determine whether they continue with an integration. They might understand individual endpoints but still struggle to answer basic questions, even ones like: “What does this do?”, and “When would I need to use it?”
No getting started guide, missing authentication examples, endpoints documented without context about when or why to use them. The developer stalls within minutes, and doesn’t come back.
2 Your team becomes the documentation
Support queues fill with questions that good documentation would answer. As a consequence, your developers spend 15–20 hours a week explaining what they’ve already built, instead of building what’s next.
3 “Docs coming soon” is the wrong kind of trust signal
Prospects use documentation quality as a proxy for product quality. Gaps and outdated content cost you conversions before sales has a chance. A polished developer portal is a sales asset.
Time to first API call predicts adoption. Documentation is your biggest lever.
A developer is the more likely they become an active user, advocate, and paying customer if they can quickly integrate their app with your API.
We create onboarding content that makes prerequisites, authentication, requests, responses, and next steps clear. Our getting started guides, tutorials, and reference documentation are built to reduce that time. It’s about guiding developers through doing something real with it, fast.
Publication-ready API documentation in weeks
A structured engagement: no months-long timelines, no weeks figuring out what we need from you.
A typical project timeline is:
Discover (Weeks 1-2)
We get access to your API, interview your team, and map the complete developer journey. In other words, from first discovery through integration, reference lookups, and troubleshooting.
Write and review (Weeks 3-4)
We produce the documentation. This can be:
- API overviews and concepts
- Prerequisites and account setup
- Authentication and authorisation guidance
- First-call walkthroughs
- Test data and sandbox instructions
- Working requests and responses
- Code examples
- Common errors and troubleshooting
- Guidance for moving into production
Your team reviews the drafts, and we refine them based on the feedback. You stay focused on building.
Deliver (Weeks 5-6)
We finalise structure and navigation, and hand over publication-ready content for your developer portal.
Dealing with documentation debt
Documentation debt accumulates the same way technical debt does. For example: Endpoints get added without docs, and getting started guides become outdated as the product changes.
We can consolidate, restructure, and rewrite so your documentation actually reflects your product, and stays that way.
Cherryleaf’s Documentation Debt Audit identifies the highest-cost problems and tells you what to fix first.
Three situations we know well
Launching a new API or major update
You’re releasing something new and need complete, polished documentation on day one. No apologetic gaps. No “docs coming soon.”
We provide complete reference docs, a getting-started guide, integration tutorials, and multi-language code samples ready for launch day.
Consolidating fragmented or outdated documentation
Your docs live in PDFs, wikis, Slack threads, and a README nobody’s updated in years.
As a result, developers, and often your internal team, can’t trust what they find.
We provide a documentation audit, consolidated information architecture, and rewritten content your team can maintain.
Reducing support overhead and speeding adoption
Support tickets flood in with questions good documentation would answer.
Adoption is slower than it should be because developers can’t self-serve their way through integration.
We provide documentation built to answer questions before they become tickets. This reduces overhead and speeds up the time to first API call.
Case studies - what this looks like in practice
Developer portal for a financial organisation
A financial services organisation had developed APIs for accessing, integrating, and securely sharing data, but documentation was scattered across hard-to-navigate PDFs.
Developers couldn’t find what they needed. Cherryleaf reviewed the site using a friction log to identify and record all the usability issues in the developer journey. We then developed an improved logical structure for the content in order to meet the needs of the audience. We also identified where content was missing, and improved the content on the website.
Cherryleaf redesigned the information architecture and rewrote the content, organised around the developer’s actual journey: understand, set up, use, reference, troubleshoot.
Bringing order to complexity at HCC Embedded Systems
HCC Embedded needed to structure a vast body of embedded systems documentation: modular, maintainable, without losing technical depth. Cherryleaf created the framework, restructured the content, and delivered a system the team could manage as the product grew.
“Cherryleaf were able to rapidly respond to our issues and help us understand. We have no expertise in this and did not want to be stuck on things that experts could solve instantly – Cherryleaf were very responsive in this
Dave Hughes, HCC Embedded
See: Helping HCC deal with the size and complexity of embedded systems documentation
Overhauling developer documentation for Tisane Labs
Tisane Labs had API documentation spread across multiple locations. It was inconsistent, incomplete, and hard to navigate. Cherryleaf consolidated everything into a single professional developer portal in under two months.
