Why We Built Natural Language Contact Entry

The hardest part of keeping track of the people in your life isn't remembering them. It's that there's nowhere to put what you know.

You know your friend Sarah moved to Portland. You know your cousin's wife works at a hospital. You know your old coworker just had a baby. But where does all of that live? In your head. Maybe scattered across your phone contacts, your Instagram, a notes app, a few text threads.

Your phone has 500 contacts. It knows their phone numbers. It doesn't know that Sarah and James went to college together, or that Tim's wife Rachel works in Kansas City, or that your friend Blake was the third employee at his company. The stuff that actually makes your relationships yours — the context, the connections, the details — has no home.

That's what YourPond is for. But building a contact book that captures all of that context means solving a hard problem first: how do you get 150 people's worth of details out of your head and into an app without losing your mind?

The import trap

The few tools that do exist for managing contacts try to solve the data entry problem with a big import. Sync your LinkedIn. Connect your Google Contacts. Pull in your phone book. Suddenly you have 2,000 contacts in your app.

And then what?

They just sit there. You scroll through hundreds of names — old coworkers you haven't spoken to in years, people you met once at a conference, your dentist's office. The app is technically "populated," but it's not useful. You didn't choose those people. An algorithm dumped them in. And the information is shallow — just names and phone numbers, no context about who these people actually are to you.

We didn't want to build that. YourPond isn't a place to store everyone you've ever exchanged a phone number with. It's a place for the people who actually matter to you — the ones whose birthday you want to remember, the ones whose kids' names you don't want to forget, the mentor who introduced you to your last job, the college friend who moved to the same city as you. Personal and professional. The people you'd actually describe to a friend.

That's a fundamentally different starting point. And it requires a fundamentally different way to get your data in.

The problem we kept hearing

Every beta tester said the same thing. They loved what YourPond could do once it was populated — relationship intelligence that suggests "hey, these two people work at the same company — are they colleagues?" Family trees that build themselves from the relationships you've entered. Analytics that show you your geographic spread and most connected contacts. Things no phone contact list or social profile could ever do.

But getting there? That was the wall. You have to take what's in your head — decades of knowing people — and type it in somewhere. Form fields feel tedious. And most people don't have their personal relationships in a spreadsheet ready to import. They have them in their head.

We needed a way to get from "the people I carry around in my head" to "a populated contact book with relationships" — without making people fill out forms and without dumping in thousands of contacts they'd never look at.

The insight

When you describe your friend group to someone new, you don't speak in database fields. You say things like:

"My friend Sarah lives in Portland and works at Nike. I met her in 2019 through work. My cousin James is a teacher — his wife Amy is a nurse at OHSU."

That one paragraph contains six extractable fields across three people, plus two relationships (cousin, spouse). The information is all there. It just isn't structured.

So we asked: what if YourPond could read that paragraph the way a person would?

How "Describe Your People" works

The feature is simple. You type about the people in your life — the way you'd text a friend about them — and YourPond extracts the details.

Step 1: You describe. Type a paragraph (or several) about a group of people. Colleagues, college friends, family — whatever comes naturally. Include as much or as little as you want: names, locations, jobs, education, birthdays, how you met, relationships between people.

Step 2: You review contacts. YourPond shows you what it extracted — each person as a card with their name, location, company, relationship tags, and any other details it found. You can edit anything, remove anyone, or add missing details before saving.

Step 3: You review relationships. After the contacts are confirmed, YourPond shows the relationships it detected — who's married to whom, who's someone's parent, who are colleagues at the same company. Again, you review and approve before anything is saved.

Nothing happens without your explicit approval. The AI is a parser, not a decision-maker.

What it extracts

From a single paragraph, YourPond can pull out:

• Names (first, last, prefix, suffix, nickname, maiden name)
• Locations (current and past — "lives in Portland" vs. "used to live in London")
• Jobs (current and past — "works at Stripe" vs. "used to work at PlushCare")
• Education (school, field of study, graduation year)
• Birthdays and birth years
• How you met and year met
• Email, phone, and social handles if mentioned
• Relationship types between contacts (spouse, parent, sibling, colleague, friend, and 25+ more)

The more context you give, the more YourPond can organize for you.

Intentional over comprehensive

Here's the thing most contact tools get wrong: they optimize for completeness. Import everything. Sync everything. Never miss a contact.

YourPond optimizes for intentionality. You start with the people who matter most — your family, your closest friends, your current coworkers. You describe them in your own words, with the context that actually matters to you. Then tomorrow you add a few more. And the day after that, a few more.

Your contact book grows the way your relationships do — gradually, intentionally, one person at a time. Not by bulk-importing a phone book full of strangers.

"Describe Your People" is designed for exactly this rhythm. You don't need to sit down and enter every person you know in one session. Describe your family in one paragraph today. Your college friends tomorrow. Your work team next week. Each time, you're adding the people you're actually thinking about — which means you're adding the people who actually matter.

The privacy part

Your text is sent to Anthropic's Claude API for processing. Here's what happens to it:

• Anthropic does not store your data
• Anthropic does not use it for training
• The text is processed and automatically deleted within 7 days
• Nothing is saved to YourPond until you review and approve it

We chose Anthropic specifically because of their data handling policies. Your description is read once, parsed, and gone.

A disclosure appears in the app every time you use the feature — we want you to know exactly what's happening with your words.

What this feature doesn't do

This is important, and it's core to how we build YourPond:

• It does not send messages on your behalf
• It does not suggest outreach or "remind you to stay in touch"
• It does not draft communications
• It does not make decisions about your relationships

The AI helps you organize your data. You manage your relationships. That line is clear and it's not moving.

Try it

"Describe Your People" is live at yourpond.io. Sign up, click the "Describe your people" button on your dashboard, and start typing about the people in your life.

Start with whoever comes to mind first. That's probably the right person.