What problem does it solve?
YC Office Hours provides a structured, proactive coaching flow that helps teams brainstorm, validate demand reality, and design thoughtful paths for new products, saving time and guiding decision making.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Startup mode features six forcing questions that reveal demand reality, status quo, desperate specificity, narrowest wedge, observation, and future-fit, enabling fast reality-checks before building.
- Builder mode supports design thinking brainstorming for side projects, hackathons, learning, and open source, helping you generate a clear plan and a design doc.
- Proactive invocation: when users describe a new product idea, the skill surfaces guided questions instead of answering directly, and can route to /plan-ceo-review or /plan-eng-review to align stakeholders.
Quick Start
Start an office-hours session by telling the assistant you want to brainstorm, and expect a guided plan and a saved design doc at the end.