AI for Attention – Seeking Feedback for YC interview

My friend Victor and I are exploring ways that AI can be used to help bolster attention and productivity. We’ve built a simple chrome extension as a proof-of-concept and would really appreciate your candid feedback. In the spirit of transparency, we have our YC interview tomorrow and have pushed this out the door to maximize our learnings (and hopefully our chances) with the available remaining time.

Privacy questions: We send the following data to the OpenAI API (GPT3.5 Turbo): The user’s goal - The page’s URL and headers - The first 100 tokens on the page - We do not send any digits or anything formatted like an email - It does not run on a very long list of financial, healthcare, and insurance websites - It does not run on hangouts, slack, google, zoom, and a few other websites for reasons of visual obtrusiveness.

The idea: Our ultimate goal is to build a personalized productivity assistant that operates across all commonly used internet devices and maintains a nuanced and accurate model of your goals, behavioral patterns, and motivational preferences.

Why we are working on this: Victor will speak for himself in the comments. I have ADHD, as do many of my friends, family, colleagues, and I suspect many of you. Medications stopped working for me years ago so I have relied on a clunky set of tools (mostly timers and blockers) to keep my focus on the right things. Those tools are based on simple rules and either get in the way at the wrong times, or are not effective enough when I really need them to be.

I’ve been wanting to build something in this space for a long time but everything started clicking when I met Victor a couple months ago. This version of the product caters more towards folks with attention challenges but the problem is much bigger, as nearly everyone we’ve spoken to has some challenges maintaining a healthy relationship with their devices (phones in particular).

I’m not sure if it matters but I should note that previously I started a fintech named Level which was acquired by Vouch in 2022.

Again, your testing and honest feedback is very much appreciated. Cheers!

I'm Victor, and worked with Vlad on this. I have been working on the other side, optimizing for Video products to get as much time spent as possible from users. But lately, I've had a change of heart. I'm on a mission to create something that counterbalances all that "entertainment" and dopamine hits we get online. Let's channel some of that screen time into stuff like homework, personal growth, and health. I'm a firm believer that AI can be our wingman in this quest to become our best selves and have a more balanced relationship with tech.

Nice idea, did you manage to get into YC?