Reconnekt

The best way to stay on top of your business network

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Inspiration

Networking is responsible for more than 80% of executive roles and contracts. Staying on top of the people you meet is critical. LinkedIn has become a firehose of social media and your addressbook is crammed with names of people you can't remember. Reconnekt will help you stay on top of your network. Never forget how you met. Never forget to follow up. Never forget what to say. Reconnekt.

Ever heard that the most powerful networking is with people you already know? Wondered who those names in your phone were? Or wished you'd followed up sooner with that awesome contact you met at a conference four years ago? And what should you say when you reach out?

What it does

A contact manager for humans. Like a personal CRM, except not like a CRM, because there's no deals, no pipeline, just contacts with heaps of context. Oh, and very gentle reminders. And it runs from the addressbook on your phone. No subscriptions, no upload, no handing over your data.

How we built it

Built with Bolt.new and years of learnings from networking fails

Challenges we ran into

  1. There were some cases where things worked on the Expo stack but not in the final build. Fortunately it was relatively easy to swap out components in the downloaded code so that submissions would run
  2. Just like with normal code, a few feature requests came in and minor bugs were spotted which meant patching updates from Bolt into the local branch.
  3. We experimented with keeping VSCode and Bolt in sync via GitHub, but in the end this introduced conflicts between the Expo stack and the full build

Accomplishments that we're proud of

This is a non-developer who has built an entire, functioning iOS app. I am super impressed by what Bolt has been able to help me achieve, and how responsive it has been to inputs, requests and suggestions. I'm also pleased to have used this project to learn the basics of VS Code.

What we learned

How to really think about the minutiae of interactions and UI layouts The structure of files within a project, and the importance of the app.JSON, package.JSON and package-lock.JSON, which is where the conflicting and deprecated components were fixed

What's next for reckonekt

  1. An AI-powered message creator. For a global solution this would require a server from where we would hit OpenAI or a similar tool. You can see the JSON 'AI message prompt' in this version of the app. The intention long term would be to pass this to a server.
  2. Native share-via feature for LinkedIn. My idea here is to allow a user to create a new contact from LinkedIn, or to append a LinkedIn URL straight to Reconnekt via a contact picker. I had spec'd this and Bolt created a how-to guide, but it required Xcode native which I wasn't comfortable trying in the timeframe
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