casual tuesday, pitched to benchsci

welcome to introspection ft. harsehaj! ⭐️ i’m harsehaj, an 18 y/o always up to something in social good x tech.

this publication is a place for me to reflect on a new topic daily, and send it to your inbox. if you’re new here, sign up to tune in! you reading this is keeping me accountable, so thank you for that. as a treat, i drop cool resources/opportunities at the end. 💌 

btw, feel free to reply with topic ideas you want me to write about for future posts.

onto today’s topic: casual tuesday, pitched to benchsci 🌟

over the past 2 weeks, i’ve been working alongside a team to develop a solution to improve productivity at benchsci.

starting the challenge, i didn’t really know most of my team members, but i can confidently say that by the end of this experience, i have made some really close friends. they also probably think that i’m a rollerblading-obsessed nerd now … oh well. 🥰

after doing a bunch of internships and leading different projects, i’ve come to realize that onboarding new hires is a criminally overlooked inefficiency. there’s always so much information to go through, and not only is it overwhelming, it’s time-consuming to ensure each team member’s understanding and next steps are calibrated.

we talked to current employees at the company and learned that the same issue is present at benchsci as well. new recruits in certain teams even go through hundreds of documents in a google drive just to gain a general understanding of their tasks.

benchsci is spending over half of their time on onboarding unproductively. this is mostly because of that chunky google drive, so i proposed building an ai tool that would allow users to chat with the google drive & ask questions directly.

ai will find the needle in the haystack of information in a single click instead of employees spending >6 hours. we love ai! ❤️ 

we built exactly that and buffed up the solution with more comprehensive onboarding features like prompt suggesting and a bunch of other fun, nerdy stuff. we put together a deck, designed the user interface and checked off dozens of other tasks in between.

finally, it was pitch time earlier this morning. i stepped up to the plate, feeling a teeny tiny bit jittery, but i cruised along. i ended up genuinely having fun while pitching our solution: making random, unplanned jokes and actually taking the benchsci executives along a story with a happy ending (our solution — benchsidekick).

i was having a blast, mostly because i was authentic. it was almost like i was just pitching a really cool idea to my bestie, and i think that’s the best way to go (maybe not if it’s the prime minister or something). 😭

it was a super fun experience building a functioning ai-driven google drive chat tool and pitching it directly to benchsci’s ceo, liran belenzon! i’m going to be uploading my pitch to twitter as soon as i receive the recording, so stay tuned.

cool finds of the day 🔍️