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Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

getboost.io

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Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#91

Post by smelterdemon »

nul_byte wrote: post #89

"Hi again Boost. So I've been working at my job now for about 8 months and don't think I'm getting paid enough as a Lead Designer -- barely making rent in SF isn't fun. Is it too early to ask for a raise?" Would someone really want to confide that much of personal glimpse into their working life to community they barely even know, or even for their current employer or future employer to possibly see one day. Not for…

I have similar concerns, although I'm shocked the quoted question is where someone would draw the line. That in particular does not seem at all personal, or potentially damaging at all (if an employer regards an employee trying to gauge their value negatively they're probably a shitty company to work for anyway). Personally I wonder how effective any kind of general career advice could be without conferring with a level of intimacy I'd reserve for a therapist or close friend. I feel like only the most practical career advice (which is widely and freely available) could be offered up without delving into things like long term goals and personal motivations. I guess I could see this being useful if you have a well formed idea of where you want to go in your career and have trouble getting from point A to point B, or could use a little encouragement/social pressure, but I think the harder problem is figuring out that destination not the implementation details.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#92

Post by peteretep »

joncrocks wrote: post #87
peteretep wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afraid not. While I've technically got global reach, I focus on London, and a particular niche in London.

Any tips for finding 'good' recruiters/filtering out bad ones? And any tips for finding good recruiters in London specifically?

What area are you in? Possible I can make recommendations albeit unlikely. I've found a fairly strong correlation between recruiters whose company I enjoy and their competence. Also: look at the spread of the jobs they're in, do they sponsor conferences and communities?

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#93

Post by ztratar »

ktta wrote: post #88
lorenzhs wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The submission link has UTMs: https://www.getboost.io/?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=so... This certainly smells.

That was something that tipped me off too. They're very specific.

It was posted by our head of coaching.

Suspicious? People self post all the time. We didn't run an upvote group, if that's your concern. HN algorithms are way too impressive.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#94

Post by ztratar »

anindha wrote: post #26

As someone that moved to SF from Sydney and didn't have a strong network here I think this would have helped. One thing is that I have no idea who is on the other side of the chat. If they are giving me advice about one of the most important things in my life is there a guarantee on the quality of that advice? Are you guys in the next YC batch?

Quality can been self-assessed quite readily, and for tricky situations we usually coach people to develop a supporting network outside of Boost. So far we have paying users who are VPs at large companies all the way to College Students.

And our tech revolves around surfacing quality advice, what works/doesn't work, so it will constantly improve. Still, we don't risk anything -- we do extensive training for coaches.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#96

Post by ztratar »

smelterdemon wrote: post #91
nul_byte wrote: post #89

"Hi again Boost. So I've been working at my job now for about 8 months and don't think I'm getting paid enough as a Lead Designer -- barely making rent in SF isn't fun. Is it too early to ask for a raise?" Would someone really want to confide that much of personal glimpse into their working life to community they barely even know, or even for their current employer or future employer to possibly see one day. Not for…

I have similar concerns, although I'm shocked the quoted question is where someone would draw the line. That in particular does not seem at all personal, or potentially damaging at all (if an employer regards an employee trying to gauge their value negatively they're probably a shitty company to work for anyway). Personally I wonder how effective any kind of general career advice could be without conferring with a le…

To both points: trust is earned over time and we have to actually design our onboarding flows and coaching processes around that idea. It's tricky, but it's how it should work -- we don't expect people to have implicit faith in any system, and actively coach them to question the world around them.

More people question too little than too much, so it's great to see you all are the opposite. :)

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#97

Post by ztratar »

beager wrote: post #68

Thanks for sharing. Some notes: 1. Signups go right to waitlist, so it's hard to validate any of this. Is this vaporware? Why waitlist? Are you still in dev, or is this an artificial scarcity play? 2. All I see here conceptually is headhunter lead-gen, so I don't understand why you're charging $708+/yr for chatting. Why not offer your service for free, register orders of magnitude more users, and make your money as a…

Hey Beager!

1. We actually have a load balancer of sorts. When we get flooded with requests and won't be able to maintain conversational quality, people get put into the line. It's effective for launches like this. We prefer to not put people into the line, as instant-access users are 38% more likely to engage, but quality trumps all else.

2. Fun you mention this! This is how our business worked at the beginning, but it led to some really absurd dynamics at scale. People above mentioned ethics questions... well, when the company's and coach's profit-motive is to place you in a new role, the advice slants that way. Especially if it's $15k a pop for an engineer. Secondly, this model only work with engineering and SV-based recruiting... and we want to help people who are facing uphill battles in the US -- not just those who already have it pretty good.

3. As we develop a larger network of industry experts and train our coaches, we'll be able to expand further.

4. People can send us whatever they want, but we don't actively encourage proprietary information in any specific way.

5. We attempted a user mentor network before and it didn't scale. The user experience was often terrible for users because we couldn't guarantee consistency or quality of advice -- a LOT of mentors would give terrible advice, and then we'd have to come in to fix the situation. To even detect that, you have to give mentors a shot. Secondarily, if a mentee slacked, the mentor wouldn't feel empathy for them and also slack. When we control the experience, we can play "coach" and get real with people -- mentors don't look to do that usually. Sometimes there are hard conversations and people need to be told their being lazy, making excuses, etc.

6. It works with chat and email. We're trying to think about scale, and live video would require a price point that is about double or triple. That would make it unaffordable for middle America.

Thanks for the thoughts + analysis! Curious your take on my replies.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#98

Post by ktta »

ztratar wrote: post #93
ktta wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was something that tipped me off too. They're very specific.

It was posted by our head of coaching. Suspicious? People self post all the time. We didn't run an upvote group, if that's your concern. HN algorithms are way too impressive.

I guess we'll have to take your word for it.

The account that posted was created about two months ago and this was the only submission which was the red flag. And this was the very first submission. Usually people have to repeatedly post to get the traction this post did because they get ignored sometimes.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#99

Post by ztratar »

ktta wrote: post #98
ztratar wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was posted by our head of coaching. Suspicious? People self post all the time. We didn't run an upvote group, if that's your concern. HN algorithms are way too impressive.

I guess we'll have to take your word for it. The account that posted was created about two months ago and this was the only submission which was the red flag. And this was the very first submission. Usually people have to repeatedly post to get the traction this post did because they get ignored sometimes.

So what's weird is she actually posted last week too, but only she can see that submission in her submissions page.

I can't see it -- I only see this one.

Maybe that's why this one was allowed to go up? Not sure.

Re: Boost – Your personal advisor and career coach

#100

Post by ztratar »

posixplz wrote: post #66
ztratar wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boost is 100% confidential. People talk about complex power grabs and political situations all the time. For Boost to work well, people need to be able to trust it with Information thy want confidential.

> 100% confidential Are your coaches licensed professional counselors, therapists or psychologists? If not, those conversations are not actually privileged; any disclosure of legally protected information (like a company's sensitive internal documents) would be highly improper.

We're thinking about putting in an NDA-like process that's more formal. People should feel secure that we have their back.

Interestingly enough, "licensed career coaching" is a complete sham. There's no real accreditation or regulatory environment: the largest career coaching programs that bestow certificates are private, for-profit orgs and give out their certs like candy on halloween. It's really sad.

I agree that there's a large amount of information that probably shouldn't be sent to us, but people also need to give us the full context for their personal problem. We don't encourage people to send us information we don't need, and often they can get by with indirect info... "we're raising $8.6m on a $100m valuation" -> "I think we're going through additional funding soon."

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