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Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#21

Post by wwilim »

roncesvalles wrote: post #15

The point about chatbots lessening the shyness barrier in a public forum is very interesting. I think just like (imo) much of the value of the data science craze of the last 10 years came not from the final analysis of the data but from inducing businesses to start measuring and storing operational metrics from every corner of the company in a structured way in the first place, much of the business value of ChatGPT w…

It's potentially even better than the big data craze - actually using the operational data was often stuck in a vicious cycle of (nobody has yet successfully used the data -> data is poor quality because nobody motivates making it better), and I bet most companies have never actually completed a single feedback cycle of their data-leveraging initiatives. Hooking a chatbot up to your documentation will be comparatively easier and offer near-instant feedback

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#24

Post by jasonwcfan »

tln wrote: post #9

Very interesting features! I'm not sure why it needs to be focused on developer docs vs all docs - any reason you decided on that niche? I'd suggest creating a "demo" slack AND discord to try out. Is the demo slack working as intended? I see "Hey there! Looks like I'm not set up yet for this Slack workspace. Please send over a link to your documentation to founders@getsidekick.ai and we'll get you set up!"

We started out with all docs actually, and decided to narrow to dev docs because 1. Markdown files are structured and easier to parse 2. Engineering teams tend to have more influence in their orgs. We tried talking to a lot of traditional customer support teams and while they were interested in the product the sales cycle was long. Whereas with many teams working on developer facing products the conversation was just "hey that looks cool, let's try it!"

And yep we're running into some issues the new Slack we set up for public testing. Sorry for the inconvenience, we should have tested it more thoroughly. It should be up in the next hour or so.

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#25

Post by jasonwcfan »

samstave wrote: post #16
tln wrote: post #9

Very interesting features! I'm not sure why it needs to be focused on developer docs vs all docs - any reason you decided on that niche? I'd suggest creating a "demo" slack AND discord to try out. Is the demo slack working as intended? I see "Hey there! Looks like I'm not set up yet for this Slack workspace. Please send over a link to your documentation to founders@getsidekick.ai and we'll get you set up!"

If they want to make Unicorn status ; make this for legal. And even better - make it so individuals can use it for legal documents.

Yeah we're thinking any type of product in a technically complex field could benefit. Legal, compliance, software, etc. For these types of products companies need highly trained employees with specific expertise to provide support and to create content, which makes it extremely expensive to scale.

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#26

Post by ghiculescu »

I might be a bit confused here. Is this just for open source projects (and companies built on top of them)? Or can I use it for internal repos?

I’d love the latter use case. A bot that scanned our internal engineering chat and answered our own team’s questions. I can provide many examples.

The difference is we don’t have public API docs. Instead we have code comments + confluence (reluctantly) + readme files in GitHub repos + the code itself. I imagine you could train off that and build the knowledge corpus over time?

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#27

Post by jasonwcfan »

rasfuranku wrote: post #22

This is amazing! Have you thougth in integrating it to update docs in Confluence?

We have! The reason we didn't start there is because Confluence is usually used for internal docs, which means a longer sales and adoption cycle. The nice thing about developer docs is that they're public so we can ingest them and start adding value ASAP.

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#28

Post by jasonwcfan »

roncesvalles wrote: post #15

The point about chatbots lessening the shyness barrier in a public forum is very interesting. I think just like (imo) much of the value of the data science craze of the last 10 years came not from the final analysis of the data but from inducing businesses to start measuring and storing operational metrics from every corner of the company in a structured way in the first place, much of the business value of ChatGPT w…

Exactly. I didn't mention it in the post but the master plan is to give companies analytics over their customer conversations and documentation. This was technically possibly years ago but no one did it because customer support was seen as a cost center and the goal was to minimize spend. Companies rarely invested in CS instrumentation, or even outsourced the function entirely, which I find super odd because no one talks to customers more than the CS team.

With language models being where they are today, companies can get some really valuable insights out of these conversations, but like you said they do need to measure and store the right things.

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#29

Post by jasonwcfan »

wwilim wrote: post #21
roncesvalles wrote: post #15

The point about chatbots lessening the shyness barrier in a public forum is very interesting. I think just like (imo) much of the value of the data science craze of the last 10 years came not from the final analysis of the data but from inducing businesses to start measuring and storing operational metrics from every corner of the company in a structured way in the first place, much of the business value of ChatGPT w…

It's potentially even better than the big data craze - actually using the operational data was often stuck in a vicious cycle of (nobody has yet successfully used the data -> data is poor quality because nobody motivates making it better), and I bet most companies have never actually completed a single feedback cycle of their data-leveraging initiatives. Hooking a chatbot up to your documentation will be comparativel…

Yeah - we think similarly to how Gong and other sales enablement products helped companies quantitatively measure and improve sales rep performance, there will be a lot of value in products that help measure and improve customer service performance. With software products getting more complex (salesforce has like 100 products), companies can increasingly get just as much value from upselling their existing customers as on finding new ones.

Re: Launch HN: Sidekick (YC W23) – AI support bot for developers

#30

Post by jasonwcfan »

gregschlom wrote: post #23

OT, but the Youtube's auto-generated captions on that video ( https://youtu.be/fPhP1325RkI ) often mis-transcribe "sidekick" as "psychic" and it's amusing that both can work equally well as a name for this product.

LOL I agree that's a pretty good name!
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