Your largest repository of information is your email. A typical inbox contains receipts, travel itineraries, social events, notes to self, calendar invites, contacts, news, updates, documents, and so much more. It is a wealth of personal information.
For a small business, this is especially true. Over 64% of small businesses use email as their sole communication to reach customers. Thus, email is an extremely powerful tool for small businesses to get ahead.
Automating lead search with AI
After talking to several small businesses I realized that finding leads is their biggest challenge.
How many times have you found a prospective partner or sales lead and the only way to connect with them is through a vague online contact form? You spend the time to fill it out and your email just goes into the abyss. You want to reach out to the person behind Hannah@USGuitars.com, not the online contact form. Finding these contact emails is an arduous process of online searches followed by tedious data entry. Now, I am lazy and wondered, can I use AI to automate this process?
I created an AI agent that takes a URL (say, “acmebakery.com” or “phillcoffee.com”) and crawls the web similar to Google. Google search works by crawling around the internet to generate backlinks and index web pages. My AI agent also crawls the internet to build an email index, called Smart Contacts.
This AI agent searches lines and lines of code to find any emails related to the URL. Then, the agent finds links to other websites and repeats the process over and over until all links are exhausted. After the agent finds all the related emails to a business, the data is cleaned up; duplicates are removed and tidied. Voila! You have a list of all emails for that business.
Organizing my inbox with AI
My greatest confession is that my email inbox is a mess. The incoming barrage of emails is never-ending. But even with all the smart tools available today (Looking at you, Microsoft Copilot!), I find myself manually tagging and creating complex Gmail filters to manage my email. LLMs come to save the day here! I started embedding all my emails and decided to create custom categories to cater to my needs.
Incoming Smart Labels and Dynamic Widgets!
I created Smart Labels as a way to quickly categorize emails in my inbox. Tell the AI a few keywords that describe your Smart Label, and it does all the heavy lifting. Every incoming email is analyzed and tagged with the appropriate Smart Label.
Not only does the AI model categorize emails without the need for clunky Gmail filters, but it can extrapolate insights, such as how many calendar invites you received or how many customer responses you received. Think of it like a mini personal assistant, parsing the data from long and detailed emails into graphs or counters.
Finally, I was inspired by the dynamic widgets in Notion and wanted a way to customize how I see information from my inbox. With Dynamic Widgets, you can view all the emails in a category quickly and succinctly. Sometimes (but not all the time), you just want to know how many calendar invites you have received, or how many job openings are getting in your inbox over a week. These new widgets provide a clean and organized way to display this information without ever having to switch to other tabs.
A smart search for emails
I have a complicated relationship with Gmail. The program is quick, free, and ubiquitous, but man, does the search function drive me nuts. Every time I sit down to do accounting or budgeting for my small business, a Gmail search sucks up 80% of my time. I always need multiple search combinations to find my receipts from last month.
For example, when I start planning my next vacation, I want to find all the travel deals in my inbox. Why won’t Gmail simply show a list of all travel-related emails when I search for “travel”? Instead, it gives me a list of LinkedIn jobs that require “travel for work” – the result of a rudimentary keyword-based search
To fix the problem, I tried using the embedding search function from the Smart Labels for a smarter inbox search. With a hybrid search technique called Reciprocal Rank Fusion, I built a smart search bar right into my email dashboard which allows me to find emails based on intent, sentiment, and context in addition to the conventional keyword search.
With these powerful features built on top of the unstructured dataset of emails, there are tremendous productivity gains that AI can provide both in your daily personal and professional life. I packaged these features together to create a new “AI dashboard for emails”, called Dash.
People are already starting to enjoy a better email experience with Dash. Join the waitlist now!
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