From Friendship to Innovation: How Katherine Tsai Built CoachRocks for Struggling Coaches
Helping coaches turn conversations into clarity, action, and growth
May 19, 2026, 11:52 AM GMT
In a world where coaches spend countless hours helping others grow, few people stop to consider the invisible workload that follows every coaching session. For Katherine Tsai, that realization came not from market research or venture capital trends, but from conversations with friends.
Several of Tsai’s close friends worked as professional coaches, and she repeatedly saw the same pattern unfold. Their coaching sessions were energizing and meaningful, but once the calls ended, the real administrative burden began — writing summaries, preparing follow-up emails, tracking action items, organizing notes, and planning the next session. Much of their time was consumed not by coaching itself, but by the manual tasks surrounding it.
That frustration became the spark behind CoachRocksutm_source=chatgpt.com), an AI-powered platform designed to simplify and automate the post-session workflow for coaches. According to the platform, CoachRocks helps users generate meeting summaries, organize client insights, prepare next-session materials, create follow-up messages, and track progress automatically after coaching calls.
Pictured: Katherine Tsai, an upcoming digital entrepreneur in the coaching space
Image Courtesy: ©Katherine Tsai
What began as a simple idea soon evolved into a broader mission: helping coaches focus more on human connection and less on administration. Rather than building “just another note-taking app,” Tsai envisioned a complete assistant that could support the entire coaching process. The system integrates meeting bots, calendar workflows, AI-generated summaries, action items, and content creation tools into one streamlined platform.
A major part of bringing that vision to life involved collaborating with Sheya and the team at Ryze Design during the MVP stage of development. Reflecting on the experience, Tsai described the partnership as one of the best early decisions she made for the company.
“Working with Sheya and her team at Ryze Design on my SaaS MVP was one of the best early decisions I made,” Tsai said. “They were incredibly proactive throughout the entire process. Instead of just executing on what I asked for, they constantly evaluated the product from a real user's perspective, raising questions, identifying friction points, and improving the flow in ways I hadn't thought of.”
She added that for an early-stage product, that kind of collaboration proved invaluable.
“For an MVP, that kind of thinking is invaluable. They helped make our user journey much smoother and more intuitive, which gave me much more confidence moving forward with the product.”
The platform’s development reflected Tsai’s close understanding of the coaching industry. Early exploration revealed that coaches were juggling fragmented systems and repetitive follow-up tasks that often led to burnout and lost productivity. CoachRocks was ultimately designed around the real day-to-day workflow of coaching professionals rather than a single isolated feature.
One of the defining moments for Tsai reportedly came during an early live test of the platform. After a coaching session ended, the AI-generated outputs — summaries, action plans, follow-up drafts, and structured insights — were delivered within minutes. The result demonstrated that automation could support coaches without replacing the personal, human side of their work.
Today, CoachRocks positions itself as an AI coaching assistant built specifically to reduce administrative overload and improve follow-through between coaches and clients. The company’s goal is to give coaches more leverage and more time to focus on meaningful transformation rather than paperwork.
For Tsai, the platform remains deeply personal. What started as an attempt to help friends struggling behind the scenes has grown into a technology venture aimed at modernizing the coaching profession itself — one session at a time.