Interactive CAE feature guides for Ansys and HyperWorks

A new hire at a structural engineering firm opens Ansys Mechanical or HyperWorks for the first time and immediately hits a wall: the interface has dozens of context-sensitive menus, tools that change behavior depending on what's selected, and documentation that explains what each button does but not why you'd use it or in what order. The complaint that 'it's not always obvious when you have selected a tool and are in a particular context' is the clearest articulation of the real problem — the software's own UI doesn't surface its own state clearly.

Vendors don't fix this because their documentation teams write reference manuals, not task-oriented guides, and because onboarding is typically sold as a separate training service. There's a structural conflict: better self-serve documentation competes with billable training hours. So the official docs stay feature-centric ('the Contact Tool allows you to define...') instead of workflow-centric ('here's how to set up a bolted joint from scratch, including the three non-obvious steps most people miss').

What users actually need is guided walkthroughs that run inside or alongside the real software — not video tutorials they have to pause and rewind, but step-by-step guidance that knows which tool you have open and what you've already done. The complaints about 'cumbersome to set up', 'features I have not been able to work out how to use', and 'some commands, it is not easy to understand the correct procedure' all describe the same failure: no bridge between documentation and actual doing.

This is a real business because CAE software seats cost $20,000–$80,000 per year, and companies routinely have engineers who are underusing 40% of what they've paid for. Every quarter, someone on a team needs to learn a workflow they've never touched — modal analysis, topology optimization, contact setup — and the current path is either a $3,000 training course or three days of trial and error. That cost recurs with every new project type and every new hire.

What to build

Build a browser-based guide library — organized by simulation task rather than by software feature — where each guide combines annotated screenshots, decision points ('if your geometry is imported from STEP, skip to step 4'), and downloadable example files, covering the 30 most-searched Ansys Mechanical and HyperWorks workflows that official documentation handles poorly.

Where to start

Publish the top 10 guides free and SEO-optimized around the exact search queries frustrated users type ('how to set up contact in Ansys Mechanical', 'HyperMesh macro tutorial') — this builds organic inbound from engineers actively stuck, before you ask anyone to pay.

The hard part

Content goes stale fast — Altair and Ansys release new UI versions annually, and a guide built against one version can actively mislead users on the next, so there's a real ongoing content maintenance cost that doesn't scale the way software does.

How it makes money

Team subscription ($200–400/month for up to 20 seats) that adds downloadable example models, a request queue for custom workflow guides, and a private Slack channel for questions — individuals get free access to the public guide library.