Show HN: GPT-3 based coaching for managers in tech

Hey everyone! Sharing this project we’ve been working on.

We run a coaching app for new & aspiring managers (mostly engineering managers and PMs). Users get personalized 2-minute daily tips (we shared it here way back in 2020), and they can reach out to a coach via Intercom chat if they need help with a specific problem.

We typically need at least ~15 mins or so to respond to these coaching requests via chat, and our team isn’t big enough yet to provide 24/7 coverage, so we decided to try out OpenAI’s API to see if we could build an “assistant coach” who can chime in faster and still provide actual value - partly inspired by the Marc Randolph’s (Netflix Co-Founder) quote that “the next wave of disruptive companies will be built by layering domain expertise over GPT-3”.

**We used prompts to give GPT-3 context on its coaching mission, including a coaching framework & questions, we gave it access to our content library of 2-minute tips for managers, and did our best to give it a bit more personality.

The results seem pretty good so far! We’ve introduced “Bunchee” to users in our app already, and just today released the web demo. There are definitely still some issues though:

So far, Bunchee is good at:

- empathy - humour - improvising (most of the times) - understanding that she is a colleague of human coaches at Bunch

What she’s not so great at:

- Actually being available 24/7 (due to OpenAI API dependency) - remembering past conversations to build more context about the user - switching modes on the fly: coaching vs. advice vs. search vs. customer support

Curious to hear what you all think!

Been using Bunch.ai for daily tips for quite a while. Some were very helpful. I wasn't so good at keeping up with new features and tips, though. This will give me another reason to try it. Hopefully, this new feature is as helpful as it can be.

sounds very interesting! especially for founders that just started managing a team

Hey Denis,

Really good question, we're doing mainly 2 things: we're pushing hard on makiing sure that our content comes from a diverse group of experts (Bunchee is referencing the tips/content from our library, which is the main difference to ChatGTP) and we're also working on assembling a diverse panel of coaches, to diversify the perspectives and PoVs of those that "train" Bunchee. And we're open about the fact that she is limited and may give harmful or biased advice.

Yes exactly, we kinda needed it ourselves tbh, I just used it yesterday again to prep an investor meeting and it went great.