Because No One Reads the Manual

The pre-launch to-do list has one strange item. It's neither code nor design, yet it keeps getting pushed back. The manual.

If you've made a service, you have to explain how to use it. Obvious. So I sat down to write the manual, but before writing the first sentence, a question surfaced.

Have I ever read a manual?

No. More precisely, almost never. When I sign up for a new service, a "getting started guide" pops up, and I close it. When something puzzles me, I search, and if the search turns up nothing, I give up. A manual is often a document that proves the maker's diligence, not a document for the reader.

My bookmark folder has about 300 "read later" items. I've reopened two. There's no reason a manual I made would fare differently.

So I threw a different question at the AI. "Is there a way to convey how to use it without writing a manual?"

This time I had it hold a meeting. Book designer, essayist, SaaS planner, marketer—I showed the same problem to four virtual experts and got each one's answer. The privilege and the trick of working alone. You can hold a meeting without a meeting room.

The four answers met at one point. Don't explain features—tell the decisions.

StackTube has quite a few features that need explaining. Register a channel and new videos get analyzed, notes accumulate, they're delivered to Obsidian or Kindle, and a month's worth is bundled into a book. Write this in feature order and you get a manual. But each feature has a reason it was made that way.

For instance, the free plan's analysis cycle is fixed at once a week. Not only for cost. Notes that arrive daily eventually go unread, and unread notes piling up is no different from YouTube watch history piling up. The monthly compilation ebook has no ads and no "read more" links. At the end of a month, at least, I wanted you to have reading whose flow isn't broken.

Stories like this don't fit in a feature table. But once you know them, the way you use the service changes. How-to is something you memorize, but a reason is something you understand, and what you understand isn't forgotten.

So I decided to make a book instead of a manual. I set rules too.

The unit of a chapter is not a feature but a scene. Not "How to register a channel" but "The day the first note arrives." I threw out the words "manual" and "guide" from the title. The book's name became "How to Read StackTube." Mechanical information like plan comparison tables and setup procedures was banished from the body and gathered in one appendix. The body goes as an essay all the way through.

I bound the length with discipline too. 40–60 pages, 4–6 pages per chapter. A manual dies the moment it gets thick—that's what the AI in the book-designer role said, and I couldn't refute it.

I didn't make a new design. StackTube has a monthly mook that bundles and publishes notes each month, and I dressed the book in that same design system. I only changed the cover color from amber to teal. So this book isn't a standalone document but issue zero of the monthly series—a companion volume. A structure where a book wearing the same clothes as the main volumes shows "how to read this service" first.

I made one each in Korean, Japanese, and English. Not translated but rewritten in each language. And all three sit here in this workshop. You can read them without signing up.

Had I written a manual, it would've taken three days. Making a book took longer than that. The reason I don't regret it is simple. A three-day manual no one would have read, and this book at least one person read to the end. Me, the maker. And if it's a document the maker can read to the end, there's a chance someone else will too.

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🔧 Technical Terms in This Episode

Onboarding The process by which a new user first adapts to a service. Usually implemented as a "getting started guide" or a tour of on-screen tooltips. This booklet is an attempt to replace the onboarding tour with prose.

Mook Magazine + Book. A publication issued like a magazine but bound like a book. StackTube's monthly compilation ebook follows this format.

Companion Volume A supplementary book attached to a series' main volumes. Numbered as issue zero, it serves as the series' entrance. It must wear the same design as the main volumes to signal "same series."

Transcreation Translation that rewrites for the same effect on each language's readers rather than translating literally. A joke in the Korean edition may become a different joke in the Japanese edition.