CoraContacts — Talk to remember. Never lose a connection.

Inspiration

I meet a lot of people. Conferences, networking events, random encounters that turn into something meaningful. And then... I forget. Not the person, I remember them, but the details. What they were working on. What I promised to follow up on. The name of their startup. The thing they said that actually mattered.

I'd been looking for a relationship manager that worked the way I actually live my life: fast, conversational, no friction. Nothing fit. Everything asked me to open an app, fill in fields, remember to log things. I never did. So I just... lost connections.

That's what CoraContacts is built to fix.

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What It Does

CoraContacts is a conversational relationship manager powered by an AI agent Cora (OpenClaw) that lives in WhatsApp. You just talk to her like you'd text a friend:

"Met Peter Steinberg at the hackathon today. Introduced by Zuckerberg. He's planning something big with OpenClaw and invited me to Silicon Valley. Remind me to pitch my agent to him tomorrow."

Cora extracts the name, notes, follow-up date, confirms with you in one line, and saves everything to a Notion database. No forms. No apps. Just a conversation.

Follow-up reminders fire automatically. Weekly check-ins get scheduled as cron jobs. Your relationship history lives in Notion, searchable and structured, on any device.

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How I Built It

The stack is deceptively simple, which only reveals itself after you've spent hours making every piece talk to each other.

• OpenClaw — the agent runtime that connects Cora to WhatsApp and runs the AI logic
• Claude (Anthropic) — the model behind Cora, handling natural language understanding and extraction
• ElevenLabs -- using speech to text for transcription
• Notion API — the database layer: every contact, note, and follow-up date lands here
• WhatsApp (via Baileys) — the interface I actually use every day
• GitHub — version control for the workspace and agent configuration

The core flow: WhatsApp message → OpenClaw routes it to the Claude agent → Cora extracts structured data → confirms with the user → writes to Notion via API → sets reminders via OpenClaw's cron scheduler.

The math of it is simple: minimize $\text{friction}(x)$ where $x$ is every step between having a thought and that thought being saved. Ideally $x \to 0$.

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What I Learned

I had never coded anything like this before. Not even close.

In one night — no sleep, deadline looming — I learned how to:

• Set up and authenticate the Notion API and build a database schema from scratch
• Configure OpenClaw with agents, workspace files, and channel integrations
• Connect WhatsApp as a live messaging channel
• Write agent personality files (SOUL.md, AGENTS.md) that actually shape how the AI behaves
• Push a project to GitHub for the first time in this context
• Debug JSON syntax errors in config files at 4am (not recommended, highly educational)

The learning curve wasn't a curve. It was a wall. And then I was over it.

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Challenges

Every single API key was a new adventure. Notion token, OpenClaw auth, WhatsApp linking via QR code, GitHub credentials — none of it was plug-and-play, and I had no prior experience with any of it.

The config file broke. Literally — openclaw.json got corrupted mid-session with a JSON syntax error that prevented the gateway from starting. The terminal stopped echoing Cora's messages. WhatsApp was routing my own replies back to me as incoming messages. It was chaos.

I got through it because of the people around me. The fellow hackers who stayed up with me, answered dumb questions without making me feel dumb, and debugged things side by side — I wouldn't have shipped anything without them. That's probably the most important thing I built: trust in a community.

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What's Next

I honestly did not have time to plan that yet. I guess I will polish it even more and maybe tailor it to a specific gap to launch.

Built With

• 11labs
• cron-scheduling-whatsapp-(via-baileys)-?-primary-user-interface-*database-&-storage*-notion-api-?-contacts-database
• elevenlabs
• follow-up-dates-github-?-workspace-version-control-*other*-json-/-json5-?-agent-configuration-markdown-?-agent-personality-&-memory-files-(soul.md
• github
• javascript
• markdown
• node.js
• notes
• notionapi
• openclaw
• whatsapp
• whatsapp-integration