Passive-Coaching-As-A-Service

It's I Heart Huckabees meets Product Hunt meets Quora

I’ve found friends and coworkers often use tools and tactics I’ve never heard of/wouldn’t occur to me, that have improved my workflow and made my life better, and similarly I have recommendations for tools I like. This is great, but it requires serendipity. Me complaining about a problem I have and being in the right situation where a friend who has had the same problem is around to hear about it.

It’s in part a matching problem, and in part ‘knowing what question to ask’. I don’t know what I’m doing badly, and I can’t just ask people how should I improve my life.

… or can I?

I propose a passive coaching system, where a user records some part of their life - ex. record their screen while they’re working - and shares it on a marketplace. The video would be short, and could be automatically cut up into random 15 second snippets. Other users would watch the clips and, if they see something that could be improved - ex. someone writing code w/o using an automated linter - they could suggest it. Better yet, they could share a video of themselves performing the task.

If the suggestion is accepted, the user receives internet points. Premium versions could involve paid rewards to get the highest quality feedback quickly.

With improvements to video search and recommendations through deep learning categorization, previous answers could be cached and auto suggested, with internet points accruing over time to the best answers.

While this could work at the personal level, the real benefit would be for small business owners, or really business operators in any size org. There’s often simple tricks for improving productivity - e.g. like using hotkeys in excel or a google appscript for automated mail merge - that can quickly solve problems that take hours of manual work.

I posit it’s important that this be video instead of text. I think many Q&A style sites force users to write out questions and answers when it’s very hard to communicate tacit, subtle points through text. Trying to describe how to blow dry your hair well is a lot harder through text than it is over a tiktok.