Write your first ten articles
A starter set that covers the questions customers ask most.
The hardest part of a new knowledge base isn’t the software. It’s the blank page. You’ve signed up, you’ve got an empty help center staring back at you, and every topic feels equally urgent, which is another way of saying none of them feel obvious. So most people freeze, write nothing, and the knowledge base quietly dies before it ever helped a single customer.
Here’s the good news: you don’t need fifty articles to make a dent. Your first knowledge base articles are the handful that answer the questions customers already ask you every day, and there are fewer of those than you think. This guide is a companion to the wider work of learning how to build a knowledge base. Where the planning stage decides your priorities, this piece hands you the concrete starter list and shows you how to write your first help articles well.
One quick distinction before we dig in. Deciding what to document first is the strategy: how you read your ticket data and rank topics by volume. This article is the output of that thinking, the actual ten articles most teams should publish on day one.
How to pick your first knowledge base articles
You already have a research team doing this for you, and it’s your support queue. The questions customers email, chat, and call about most often are, by definition, the articles worth writing first. Pull your last month of tickets, group them by topic, and count.
That count almost always follows the same shape: a small number of questions drive the bulk of your volume. Answering the top ten swallows a surprising slice of your ticket load, because customers cluster around the same sticking points. This matters, because around 81% of customers try to resolve an issue on their own before contacting a live rep, according to research popularized by Harvard Business Review. If the answer isn’t written down, they hit a wall and open a ticket anyway.
The first ten articles to write
Almost every product, whatever it does, shares the same starter set. The wording changes, but the jobs behind these articles are near universal. Here’s the list, and the exact question each one answers for a customer.
| Article | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Getting started guide | ”I just signed up, now what?” |
| Creating an account and logging in | ”How do I get into my account?” |
| Resetting your password | ”I’m locked out, how do I get back in?” |
| Billing, plans, and payment | ”How does pricing work and how do I update my card?” |
| Your single most-asked question | ”The one thing every customer emails about” |
| How to use your core feature | ”How do I do the main thing your product is for?” |
| Fixing the most common error | ”Why isn’t this working, and how do I fix it?” |
| Inviting and managing your team | ”How do I add or remove people on my account?” |
| Connecting your other tools | ”How do I integrate this with the software I already use?” |
| How to contact support | ”I’m still stuck, how do I reach a human?” |
A few notes on why these earn their spot. The getting-started guide is your highest-traffic article by a mile, because every customer passes through onboarding. Password reset and login look trivial, but they’re perennial top-five ticket drivers for nearly everyone. And the “contact support” article matters because self-service and human help work best as a team, giving people a clear path forward when an article doesn’t fully solve their problem.
How to write your first help articles well
A great starter list still flops if the articles themselves are a slog to read. The bar isn’t literary, it’s practical: can a stressed customer skim it and solve their problem in under a minute? Keep these habits in mind as you draft.
- One article, one job. Don’t cram billing and password resets into a single “account help” page. Separate articles rank better in search and are far easier to keep current.
- Title it the way customers search. “Reset your password” beats “Credential recovery” every time. Use the plain words your customers actually type, not your internal product names.
- Answer first, context later. Put the steps up top. Nobody reading a troubleshooting article wants three paragraphs of preamble before the fix.
- Use numbered steps and screenshots. Walkthroughs are easier to follow as a list than as a wall of prose, and a screenshot removes any doubt about which button to click.
- End with a next step. Link to the related article or the contact form, so a half-solved question doesn’t dead-end.
The fastest way to hit that bar consistently is to stop reinventing the format for every piece. A reusable help article template gives each article the same shape (a clear title, a short intro, numbered steps, a next step), which means you write faster and customers read faster. Consistency is what makes a young knowledge base feel like one polished product instead of ten people’s scattered notes.
What to do after your first ten
Once the starter set is live, let your data tell you what’s next. Watch which searches come back empty, which articles get the most views, and which questions still flood your queue despite everything you’ve written. Each of those is a signpost pointing at article number eleven.
The appetite is there when the content is good. Around 91% of customers say they’d happily use a knowledge base if it met their needs (Zendesk), so every well-written article you add pays you back in tickets you never have to answer. Start with these ten, and you can build your knowledge base into something that carries real weight from its very first week.
