Spanning Labs on Chainstack: Building a new technical documentation paradigm

Petar Stoykov

May 9, 2023 in Customer stories

Streamlining multi-region setup and minimizing cloud infra costs

In addition to offering top-tier, cost-competitive truly enterprise-grade RPC services, Chainstack was also one of the easiest providers to work with. The team was always very responsive and readily available for any support questions and their offerings were the most robust – allowing us to select multiple regions and node providers to minimize our cloud costs and maximize the distributed nature of our relayer offering.
Drew Beller, Co-Founder, Spanning Labs

What is Spanning Labs?

Spanning Labs is a technical documentation assistant that streamlines technical communication and content creation for sales and support teams. They are laser focused on solving problems specific to customer facing, cross-functional team members, such as scattered product/sales information and added complexity around supporting their customers unique needs.

In their research, they found that these team members – like those in Developer Experience and Sales Engineering roles – use 7.9 tools per day on average. By unifying disparate information sources, such as public documentation, internal wikis, Discord help channels, messaging tools, and CRM data, Spanning Labs eliminates the hassle of searching for information and helps teams focus on delivery.

They also discovered that in transactional sales, the performance gap between average and star performers is 59%. In complex sales, star performers outperform the average by 200%. With AI-powered tools, Spanning users can effortlessly create high-quality, customer specific technical documentation inside the Spanning editor – decreasing that gap and increasing overall support for your customers.

And they know it’s challenging to track how to improve existing documentation and what the impact of tailored content has on your sales pipeline. With the insights available within Spanning, they are able to highlight information gaps, as well as how customized documentation is impacting sales.

The platform supports various workflows, enabling teams to work smarter, not harder. Spanning Labs can assist in generating a wide range of content, including customer-specific statements of work, integration proposals, technical guides, and tutorials. In the next three years, the company plans to become the essential tool for creating customer-specific content, resulting in better experiences for developers worldwide.

Figure 1: Creating AI-powered technical documentation with Spanning Labs; Source: Spanning Labs

Revolutionizing technical documentation and content generation

Spanning Labs offers a cutting-edge solution that revolutionizes technical documentation and content generation. Their platform is designed to assist sales and support teams, as well as developer relations teams, by streamlining their workflows and enabling them to work more efficiently.

Unified information sources: Spanning Labs connects various data sources, such as public documentation, internal wikis, messaging tools like Discord or Slack, CRM systems, and more. By centralizing these sources, the platform eliminates the hassle of searching for information, allowing teams to focus on delivering high-quality content.
AI-powered content generation: The platform harnesses the power of AI to generate a wide range of content, including integration proposals, customer-specific statements of work, technical guides, tutorials, one-pagers, product feature announcements, and answers to individual questions. It also has the capability to summarize lengthy documents and disparate data sources into concise summaries or even single tweets. The AI continually learns from previous documents and generated content, optimizing pipelines for specific workflows.
Customizable templates and workflows: Spanning Labs will allow users to upload their own templates, providing a highly customizable experience. The platform adapts to the specific needs of each organization, enabling seamless integration with existing processes.
Data security and privacy: The platform ensures that user-uploaded sources and generated content are securely stored in encrypted cloud storage. It maintains a strict separation of data by user or company, requiring user authentication to access any information. Data-in-flight is also encrypted, ensuring that sensitive information is never at risk.
Continuous improvement and integration support: Spanning Labs continually works on adding new integration support and updating its pipelines to provide its customers with the latest and most effective AI models, latest state-of-the-art research, including custom in-house models that are trained and fine-tuned for each customer.
Accuracy and confidence: Spanning Labs uses state-of-the-art techniques to ensure that the content generated by the AI is accurate and based on the data sources provided by the user. The platform highlights the sources used to derive the information, allowing users to verify content before sharing it publicly or relying on it completely.

Spanning Labs’ innovative solution is a game-changer in the world of developer relations and sales engineering, helping teams to work smarter, faster, and more effectively while delivering top-quality content tailored to their customers’ needs.

Scaling our collaboration after a previous business venture

Spanning Labs’ journey with Chainstack began while working on a multi-chain relaying solution in their previous business venture. They aimed to provide the most robust solution for their customers by working with a variety of RPC providers, including running their own nodes and other public providers.

Their goal was to create a trustworthy enterprise multichain solution with multiple levels of redundancy. However, they encountered numerous challenges with some of the largest Web3 node providers in the market. These providers often faced daily outages and were unresponsive, taking days to resolve issues. This unreliability hindered their ability to deliver the dependable solution they envisioned for their clients.

This all changed when they discovered Chainstack. Unlike their previous experiences, Chainstack proved to be reliable, responsive, and efficient. Spanning Labs was able to use Chainstack nodes as their primary RPCs for every blockchain they supported, enjoying an outstanding experience without any of the problems they encountered with other providers.

Securing a reliable and cost-effective cross-chain solution

At Chainstack, we pride ourselves on providing a reliable, cost-effective solution that caters to our clients’ needs. Spanning Labs’ use case was centered around monitoring blockchains for events and publishing transactions back to them, and they found our nodes to be both responsive and dependable.

As Spanning Labs transitioned their relaying architecture to become a multi-cloud provider and multi-regional, our unique solution offerings allowed them to map their servers to nodes in the same regions and with the same cloud providers. This enabled their solution to be well-distributed and robust, even though it was centralized.

When asked to rate their satisfaction with Chainstack in terms of infrastructure spending, Spanning Labs gave us a perfect score of 10. They appreciated our reasonable and competitive pricing, as well as our transparency and upfront communication about expected costs. They had previously experienced misquotations and mischarges with other major node providers, making Chainstack a refreshing and trustworthy change of pace.

Spanning Labs noted that those familiar with major enterprise-grade infrastructure providers in the Web2 world have certain expectations regarding service, cost, and meeting SLAs. Chainstack has proven to be a trustworthy enterprise-grade infrastructure provider for Web3, a space where many may claim to offer similar services but often fall short. Our commitment to reliability, cost-effectiveness, and exceptional service made Chainstack a match made in Heaven for Spanning Labs and their platform’s use case.

Resolution summary

We successfully scaled our collaboration with Spanning Labs after their previous business venture, surpassing other major node providers in pricing transparency and reliability.
Chainstack offered a cost-effective cross-chain solution tailored to the needs of their multi-chain relaying solution with our reliable, responsive, and efficient nodes.
This helped enable Spanning Labs’ transition to a multi-cloud and multi-regional relaying architecture to power their platform’s effective operations.
Using Chainstack infrastructure, Spanning secured 100% uptime for relayer connectivity to all supported blockchains, which proved challenging otherwise.
In doing so, Chainstack proved to be a trustworthy enterprise-grade provider for their Web3 needs, resulting in a perfect satisfaction score in cost-effectiveness.
Our commitment to reliability, cost-effectiveness, and exceptional service, made Chainstack the ideal blockchain infrastructure partner for Spanning Labs and the platform’s use case.