Announcing CardImporter for HubSpot

Announcing CardImporter! A better way to scan business cards into HubSpot. And the second HubSpot app by Intro CRM.

First, you may know HubSpot has a card scanner in the HubSpot mobile app. So... Why does this exist?

Unlike the existing HubSpot scanner, CardImporter is designed to enrich HubSpot with precise, AI-powered property mapping and timeline integration, perfect for lists, workflows, and reports.

See how it works in the video below. We automatically update contact properties, have AI-enhanced at handling, and advanced optical character recognition (OCR).

Roadmap items include storing images inside of HubSpot, support for audio notes, recording conversations and transcribing them, and more.

We'll only be rolling access out to a limited number of users as we build the product. If you're interested, head over and request early access here.

Transcript

Introduction

[00:00:00] Harris Kenny: Hi there. My name is Harris, Kenny I'm with Intro CRM, and I'm excited to announce the alpha release of card importer. Which is a card importing or business card scanning app for HubSpot.

[00:00:12] Harris Kenny: Now, this is not the first app that I've built with my team. That would actually be OutboundSync, which is a custom integration between Smartlead and HubSpot for folks who are doing scaled cold outbound, and they want to get all that activity pushed into HubSpot into their CRM. But in this app, we're solving a different problem and a really, really specific one.

Announcing CardImporter

[00:00:30] Harris Kenny: Now of course, HubSpot has a scanner in the HubSpot app and it is solid.

[00:00:35] Harris Kenny: It does the job and it works probably for most people. However, what we were hearing from customers is that there are a subset of HubSpot users who want more out of a business card scanner, and they want it to be built specifically for HubSpot.

[00:00:50] Harris Kenny: What I'm going to show you today in this demo over the next few minutes is our version one.

[00:00:55] Harris Kenny: It's got a basic front end. I'm going to show you how we're taking that business card scan. We're mapping to properties. We're pushing to HubSpot. We're updating both contact properties, as well as putting a timeline event into HubSpot, which is going to be useful for lists and workflows and things like reports.

[00:01:10] Harris Kenny: But this is a proof of concept. My hope is to put this out there, to see what kind of interest there is. And if there is interest, then we'll spend more engineering time and make a better.

[00:01:20] Harris Kenny: I've seen a lot of feedback and discussion on the HubSpot forums. I do think there's room for a better product in this space. And I actually think there's room to add a lot to this, including recording audio notes, using the image of the actual card scan and including that in HubSpot for later reference and verification, things like that.

[00:01:37] Harris Kenny: So I think there's actually a lot that could be done here, I just want to get this out there. Who likes it, see, who might want to use it and who knows? Maybe we'll build this out even more, but for now, let me just show you how it works today. And, uh, we'll go from there.

CardImporter walkthrough

[00:01:51] Harris Kenny: Here you can see in the home screen, we've got a bunch of cards that I've already scanned. And we're doing a few things now I'll spare you all the little details, but we are taking this image, and we're using optical character recognition to extract all the texts from the image. And then we're using AI to map what we think the fields should be. Based on this um, Based on this initial image. And of course you can see the full image if you want.

[00:02:17] Harris Kenny: Here you can see we're extracting everything from this first card and we're pushing it over.

[00:02:21] Harris Kenny: We're doing a few things here. When we do this, we're fixing the capitalization of names, for example, and job titles. We're also formatting phone numbers to use the HubSpot style format, which you're going to see in a few minutes when I show you the HubSpot side, how quickly those get picked up, which is pretty nice.

[00:02:39] Harris Kenny: It could also pick up different fonts. Like here, you've got like more of a cursive script and it's able to pick that up. No problem. And in this example, we're also normalizing the domain to be all lowercase.

[00:02:50] Harris Kenny: But all of these have already been imported. So let me show you an example of a fresh import and what that looks like.

[00:02:56] Harris Kenny: Now, because this is, um, I guess like an alpha or MVP release. Some of these things run a little bit slow. Appreciate your patience with that. Again. I really just kind of want to see if anybody else wants this. And then if so, you know, we'll obviously be building it out and making it even better.

[00:03:10] Harris Kenny: Here you can see this car just got picked up. The status of the card is review. It needs to be reviewed. this is an old car to mine from an old job years ago. You can see it extracted all this text out of here. One thing that's pretty cool is that it also picked up that, um, the note, the handwritten note on here that says changed jobs. But you can see all of this was done automatically.

[00:03:30] Harris Kenny: And if you wanted to push this over to HubSpot, you would just click import.

Import into HubSpot

[00:03:35] Harris Kenny: And here we can go over here and we'll just wait a second. And you're going to see that this list is going to update. And now, while this is happening, I just want to note that these are fresh contacts. Being created by CardImporter, the names are being updated by CardImporter.

