Trophy is the first developer-focused gamification stack. It provides APIs for tracking user interactions and building features like achievements, streaks, points and leaderboards. It also provides tools for building highly-retentive lifecycle email and push notification campaigns with no code.

For Co-Founder & CEO Charlie Hopkins Brinicombe, choosing to differentiate through developer experience meant that documentation needed to be given the attention it deserved.

“As an API company docs are always important, but Trophy sees it as a critical part of how we win”.

The initial solution

Charlie initially chose Fern to manage both their SDKs and documentation, attracted by the promise of a unified platform. However, as their documentation needs evolved, several limitations became apparent.

Fern focused on an experience using a proprietary API specification syntax, which felt like vendor lock-in and meant learning another tool when the team was already struggling with bandwidth across product and marketing.

“We just wanted to set up beautiful and content-rich documentation fast whilst staying focused on our roadmap.”

He also felt that the navigation and layouts Fern offered just weren’t as visually-appealing or imaginative as they wanted their docs to feel. They were stuck with basic tabbed layouts and sidebars, where Trophy wanted to make sure their docs stood out.

Charlie decided they needed a partner who put documentation first.

Searching for an alternative

The team evaluated several documentation platforms including GitBook, Docusaurus, Hashnode, and Mintlify. The criteria were:

• Surfacing the most important platform concepts in as few clicks as possible.
• Making GitHub repositories and status pages easily accessible.
• Clearly segmenting platform docs, API reference, tutorials, and examples.
• Making it easy for developers to get help when needed.

What's more, having built Trophy’s entire API around OpenAPI specifications, they needed a solution that could easily integrate with their existing workflow.

Why Mintlify won

After thorough evaluation, Charlie chose Mintlify for a few key reasons.

Mintlify's content creation workflow felt natural and intuitive, allowing writing in pure MDX with support for a broad range of Mintlify components, like Mermaid diagrams, to help explain core concepts more deeply.

“Mintlify gives you a local dev server and an infinite canvas to write content. Plus you always know there’s a rich component library just waiting to add that final 10% when you know it will make the difference”.

Mintlify’s API explorer was also OpenAPI-first, fitting right into the team’s existing workflow.

Mintlify’s layouts also felt cleaner, helping to differentiate between platform guides, tutorials and examples. It was also much easier to set up than other platforms.

“A couple of platforms offered quick links in the sidebar, which we wanted to use for our GitHub status page, and support links. But in the end, Mintlify just worked. And that was the best developer experience."

Finally, it was attention to detail that sealed the deal with Mintlify offering support for Lucide icons, allowing Trophy to maintain UI consistency across product and docs, and in providing a ‘link rot’ CLI tool that automatically checks for broken links on every deployment.

“You can always tell when the builders of a tool really understand you as a user. It’s like you just know someone made that choice because they knew you would come to expect it”.

Migration was a breeze

The API docs migration process from Fern to Mintlify was smooth. As the team had built their workflow around their OpenAPI specification, all that was required was to connect their spec to Mintlify and automations handled the rest.

The content migration was equally as smooth, allowing all MDX files to be ported over with almost no changes.

And what’s more, when they did hit a speed bump, the Mintlify support team was very helpful in understanding the problem and resolving the issue.

“There was a minor issue that was holding up our push to production, and I really appreciated the Mintlify team's care in making it a priority and getting us to success”.

Results

The documentation overhaul took about a week, and Charlie is "super happy with the result."

The combination of Mintlify's robust platform and Trophy's thoughtful content strategy created documentation that truly serves as an extension of their product.

Trophy's new documentation successfully achieves their original goal: every software engineer arriving at their docs can quickly understand what Trophy does and how to implement it.

Looking ahead

Charlie is most excited to partner with Mintlify in how they innovate for the future, such as a context-aware AI assistant that shows personalized code snippets with API keys pre-filled, multi-language support, and LLM integration for intelligent search.

The migration from Fern to Mintlify proved that choosing the right documentation platform isn't just about features, it's about finding a partner that cares about your needs and empowers your team to create exceptional developer experiences.