So far we’ve done two projects, and the experience is more or less according to my expectations. The first project was to write several small manuals for several web applications. The second one involved overhauling all our API documentation and merging it with assorted bits and pieces everywhere.”
Vadim Berman, CEO, Tisane Labs
See: Refining Tisane’s developer documentation.
Developer portal for a global, multi-billion dollar company
A large, international, multi-billion dollar company, had developed a series of APIs to make it easier for organisations to use its services. It wanted to provide a developer web portal that encouraged customers and partners to use these APIs. Cherryleaf structured the content around the developer journey: discover, register, integrate, troubleshoot. We produced marketing, technical, training, and troubleshooting content. The portal launched to successful client feedback.
Example
Learning paths: Connecting your documentation to a goal
Reference documentation and guided learning solve different problems.
A developer looking up an endpoint doesn’t want a course.
A developer trying to build their first working integration doesn’t want a flat list of endpoints with no order and no context.
Most API documentation is built for the first developer and leaves the second one stuck.
We can design learning paths that sit on top of your existing documentation: sequencing the reference material, how-to guides and explanations you already have around a specific outcome, such as “build an authenticated payments flow” or “send your first appointment reminder.”
What this involves
This involves:
- Mapping who the path is for, what they already know, and what they need to be able to do at the end.
- Selecting and ordering existing content (reference pages, guides, explanations) around that goal, rather than duplicating it.
- Identifying the gaps: the steps your documentation assumes but never actually states.
- Adding practical exercises where they matter, so developers can test what they’ve just read rather than take it on trust.
- Keeping the underlying documentation as the single source of truth, so the path never drifts out of sync with the docs it’s built from.
This is a distinct service from writing reference documentation. Some clients need one, some need both. We’ll help you work out which.
Your docs are now being read by AI coding assistants as well as humans
When a developer uses Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor to integrate your API, the quality of your documentation directly affects whether the generated code works.
Cherryleaf can help you make sure your API documentation is:
- Clear and explicit
- Consistently structured
- Aligned with your API specification
- Supported by complete examples
- Suitable for retrieval and reuse
- Easier to maintain and govern
- Available in appropriate machine-readable, or AI-consumable MCP formats
DevRel content that builds developer communities
API reference documentation explains how something works. DevRel content shows developers why they should care, and inspires them to build.
- Tutorials and developer cookbooks that demonstrate what your API enables in practice
- Blog posts and articles written for technical audiences that pass the developer authenticity test
- Getting-started content built to reduce friction from first read to first API call
- Explainer content that bridges technical accuracy and developer engagement
- Community content that builds lasting relationships with your developer ecosystem
- AI-assisted reverse engineering of developer engagement strategies you admire, adapted to your context and goals
Why technical writers excel at DevRel content
- They understand the technology deeply enough to create content that passes the developer authenticity test.
- They know how developers consume information and can create content that fits naturally into their research and implementation workflows. Our technical writers create authentic content that builds credibility within developer communities.
- They excel at making complex technical concepts accessible without dumbing them down, exactly what DevRel content requires.
Our DevRel writing services help you create content that developers trust, share, and act upon.
Not sure where you're losing developers?
Our API Documentation Friction Review is a focused evaluation of your existing documentation and developer journey.
We review a representative integration task from a developer’s perspective and identify where users are likely to become confused, delayed, or dependent on support.
The review can cover:
- Product and API discovery
- Navigation and information structure
- Prerequisites
- Registration and access
- Authentication
- The first API request
- Endpoint and schema explanations
- Code examples
- Workflows involving multiple APIs
- Errors and troubleshooting
- Sandbox and production guidance
- Search and findability
- Consistency and terminology
- AI-readiness
- Missing, duplicated, or outdated content
You receive a prioritised report showing:
- The main points of friction
- The likely effect on developers and internal teams
- Quick improvements
- Larger content or structural gaps
- Recommended next steps
It is a practical way to understand the problem before beginning a larger documentation project.
Ask about an API Documentation Friction Review
Ready to make your API documentation work better?
Talk to us if you are:
- Preparing for an API launch
- Improving a developer portal
- Consolidating fragmented documentation
- Trying to reduce integration friction
- Dealing with repeated support questions
- Introducing a docs-as-code workflow
- Preparing content for AI-assisted development
- Unsure where your current documentation is failing
Tell us about your situation in a short discovery call. We’ll tell you exactly what we’d do and how quickly we can do it.
Email:
info@cherryleaf.com
Talk to us about your API documentation