Short answer
A knowledge base for a startup is the few written pages that stop the founders being the only place answers live: how the product works, why key decisions were made, how to ship, who the customers are, and a start-here page for new hires. Write those five first, in a tool whose files the company keeps as it grows.
A startup with five people already has a knowledge base. It is the founders' heads, a Slack channel and a few DMs. That works until the first person joins who was not in the room when anything was decided, and from then on every question they ask costs a founder twenty minutes.
So a knowledge base for a startup is not a wiki with forty empty pages. It is five written pages, kept current, in a place the whole team can read and that the company still owns when the free period on the tool runs out. This post covers which five, how to lay them out, which ones the founders keep to themselves, and what the choice of tool costs you later. Baalda is the tool this site is about, and the plain markdown files it keeps on every laptop are a big part of how it answers the last question, so it comes up early. Where it is the wrong pick is at the end.
What does a knowledge base mean for a startup?
The phrase covers two different products, and most of the pages ranking for it mix them up.
- A customer help centre. Public articles that answer support questions so customers stop emailing. Helpsite, Intercom and Zendesk sell this. It is about deflecting tickets.
- An internal knowledge base. What the team needs to know to do the work: how the product is built, why it was built that way, how to ship it, who the customers are. It is about not asking a founder.
This post is about the second one. If you need the first, buy a help-centre product. Baalda is not one. The closest it gets is a read-only public link to a single note, which is fine for sharing one page with a customer and nowhere near a searchable, branded support site.
An internal knowledge base for a small team is close to what we call a team second brain: the shared version of the notes each founder already keeps for themselves.
What should a startup write down first?
Five pages, in this order. Each one replaces a question someone asks every week.
- How the product works. One page: the main parts, where each one runs, what talks to what. A new engineer should be able to read it in ten minutes and know where to start.
- Why we decided that. A decision log, one note per decision: the date, the options, what was chosen, who chose it and why. This is the page that stops the same argument coming back every quarter.
- How to ship. How code reaches production, how to roll it back, who to call when it breaks. Say where the credentials live. Never put the credentials in the page.
- Who the customers are. One note per important customer: what they bought, what they asked for, what anyone promised them. Sales promises that live only in a founder's inbox are the most expensive thing a startup forgets.
- Start here. The first-week page for a new hire: accounts to request, people to meet, and links to the four pages above in reading order.
What to skip at this size: a page for every meeting, a template library, a folder tree drawn up before anything is in it. Write the five, link them to each other, and add a page only when the same question gets asked twice. Our guide to internal documentation goes further on keeping pages like these current once they exist.
How should a small team lay the pages out?
Flat, dated, and one owner per page. Here is the whole structure for a five-person company:
company/
start-here.md
product/how-it-works.md
decisions/2026-09-12-postgres-over-firestore.md
decisions/2026-10-02-annual-pricing-only.md
shipping/deploy-and-rollback.md
customers/acme.md
founders/
fundraising.md
hiring-plan.mdThree rules keep it working past the tenth hire:
- One decision per file, with the date in the name. Decisions are the thing people search for later, and a dated filename sorts itself.
- A named owner at the top of each page. A page with no owner goes stale, and nobody notices until a new hire follows it.
- Links, not copies.
start-here.mdlinks to the other pages rather than repeating them, so there is one place to fix each fact.
In Baalda each of these is a plain .md file in a folder on every member's disk. The same folder opens in any editor, works with git, and is readable by tools you have not chosen yet. That matters more for a startup than for anyone else, because a startup's tools change faster than anyone else's.
Which pages should the founders keep private?
The founders/ folder above. Fundraising, the cap table, the hiring plan, compensation, and anything about a specific person's performance. Every startup has this material, and it usually ends up in a separate tool, which means the founders keep two knowledge bases and one of them goes stale.
How hard it is to keep one folder private depends on the tool and the plan. In Notion, private teamspaces, ones that "can't be seen or discovered by anyone except those you add", are on the Business and Enterprise plans, according to Notion's pricing page as of 14 October 2026.
In Baalda the founders' folder sits in the same vault as everything else, set to No access for everyone except the people who need it, from Vault Settings, Members and access. The server enforces it, so the folder is not just hidden in the interface: a member without access never syncs those files and their AI assistant cannot read them either. The setting is not tied to a paid plan.
What does a startup knowledge base cost as the team grows?
This is where the choice made in month one shows up in month seven.
Notion for Startups is a real offer and worth knowing about. Notion's startups page lists its Business plan, with Notion AI included, free for 6 months for startups affiliated with one of its partners, 3 months for others with a business website and company email, and 1 month for teams under 10 employees. It is for non-paying Notion customers with fewer than 100 employees. When the free months end, Business is $20 per member a month billed yearly, per Notion's pricing page as of 14 October 2026. For ten people that is $200 a month. Notion is good, and that may be money well spent. Just plan for that bill from the start.
Baalda takes a different path, and the thing that does not change along it is the files:
| Stage | What you run | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
| One founder | A local vault: a folder of markdown on your disk | Free |
| Two founders | Turn on sync and sharing on the managed backend | Free for 2 people and 1 synced vault |
| Three or more | Team on the managed backend | $10 per seat a month, or $110 a year, minimum 3 seats |
| Any size, own server | The Apache-2.0 server, self-hosted | No plan limits, you pay for the server and the time |
Prices are from Baalda's plans page as of 14 October 2026.
Nothing moves between stages. The notes are the same .md files on each laptop at every step, so there is no import going in and no export coming out.
The part worth checking in any tool is what happens if you stop paying. In Baalda, if a Team subscription ends while the account is over the free limits, the server stops accepting writes and answers them with a 402 account_read_only error: "Your Team subscription ended, so this vault is read-only until it is resumed or reduced to the free limits." The team's synced copy stops changing. Every member's local files stay fully editable, because they are files on their own disk, and nothing is deleted. If you self-host with billing switched off, the limits are not enforced at all.
If cost is the main question, our comparison of free Notion alternatives for teams lists the limit each free tier hits first.
How does the team's AI read the knowledge base?
A five-person startup in 2026 is already using Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor every day. Each of those assistants does better work when it can read the decision log and the shipping page, not just what someone pastes into the chat.
Baalda exposes the vault over MCP. Each person creates a token in Vault Settings, MCP, and connects their own assistant. The assistant then works with the notes through tools such as search_notes, read_note and edit_note, with the same permissions as the person who connected it. An engineer's assistant can read shipping/deploy-and-rollback.md and add a step to it after an incident. It cannot open founders/hiring-plan.md, because the engineer cannot.
That is the main difference from pasting a knowledge base into each assistant's memory. There is one copy, the team can read it, and when the assistant writes something down it lands in a file the next person sees.
When is Baalda the wrong choice for a startup?
- You need a customer help centre. Buy a help-centre product. Baalda's public link shares one note, read-only, and that is all.
- Your company runs on databases. If the CRM, the roadmap board and the hiring pipeline are all tables with views, Notion or a dedicated tool fits better. Baalda has no databases, table views or relations.
- Your team works from phones. Baalda is a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux. iOS is planned, not shipped.
- You are already deep in Notion. There is no Notion importer. The workable route is exporting to markdown and opening that folder as a vault, and databases do not survive the trip intact.
- Nobody wants to run a server. Self-hosting is free in money and not in time. On the managed backend, a team of three or more pays per seat like it would anywhere else.
If none of those apply, start with the five pages in a local vault today, and turn on sync when the second person needs them.