Hi Product Hunt! I’m Jason, cofounder and CEO of Sidekick. We’re really excited for our first launch on Product Hunt today. My cofounder @ayan_bandyopadhyay and I worked together at Robinhood, where we first learned that the way most companies handle customer support (CS) was totally broken. CS teams have more customer interactions than any other department in the company, but they are often regarded as just a cost center. Often, their responsibilities are even outsourced to offshore teams. That’s really messed up! Why would companies delegate the role that spends the most time with their customers to an external agency? That’s why we started Sidekick: to help customer facing teams automate without outsourcing, allowing them move up to the orchestration layer where they can have greater impact on the business. We want to turn customer support into a high-leverage role like product or engineering, and with generative AI we finally have the tools to do so. 🤖 What is Sidekick? Sidekick is an open source developer support bot. It does just two things: 1. Searches through your documentation to answer questions on Slack. 2. Updates your documentation with new information when a human responds to a question. It sounds simple, but when combined, Sidekick helps support engineers scale themselves 100x by creating a content feedback loop. As Sidekick learns from your slack messages, it makes your documentation better. As your documentation improves, Sidekick gets better at answering questions. As Sidekick gets better at answering questions, you can spend more time on long-tail questions instead of the ones that come up all the time, helping Sidekick learn even more. Why are we starting with developer support? 💸 Developer support is expensive! The only people who can help developers troubleshoot issues are other developers, but hiring developers is expensive. There’s a 2000:1 ratio of developers to support engineers in the #help channel for a typical open source product, so it's impossible to keep up with all the questions. 📝 Developers run on documentation. Many of the questions the asked have already been asked before. It would be nice if there was an easy way to record those answers in the docs, but everyone's too busy providing support to keep the docs up to date. Sidekick solves both these problems, freeing up time so support engineers can focus on more important things than searching through documentation. Here’s how companies are using Sidekick to save their support team hours per week. ⚡️ Never answer the same question twice. Staff members can react to any message with a 🦾 emoji to get Sidekick to search for an answer. Even if it doesn't find one, it'll link to the most relevant parts of the docs or most similar Github issue. 🗃️ Keep your docs up to date. Staff can react with the 📝 emoji to any message to get Sidekick to submit a pull request to Github with an update to the .md documentation based on the contents of the message. It automatically knows which file and which part of the file to edit, and matches the formatting of your docs so all you have to do is review + approve. 🪩 Engage your community. Activity on a channel tends to increase when Sidekick is added, because developers know they can get instant answers. You’ll start to see messages from lurkers who otherwise wouldn’t speak up because they don’t want to bother a human with their issues. HOW TO GET STARTED! Visit our website and click the link to add Sidekick to your Slack. As part of our launch, we’re offering one month free when you subscribe with the promo code SIDEKICKPH2023, and the product is fully refundable. Once installed, send us an email at founders@getsidekick.ai with a link to your Github repo or a zip with your docs in .md files. We’re working on a self-serve flow for all this but haven’t had a chance to fully automate it yet, so please bear with us! You should be up and running within 12 hours. HOW TO USE To ask Sidekick a question, just tag it! To get a PR with doc updates, react to any message with the 📝 emoji. If you prefer to set it up yourself, we’ll be making the core search and conversation modules open source soon.

Jason Fan

Sidekick

Maker

📌

2yr ago

Vaibhav Gupta

wrapped.dev

Excited to try it out! How do you guys update my documentation if it changes? do I need to do anything?

Hey @hellovai! We index all your docs and search through them to find the section that's most relevant to the information. Then we use GPT to combine the new info with the existing doc. It all goes into a PR so you have a chance to review and tweak it before merging it in.