THE CHALLENGE We had built an internal system to automate verified contact creation in Wercflow. It worked. But it wasn’t exposed to users...yet... Then a major client came to us with an urgent ask: They were prepping for a high-profile IRL event and wanted to instantly add business cards and email threads to their Wercflow network. Manual entry was a non-starter. They wanted a “just forward it and forget it” solution. We had the backend logic. We just needed to plug it into the wild.
Company:
Wercflow | IPG Agency
My Role:
Head of Product
Year:
2024
Techstack
Gmail | Zapier | Postgres | Slack
The Solution
We launched a real-time email parser that let users forward business cards, intros, or contact dumps and automatically turned them into clean records in Wercflow.
1. Accept Forwarded Emails via Unique Inbox
Each account got a dedicated email address (contacts@wercflow.com). Any email forwarded there triggered a Zapier flow that identified the sender and extracted the payload.
3. Created & Linked the Right Entities in Postgres
From there, we:
Matched to existing users or created new ones
Created "virtual" callsheets because contacts table had a callsheet/project dependency
Linked both sides in user_contacts, user_contact_callsheets
Handled success/error states automatically
2. Used OpenAI to Parse & Normalize Contact Info
Instead of brittle regex, we used GPT to extract names, roles, phone numbers, links (IG, LinkedIn, IMDB, etc.), and classify them.
Even messy forwards like “Hey—looping in Chris who worked on X” got structured cleanly.
4. Delivered Confirmation Instantly
Once processed, users got a Slack alert or email with the contact card and a link to their updated Wercflow.
