Whatfix makes it easy to create interactive how-to guides. I made one in minutes

An old adage of teaching is not to tell someone how to do something, but to show them. Whatfix is a tool that makes it easy to do that.

For example, I created this quick navigation guide for readers of Tech in Asia from India, who want to track Indian startups.

So even non-techies like me can create visual, interactive how-to guides in minutes. They can be slideshows, videos, or “flows” on a website like this one.

For enterprises, Whatfix offers a few additional bells and whistles according to their training or other needs. Indian ecommerce leader Flipkart, for example, is using Whatfix to onboard affiliates to its app. Angers University in France is using Whatfix to show students how to use library tools. And Maxwell Health is using it to handhold its enterprise clients, says Khadim Batti, co-founder of the Bangalore-based Whatfix.

“There are different kinds of enterprise users who use Whatfix for supporting their clients. But when you go to the Whatfix site, there is a crowdsourced community version, which is free for all. Anyone can create, contribute, and use interactive how-to guides,” Batti tells Tech in Asia.

Batti and co-founder Vara Kumar used to work for Huawei Telecom before striking out on their own. Their first product was SearchEnabler, an SEO [search engine optimization] and social media engagement tool for small businesses. It was in trying to get traction for SearchEnabler that the idea of Whatfix struck them.

“What we realized soon enough was that this particular segment (small businesses) required a lot of handholding. Unless we did that, we couldn’t scale. There were two ways to solve this problem: either we wrap services around this or we solve it technically so that we could scale to a much larger audience,” recounts Batti. They started working on effective ways to support users, and the idea of Whatfix evolved from those experiments. “So it was a by-product of our earlier product. This got very good feedback and we realized this is a much better product, and so we pivoted,” he says.

That was two years ago. Today, the technology behind Whatfix is awaiting a patent, the platform is ready to scale up, and it has just raised INR 55 million (US$881,000) from Helion Venture Partners, Powerhouse Ventures, GSF, and Silicon Valley angel investors.

Batti explains to Tech in Asia how crowdsourcing helped Whatfix refine the product and turn it into a business solution: