Start with the questions already in your inbox
Open the last 30 to 50 support conversations and group them by intent. Early-stage products usually see the same themes: account access, setup, imports, billing, cancellation, exports, and one or two product-specific workflows. Write an article for each recurring intent before adding an answer layer.
A good article covers one task completely: starting condition, numbered steps, expected result, and the two or three likely blockers. Screenshots often help more than another paragraph of marketing copy.
Launch a deliberately small help center
You do not need fifty categories. Publish six to ten articles that a customer can browse without knowing your internal vocabulary. Give each article a specific title and stable URL, then link it to the next task. An import guide, for example, should point to field mapping and common import errors.
Add answers with boundaries
Use an answer experience that only draws on published sources and shows those sources. If no article supports a question, it should say so and show a contact path. Do not use it to decide refunds, security incidents, or account-specific exceptions.
Measure gaps, not imaginary deflection
Track common questions, questions with no source, and visits from an answer to its source article. Review them weekly. A repeated missing question is your next documentation task. That feedback loop is the advantage of a small help center: it gets more useful as customers reveal where the product is unclear.