Tisane Labs is company that provides a natural language understanding application with a focus on abusive content, and the related legal and regulatory requirements. The system, Tisane, detects cyberbullying, personal attacks, hate speech, sexual advances, obfuscated profanities, criminal activity, and more.
Below is an email we received from Vadim Berman, CEO of Tisane Labs, about the documentation work Cherryleaf carried out for Tisane.
Why they chose Cherryleaf
First, we needed to pick the vendor. The industry seems to be small. The options are: bigger (biggish?) vendors, freelance writers, and boutique companies like Cherryleaf.
Freelancers may offer the best value but are difficult to find and assess, and have shifting priorities. I emailed my enquiries to 4 companies. One (a major provider with most of its staff seemingly in Nigeria) never bothered to reply. Three others, including Cherryleaf, did. Two were British, one was US-based. Cherryleaf was the smallest of the three.
Cherryleaf, represented by Ellis Pratt, is an archetypal boutique. Ellis provided a useful assessment of the situation, and suggested strategy to handle another chunk of content which I did not know what to do. Essentially, it would increase the project somewhat, but it was perfectly reasonable.
The other British vendor is a bigger company with a few branches in Europe. The representative showed up semi-prepared. He knew what we wanted but had a very rough idea how to proceed. The rate probably made sense to prospects residing in the Buckingham palace, but was a bit too high for us and too opaque.
The American vendor replied with a wall of text, obviously generated by GenAI. Some of it was flat out wrong. The sales guy showed up unprepared and started by citing their big customers with the vibe “we don’t really care for small guys like you but might deign to take your project”. Their main selling points were the big names they worked for and that they use actual developers as technical writers. Can you assess how much I will have to spend? Nah, we’ll just charge you hourly and see how it goes. “But other vendors did produce a quotation.” Oh, they did? Then let me connect you with a technical writer and we’ll see. I obviously declined. When I told them that there are more projects, I was told something to the tune of “oh but we didn’t know, we thought you were a small client”. I was offered to look at their flagship projects for Silicon Valley big names and found errors on the first couple of pages. Do learn that arrogance doesn’t sell, at least when I’m the customer.
About the documentation projects
So far we’ve done two projects, and the experience is more or less according to my expectations. The first project was to write several small manuals for several web applications. The second one involved overhauling all our API documentation and merging it with assorted bits and pieces everywhere.
Cherryleaf writers know what they’re doing. Again, an archetypal artisan shop. They might not have experience with every piece of tech out there (so this is up to you to follow up on). They are, however, very responsive and also fluent with the tools of the trade. (I was recommended Redocly and I can’t believe how good the platform is. Thanks again, Ellis.)
There were a couple of issues but Ellis handled them efficiently, and graciously declined to charge for these portions.
The main strength of Cherryleaf is to know how to organise the content. It all looks self-evident when you look at the result, but it’s hard to come up with it on your own. Cherryleaf also knows about the new tools like GenAI, but I personally prefer human touch. (Don’t overuse GenAI, kids, it’s bad for business.)
Cherryleaf team accumulated decades of experience, take pride in what they do, and prioritise providing value over the approach of “take the money and run”. Business does not have to be impersonal, you know? It’s humans dealing with humans, after all.
Best regards, Vadim