Asterly

Asterly, a Chrome extension for how-to guides

You do it once. Asterly writes down every click.

Asterly watches you do a task in Chrome and turns it into a step-by-step guide: a screenshot for each step, the button you clicked marked on it, and a line that says what to do. Then we host it.

You send a link. The person on the other end opens it in a browser tab. They don’t install anything, sign up for anything, or unzip anything. That’s the whole idea.

asterly.com/g/invite-a-teammate
Step 1Click Settings
HomeProjectsInboxSettings
Good morning, AnaThree projects moved this week.Spring launch12 tasksSupport rota4 tasksQ4 hiring9 tasksInbox
Step 2Click Members
HomeProjectsInboxSettings
SettingsGeneralMembersBillingTeam plan · 4 seatsNext invoice on 1 NovemberChange plan
Step 3Click Invite people, top right of the listOnly workspace admins see this button.
HomeProjectsInboxSettings
SettingsGeneralMembersBillingMembers 4 peopleInvite peopleARAna Ruizana@example.comAdminBOBen Okaforben@example.comMemberCMChloé Martinchloe@example.comMemberDPDev Pateldev@example.comMember
Step 4Type their work email
HomeProjectsInboxSettings
SettingsGeneralMembersBillingMembers 4 peopleInvite peopleARAna Ruizana@example.comAdminBOBen Okaforben@example.comMemberCMChloé Martinchloe@example.comMemberDPDev Pateldev@example.comMemberInvite peopleEmailname@company.comRoleMember ▾CancelSend invite
Step 5Click Send invite
HomeProjectsInboxSettings
SettingsGeneralMembersBillingMembers 4 peopleInvite peopleARAna Ruizana@example.comAdminBOBen Okaforben@example.comMemberCMChloé Martinchloe@example.comMemberDPDev Pateldev@example.comMemberInvite peopleEmaildana@example.comRoleMember ▾CancelSend invite
A normal link. Your teammate opens it in the browser they already have.The click you made, marked for them, so nobody hunts for the button.Five steps you can skim. Not a six-minute video.

1 The problem

How-to docs are a chore to write, wrong by next month, and oddly hard to share.

Writing them is tedious.

You do the task. Then you do it again, slower, stopping on every screen to take a screenshot, crop it, draw a red box around a button, paste it into a doc, and type “Click Save.” Half an hour later you’ve documented something that takes two minutes to do. So mostly, nobody does it, and the process lives in one person’s head.

Then they go stale.

Somebody renames a menu. A button moves to the other corner. Now your doc is confidently wrong, and fixing it means retaking the screenshots, so nobody does. The next new hire follows it, gets lost, and messages you anyway.

And sharing them is weirdly hard.

A guide that lives on your laptop helps exactly one person, right up until someone else needs it. Then it becomes a PDF in Slack, a doc nobody can find, or a polite request to install something just to read it. What you wanted was to send one link.

Instructions should be the easiest thing in the world to read. Nobody should need to install software to find out where the Invite button is.

2 What we believe

A few opinions we’ve built Asterly around.

  1. The reader matters more than the author.

    Lots of tools make recording pleasant. We care most about the person on the other end. They should click a link and be done, not install, sign up, or download first.

  2. A guide is a page, not a video.

    You can skim a page, search it, and jump straight to step four. Video is wonderful for a demo and miserable for step four.

  3. Fixing one step shouldn’t mean redoing twelve.

    Software changes. When a button moves, you should be able to fix that step in a minute, and everyone holding the link sees the fix.

  4. Small, on purpose.

    Chrome first. One job. No in-app overlays, no analytics dashboard, no seat minimum. We’d rather do it well, and say plainly when Asterly isn’t the right fit.

  5. Say what isn’t done.

    Early products love describing their roadmap in the present tense. We’re trying not to. If something isn’t built, this page says so.

3 How it works

Here’s a guide being made, start to finish.

Scroll slowly. This is the flow, drawn in HTML so it loads fast: inviting a teammate in a made-up app called Harbor. Three steps, about as long as it takes to read this paragraph.

1 Capture

Press record and do the thing.

Open the Asterly side panel in Chrome, press Record, and do the task the way you always do. Every click becomes a step: a screenshot, the thing you clicked marked on it, and a label taken from the page, like “Click Members.”

Took a wrong turn into Billing? Don’t start over. Keep going and tidy up afterwards. There’s a pause button if you need to go and look something up.

2 Annotate

Tidy it up like a person would.

Delete the clicks that don’t belong. Rewrite a title so it says what you’d say out loud. Add a line of context at the step where people always get stuck.

This is the part that used to be cropping, pasting and drawing red rectangles. Now it’s just editing words.

3 Publish

Send a link. That’s the whole handoff.

Press Publish and you get a link. Paste it in Slack, a ticket, or a reply to a customer. It opens as a plain web page in any browser. Nobody installs an extension, makes an account, or unzips anything to read it.

Should it stay inside the company? Keep it to your workspace and invite the team. When the process changes, fix the one step that changed. The link stays the same.

4 Who it’s for

Who it’s for, and who should use something else.

It’s for you if…

  • You answer the same “how do I…?” question every week, and you’re tired of typing the answer.
  • You work in product, support, customer success or ops, and writing process docs is part of the job, not a once-a-year project.
  • Your team is small enough that one person writing good guides makes a real difference.
  • The work happens in web apps, in Chrome.

It’s not for you if…

  • Your process lives in desktop apps. Asterly only captures Chrome.
  • You want people walked through the live app, click by click. We’re not building that.
  • The guide never needs to leave your laptop. Asterly is for the moment someone else needs it.
  • You need SSO, audit logs and a security review this quarter. Not us, not yet.

5 Where things stand

Where things stand, honestly.

Today
There’s a waitlist, and that’s it. No self-serve signup, no checkout, no “start free trial” button. Joining means we’ll email you; it doesn’t create an account or charge anything.
Early access
Hosted links and team workspaces are what the waitlist is for. We’ll start with a small number of teams so we can watch what breaks and fix it quickly.
Pricing
The plan is free for three public guides, then Pro at $12 or ₹999 per person a month. That’s a hypothesis we’ll test with the first teams, and people on the waitlist get founder pricing. The reasoning is on the pricing page.
Not built
Desktop apps outside Chrome. Firefox and Edge. Automatic redaction of secrets. Click-by-click replay inside the live app. Single sign-on. We’ll say so here when any of that changes.
Maybe later
The same guides your team reads, also published as Markdown with an llms.txt index, so an AI assistant can follow the steps too. It’s a direction, not a feature.

6 A note from me

Hi, I’m Yash.

Most teams have a few processes that live in one person’s head, plus a doc that was right once. Everyone agrees the fix is to write it down properly, with screenshots, and that is exactly the job nobody wants. So it doesn’t happen, or it happens once and quietly rots.

Asterly is my attempt to make that boring job take a couple of minutes: do the task, tidy the steps, send the link. I’d rather do that one thing really well than build another documentation platform.

If you write “click here, then here” more than once a week, I’d love to have you on the waitlist. When I write back, tell me the first thing you’d document. It genuinely helps.

YashFounder, Asterly