A bit of history

Around a year ago, in July 2023 I decided to move to Intercom the Q&A library that I hosted on this website using Podia. There were many reasons that motivated that choice but here the top 3 reasons:

• I outgrew Podia and the original Q&A library wasn't easy to explore anymore

• Intercom offered a great AI answer feature and a good search

Why am I making the change one year later?

Intercom served me well, this platform really allowed me to double down on the writing of answers to Service Design questions. Indeed it's on that platform that I reached the 400th Q&A milestone!

But a few things have changed that make it now smart for me to go back to Podia:

• Podia has finally added the ability to toggle course sections (one of the things that made my previous library on Podia unusable when I had many elements in it).

• ChatGPT has made custom GPT available and free to use (sure you have to pay once to create them, but then they run even if you don't have anymore a ChatGPT premium account).

• I'm not fond of the direction Intercom is taking (still super messy pricing structure, and too much focus on everything AI) but am fond of the renewed focus of the Podia team towards the paying customers.

Then there is also the elephant in the room: Intercom isn't cheap. It costs around 90 bucks per month and that doesn't count the AI answers that are billed at 1$ each answer that people find satisfying (I had a trick to use it without having to pay for my own use fortunately).

How I'm making the new library of Q&A in Podia

Before July 2023, my Q&A were already on Podia but where all added in one "course". This meant that with hundreds of elements in that library the navigation wasn't working anymore as the UI of this course feature isn't meant to host hundreds of elements.

So this time, each category of the Q&A is in the backend of Podia it's own course.

Then on a landing page I show all these courses.

The benefits of doing this all in Podia

With this new setup I can do a few things that are pretty cool:

• Design freedom: I have much more design freedom than what Intercom offered. For example I can easily add the newsletter subscription form to let people recieve the new Q&A in their inbox, or I can easily add in a specific category of Q&A links to recommended courses and resources.

• Add to your dashboard: As a user of the website you can now easily save a whole category of Q&A to your dashboard. It's a bit like an internal bookmarking thing that even saves your progress in reading the Q&A from that category. Pretty cool!

• Comments: Now you can add comments (if you are registered) to specific Q&A and share your own tips or ask follow-up questions

• More embeds: Podia has a much richer ecosystem of things you can embed directly on a page, that's gonna be especially nice to embed presentations from Canva.

• It's one UI: the UI of my courses, and the Q&A library is now exactly the same.

And I save more than 1000 bucks per year, which is definitely nice!

The downsides of doing this all in Podia

It's obviously not all rainbow and sunshines. Here are a few of the issues that I have and how I found alternatives for them:

• Search: Podia has no search feature (outside the search feature within the community thing). So I've made a tiny Custom Google Search. It's not as nicely integrated than on Intercom, but it does the trick.

• AI answers: The AI answers of intercom were very good, but to be honest most people didn't know how to use it. Now I've made a custom GPT that answers based on the content of this website. It's less integrated and I'm less fond of the way it formats the answer, but hey! I don't pay 1 buck every time someone asks a question!

How long did that migration take?

This migration took me approximately 2 intense days of work (outside of the prototyping to test how it could look like). Fortunately I had a 4 day personal retreat planned were I could take time to finish this migration.

The work that I still have to do

So the migration to Podia is done but I still have to do a few technical things including:

• Redirection: Add redirects from the old intercom URLs to the new Podia URLs

• Podia Links: Add a message and redirection on each old Q&A article that let's people know that there is now a new library. I'll also need to update the old "brain" landing page, so that it brings people to the new Q&A library.

Want to explore it?