[00:03:48] Harris Kenny: And then you can see these properly formatted HubSpot style, phone numbers here as well, which is great to be able to work through call tasks.

[00:03:55] Harris Kenny: And as we're looking at this list, I just want to also discuss like how we built it. Right. So, because this is a, a timeline event we're able to add filtering off of the card importer um, category inside of HubSpot.

[00:04:11] Harris Kenny: So here you can see the different properties. Of the name of the company and the domain, email, first name, last name.

[00:04:18] Harris Kenny: This is where I think there's going to be room for this product to grow.

[00:04:20] Harris Kenny: You know, we can talk about tagging like specific events or trade shows, or you can also build workflows to fire off on certain days.

[00:04:26] Harris Kenny: So if cards are scanned within a certain date range, they would be therefore added to a certain trade show lead lead list automatically. But I also think it would be neat if a marketer or rev ops person could just set that as a dropdown option for the um, Team who's importing in the card. So that, that shows up on its own automatically.

[00:04:47] Harris Kenny: You can see our newly scan card is down here. This was the one that was just added.

[00:04:50] Harris Kenny: And let me just drill down to that contact record really quick and just show you what it looks like.

[00:04:56] Harris Kenny: You can see that all of this has been updated correctly based on what was inputted in CarddImporter. You can also see that the source of this is the integration.

[00:05:03] Harris Kenny: And then you can see this timeline event here where we've got the details. We've also got the image and this is kind of the beginning of what's possible here. I'm really interested in seeing a the possibilities of embedding this image inside an I-frame here basically like inside of his timeline event.

[00:05:19] Harris Kenny: But also I think there's room that it could potentially be a CRM card over here on the right side. Um, so I think there's a couple different things that we can do with this.

Business card scanning edge cases

[00:05:27] Harris Kenny: Let's just show you another one really quick.

[00:05:33] Harris Kenny: We've got different orientations. Some of these cards are vertical or portrait. Some of them are landscape. Some of them have other things in the background. Some of them have different lighting. Some of them have different translucency. And so far they've all been really consistent. Uh, which I'm pretty happy about.

[00:05:50] Harris Kenny: It definitely took some troubleshooting in order to get this AI mapping to work.

[00:05:53] Harris Kenny: But I think that from what I've been seeing so far, I'm really, really happy with results. And I think it's ready to, uh, get a little bit more attention from some more users.

[00:06:02] Harris Kenny: Okay. So we've got that import running in the background here. It's going to show up. Here in this list in a second.

[00:06:07] Harris Kenny: While that's running I just wanted to show you... this is mobile optimized. So here it is like if you're at a trade show and you have an iPad, or if you're in your hotel room and you're doing this on your phone. We've got a, you know, an iPhone or an iPad form factor here. And it all works really nicely with that.

[00:06:24] Harris Kenny: And let me just give this a refresh to see if our new card has showed up yet.

[00:06:30] Harris Kenny: Okay. Cool. Patrick Bateman. So we've got our new card here. And if you go back to CardImporter, then you can see that now these have all been imported.

[00:06:41] Harris Kenny: And then you can filter if they haven't been, you can also delete them, of course, if you import it twice by accident or something like that.

Workflows, lists, and reporting, and more

[00:06:48] Harris Kenny: And, uh, let me just show you one last thing really quick. Which is how you can start to look at workflows and triggering workflows based on these scans that happen. And this is kind of the beginning of what I think will be something that we can really build on over time.

[00:07:03] Harris Kenny: Because you've got this happening as a timeline event. There's going to be a lot of other things that we're going to be able to trigger off of this. Followup for lead show lists, attribution and especially with HubSpot's new events, um, Support that they building within the app. I think there's going to be a lot more happening on the event side.

[00:07:21] Harris Kenny: And so I think there's going to be just some really cool things that you can build out in terms of workflows.

[00:07:25] Harris Kenny: And remember that just because something is sitting in a list, it doesn't mean that it's just sitting in a list. Of course you can build reports off of lists, based on which context are included in certain lists and things like that.

[00:07:36] Harris Kenny: I think that there is going to be a lot of potentially interesting use cases for this over time.

Join the waitlist today

[00:07:40] Harris Kenny: Let me know if this is something you're interested in. If you go to introcrm.com/cardimporter, you can sign up for the waitlist. We'll be doing a very, very limited testing run to see how this works, iron out the kinks and see who's interested in it.

[00:07:55] Harris Kenny: If this is something that you're interested in, again, introcrm.com/cardimporter. And please sign up there.

[00:08:03] Harris Kenny: I would love to get your feedback and I'd love to know what you might want to do with it. The size of your team, the types of events you do, and just gauge how much opportunity there is to build something here.

[00:08:12] Harris Kenny: Thank you for your time for your interest and have a great day.