{"id":83816,"title":"Focus Buddy - AI productivity coach to get more work done","tagline":"The AI you speak to 3-4 hours every day to help you think clearly, avoid distractions and be held accountable","body":"### **TLDR**\n\n_FocusBuddy is an AI productivity coach that sits in the background on your computer and speaks to you while you work to help you think clearly, avoid distractions and hold you accountable. Our users converse with the AI over a phone call for 3-4 hours everyday while they’re working_.\n\n### **The Cost of ADHD** \n\nWe’re starting by focusing on people that struggle with ADHD\n\n**People with ADHD consider it the BIGGEST blocker in their life and the PRIMARY cause of their poor grades, missing promotions, and getting fired.**\n\n* 17 million adults and children in the US\n* 2-4 more hours wasted every day compared to peers\n\nBeyond ADHD, there are 80 Million people knowledge workers in high income countries that struggle with workplace productivity that FocusBuddy will serve\n\n### **How Focus Buddy helps our user Jeff**\n\nJeff is a brilliant product engineer who has ADHD. He often struggles to complete work due to his tendency to hyper-focus on details and get distracted by sudden impulses. Here is what Jeff's new workflow looks like since he started using FocusBuddy: \n\nJeff calls Focus Buddy first thing in the morning after breakfast. They go over his to-do list together and create a schedule for his day. Jeff then begins his first task - writing a draft PRD. He explains his approach to FocusBuddy and asks for frequent check-ins to keep him on track. \n\nAn hour into drafting, Jeff notices a small discrepancy in a user activity chart. His ADHD brain latches onto this detail, and he spends the next 30 minutes hyper-focusing on it, losing sight of the bigger picture. Just then, FocusBuddy speaks up: \"How's it going?\" Jeff explains: \"He is still figuring out the details on the chart\" FocusBuddy detects that Jeff has been hyper-focusing on a detail and helps Jeff realize that he is falling behind on schedule with more important parts of the PRD.\n\nFocus Buddy then works with Jeff to wrap up work on the chart discrepancy and reorganize his schedule to come back to the chart later in the day. They then do a 5-minute meditation to shift his focus away from the discrepancy and ease his mind back onto the main task. At the end of the day, FocusBuddy helps Jeff perform a daily reflection and prepare for his day tomorrow.\n\nJeff and our other users experience multiple types of interventions by Focus Buddy every single day and attribute their new-found productivity to it.\n\n### **Why Focus Buddy works**\n\nToday, people with ADHD spend hours every day virtually co-working on apps like Focusmate, updating to-do lists, using meditation apps like Calm, and journaling with little success. It is extremely hard to keep these apps updated, they have very little context about you and are unable to proactively provide timely support when needed. \n\nFocus Buddy is deeply integrated, is seamless to interact with, builds a lot of context over time and is able to leverage this context at critical moments to provide the necessary support.\n\nOn top of that, our voice AI infrastructure is revolutionising the way humans and AI interact. we're crafting an entirely new paradigm for fluid, natural conversations that feel as intuitive as talking to another person. Here are some examples:\n\n[**Multimodal Voice + Text Conversation**](https://youtu.be/d4FpwMfz_Ow)\n\n[**Proactive AI Initiated Check-ins**](https://youtu.be/XOgYMysjZ10)\n\n### **Our Team**\n\n![uploaded image](/media/?type=post\u0026id=83816\u0026key=user_uploads/650126/d303db31-ba55-407a-a001-09b86bbe9aa3)\n\n[Adnan](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adnan-sherif-as/) and [Yash](https://www.linkedin.com/in/yashmr/) have been best friends for over a decade, roommates for the last two years, and worked on the Google Pixel team as a Product Manager and ML Engineer. Yash led product and safety for Generative AI apps on the latest Pixel phone, while Adnan worked on training and deploying low-latency, resource-constrained, fully on-device Gemini models used by these apps.\n\nAdnan is a national triple jump champion, and prior to Google, he conducted AI research at UC Berkeley’s SkyLab with Ion Stoica (co-founder of Databricks), focusing on scaling graph machine learning to problems with millions of nodes. Yash has worked at startups like Kalshi and Relay, helping them from pre-launch to launch.\n\nAdnan learned to manage the ADHD symptoms he faced throughout high school and college and went on to help others cope with the same condition.\n\n# **Our Asks**\n\nReach out to us at [founders@focusbuddy.ai](mailto:founders@focusbuddy.ai) to learn more and sign up on our website to try us out and give us feedback. If you know anyone with ADHD, feel free to send them our way\n\nContact:  [founders@focusbuddy.ai](mailto:founders@focusbuddy.ai)  | Website: \u003chttps://www.focusbuddy.ai/?ref=yc\u003e","slug":"Lns-focus-buddy-ai-productivity-coach-to-get-more-work-done","created_at":"2024-09-06T17:41:22.363Z","updated_at":"2026-05-25T01:41:55.858Z","total_vote_count":346,"url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Lns-focus-buddy-ai-productivity-coach-to-get-more-work-done","share_image_url":"https://www.ycombinator.com/media/?type=post\u0026id=83816\u0026key=user_uploads/650126/d303db31-ba55-407a-a001-09b86bbe9aa3","company":{"id":29828,"name":"Sterling Labs, Inc","slug":"sterling-labs-inc","url":"https://www.drafttherecord.com/","logo":"https://bookface-images.s3.amazonaws.com/small_logos/c84a03d0d402a34192f801bf5c20f40407fa3c88.png","batch":"Summer 2024","industry":"Consumer","tags":["Consumer","Productivity","Mental Health","AI","Conversational AI"],"search_path":"https://bookface.ycombinator.com/company/29828"}}