18 the.garage · United States Live
Business development out of the founder's head and into one system
Every contact from a card, a badge, a LinkedIn screenshot or a voice memo is captured in Slack, enriched and scored, so the warm relationships are the visible ones.
- Before
- Contacts spread across notebooks, business cards, slide photos and voice notes, sorted by hand for hours after every event
- After
- Every capture dropped into Slack becomes a clean, enriched CRM contact, and every relationship carries a score from hot to cold
- 4
- ways to capture a contact in Slack: photo, screenshot, voice memo, note
- 1
- command to check or roll back the CRM move
- Card or badge photo
- Screenshot
- Voice memo
- Clean CRM contact
- Relationship score
- Card back in Slack
01 What changed
- A contact met at an event reaches the CRM without anyone typing it
- The warm relationships are visible, ranked, instead of found by luck
- A skipped contact now shows up as a failure, not a quiet success
The full story The problem, how we approached it, and what we built
the.garage, a Nashville startup platform for healthcare and medtech founders, ran its business development out of its founder's notebooks, phone and memory. We built the system that captures every contact the moment he meets them, enriches it, writes it to the CRM and scores the relationship, then moved the whole CRM with a one-command rollback.
02 The problem
For one person met at an event there might be a note in a notebook, a business card, a photo of a slide and a voice memo. After every event the founder spent hours sorting them by hand, and the connections that mattered were found by luck.
Contacts with no email address were the worst case: the CRM could not hold them, so they quietly went nowhere.
03 The approach
We mapped how a contact actually reaches the founder, then built a Slack capture that takes a card or badge photo, a screenshot, a voice memo or a typed note and pulls out name, title, company, city, the pain points from the rambling and the next step. The contact is enriched, written to the CRM, and a card comes back in Slack.
A contact without an email is matched to the record that already exists and updated in place, or the bot asks for the email in the thread. When a silent skip was found in September we fixed it, made the health check fail loudly instead of reporting success, and kept a rollback script beside the fix. The CRM move itself checks and rolls back with one command.
04 What we built
- Slack capture for card and badge photos, screenshots, voice memos and typed notes
- Extraction of title, company, pain points, next step and a follow-up task from each capture
- Match-then-update for contacts with no email, or a question back in the thread
- Relationship scores from hot to cold, from email history
- CRM cutover with status and rollback as one command, and a health check that fails loudly