Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach • Hacker News Board

ztratar wrote: post #3

elfenheart wrote: post #2

This is awesome!

Hey Elfen! Founder here -- thank you. :) We're always looking to hone in our pitch and improve the product. If you or anyone else here has feedback, let me know.

Can we get a shift + Enter to submit the main chat text field?

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#6

Post by thinbeige » Thu, May 18, 2017, 9:51 PM UTC

How will you scale (if intended)?

Why I ask: Wondering if bots or customer support staff can really support this use case.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#7

Post by sprice » Thu, May 18, 2017, 9:54 PM UTC

This looks very useful. But it's not clear to me what a "topic" is. Is it a single question from beginning to end? If it dragged on could it become a new topic? More clarity with this would be great!

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#8

Post by ztratar » Thu, May 18, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

sprice wrote: post #7

This looks very useful. But it's not clear to me what a "topic" is. Is it a single question from beginning to end? If it dragged on could it become a new topic? More clarity with this would be great!

Thanks for the feedback!

There's actually currently an AB test where we remove topics. It seems that most people are confused by this, and it created a strange flow in the conversations.

A topic is basically an entire chat engagement, end-to-end, with a specific purpose.

As I said though, we're looking to gain data right now to possibly remove them. Appreciate the thoughts!

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#9

Post by fecak » Thu, May 18, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

I also provide private career advisory/coaching and resume services to many in the tech sector, and I'm a mod on a Reddit sub that answers compsci career questions (r/cscareerquestions), so this caught my eye.

The biggest question I generally have with services like this is "who is providing the advice?". We have an issue in our Reddit sub, where there is little transparency (obviously due to anonymous accounts) as to whether your career advice is coming from someone with twenty years of industry experience or an intern. I think the source of the info is relevant, as the recipient may want to weigh the advice based on the source's experience.

It appears Boost is using some AI that might automate some of the response, which will hopefully provide some good answers and perhaps have a few kinks with advice that doesn't quite apply.

As a bit of advice for the founder (saw you commenting here), perhaps a bit of info on the source of the advice would be useful to users.

Best of luck with the service, and feel free to reach out.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#10

Post by ztratar » Thu, May 18, 2017, 9:57 PM UTC

thinbeige wrote: post #6

How will you scale (if intended)? Why I ask: Wondering if bots or customer support staff can really support this use case.

Hey there! We're looking to scale this in a similar way as Facebook M -- where our coaches on staff have control over specific bots with specific purposes, and can leverage an entire world of data/knowledge to quickly craft personalized responses.

At $59/month, unit economics should work as we develop better tech. But for now we're certainly prioritizing quality over speed. :)