"Up Next" unified action list
One prioritized feed blending four item types — your action items, contacts overdue for a reach-out, AI/rule suggestions, and recently added people — each with a colored badge, filter chips with counts, and pagination.
Surface I — The Web App the CRM you live in
A workspace where relationships stay warm
Fourteen pages built around logging conversations, working an outreach queue, and never dropping a follow-up. Material Design 3, deeply wired into Gmail and Google Calendar.
Guided first run
ends with a real email sent, no AI key required1
Start with a network, not an empty page
New accounts are offered a curated recruiting database — real PMs, recruiters, and BYU alumni at companies that hire new grads — instead of a blank CRM.
2
Import while you connect
Prospects and companies stream in on a live progress bar while you connect Gmail and Calendar in a side tab that lands on a confirmation page.
3
Pick a target company
Companies are ranked by how many alumni you'd know there, with alumni and product-role sub-counts, so the first target is the warmest one.
4
Send a personalized intro
A pre-written, editable intro email — with an automatic alumni-to-alumni variant — sends with follow-ups already scheduled that cancel themselves on a reply.
5
Confetti finale
"Your first networking email is on its way," plus a recap of what's next: the extension, personalized suggestions, one-click availability. Every step is skippable and resumable across sessions.
Home / Dashboard
a three-band relationship hubInline item actions
Per row: Done, Snooze (1 day to next follow-up), Profile, Log interaction, Email/Intro, Save or Dismiss a suggestion, and a quick-note popover — with animated hover labels.
Getting-started checklist
The new-user empty state: add the target database, pick a company, connect Gmail/Calendar, install the extension, log your first conversation.
Today's schedule
A time-grid of today's Google Calendar events with a live "now" line, event popovers (Meet link, attendees with RSVP flags, resolved contact context), and drag-to-create.
Discovery digest
"New PMs at your target companies" — one line per company ("3 new PMs just joined Qualtrics"), hidden when the weekly search found nobody.
Networking stats & streak
Meetings, relationships-on-track %, and contacts-added counters with 7-day trend and a day-streak flame.
Activity heatmap
A GitHub-style calendar of daily activity — conversations, actions taken, contacts added — with hover detail and a Less→More legend.
Network health donut
Healthy / Due soon / Overdue / Never contacted / No cadence, with interactive segment tooltips, beside a "Needs attention" photo grid of neglected contacts.
Contacts
Tiered network
Contacts live in three tiers — My network, Prospects, Archive — as independent toggle chips with counts, so 70 scraped profiles never bury the five you plan to contact.
Smart search
Search across name, email, company, title, school, industry, and tags, with a live dropdown that separates people-matches from by-tag matches.
Rich contact creation
Multiple work experiences, education with degree autocomplete, several emails and phones (with a preferred flag), tags, LinkedIn URL, and custom follow-up cadence.
Contact profile
Two-column layout: photo upload, inline-editable email and cadence, LinkedIn re-link prompts, freshness stamp, and quick actions to log or compose.
Timeline tab
A merged reverse-chronological feed of meetings, interactions, inbound/outbound emails, and completed actions for that person.
Actions tab
Pending items split into your commitments vs. "Waiting on {them}" with days-waiting, inline editing, priority dots, and undo on complete/delete.
Emails tab
Threaded Gmail history per contact — read sanitized bodies, reply, schedule a follow-up sequence, and see queued sends with cancel.
Attachments tab
Upload, download, and delete files attached to a contact.
Inline editing everywhere
Email and follow-up cadence edit directly on the card — hover to reveal, click to edit, blur to save. No edit mode for the two most common actions.
Add to network
A one-click button on the list and profile promotes a prospect into the active network; the first real touch graduates anyone automatically.
Relationship health as a ratio
Color reflects days-since-contact ÷ your cadence, not a raw date — a 30-day cadence at 10 days reads green; a 7-day cadence at 10 days reads red.
Extension preview page
A landing page for a LinkedIn profile captured by the extension: full experience/education, suggested tags, and Save-to-Contacts with duplicate detection.
Companies — the recruiting command center
Targets & all-companies views
Toggle between tracked employers and every company in your network history, sorted by priority, next-app date, traction, or name.
URL-synced filter bar
Stackable status chips (Researching → Closed), traction, tier, and contacts filters — all shareable/bookmarkable via the URL with a live result count.
Add a company early
Chase a company before you know anyone there: add name, LinkedIn URL, and office in seconds, deduped against every company already in your network.
Per-office pipelines
A location scope selector makes each office ("Google San Diego") its own targetable pipeline with its own status and notes.
Contact roster by persona
Current and former employees grouped into your network vs. prospects, with persona badges (Alum·Product, Recruiter), BYU-alum flags, outreach stage, and email status.
Stage stepper
Researching → Active outreach → Applied → Interviewing → Closed, each stage an expandable editor with a collapsed summary and autosave.
Applications & documents
Track multiple applications per company with role, location, date, and resume + cover-letter PDF uploads.
Interview rounds & cycles
Log interview rounds (date, interviewer, questions); "prepare for next cycle" starts a fresh application cycle that keeps each season separate.
Recruiting-intel log
A timestamped notes log for application windows, referral programs, and team info — everything you learn on a call lands somewhere you'll find it again.
New-hires discovery card
Weekly-discovered PMs at this company, each with add-as-prospect (auto-enriched) or dismiss.
Outreach flow
work one company at a timeCompany-at-a-time queue
Prev/next (with ←/→ keys) through target companies ordered by application deadline then priority, showing "Company X of N".
Context strip
Logo, priority, program, next-app window, latest intel note, and links to the full company page and bench.
People cards
Current and (collapsible) former employees with persona, alum, and stage badges, an adjacency score, and a "why they were kept" review note.
Person modal
The full picture of a contact — roles here and elsewhere, education, email provenance — with Write email, Open profile, and Mark contacted for off-platform outreach.
Bench-aware skipping
Companies with only bench or no contactable people are skipped, with a count and a link so nothing hides silently.
Activity, meetings & transcripts
One modal for everything
The unified conversation modal logs a past meeting (notes, transcript, AI action items) or schedules a future one (private reminders, Calendar invite, Meet link) — eight types, multi-contact, reachable from anywhere.
Unified activity timeline
Meetings and interactions in one newest-first feed, searchable across titles, notes, private notes, attendee names, and summaries.
Meeting cards
Attendee chips with RSVP status, an "On calendar" badge, private reminders, notes, a transcript viewer, and file attachments.
Transcript upload
Paste VTT/SRT/plain text (auto-detected) or upload audio (MP3/WAV/M4A) for speaker-diarized transcription.
AI speaker matching
Maps anonymous "Speaker 0" labels to your known contacts using names, roles, and content, with confidence scores and one-click confirmation.
Action items from transcript
Pulls concrete commitments, splitting your tasks from what the other person owes you, each with an evidence quote and resolved due date.
Action items
Grouped task list
Overdue, Due this week, Due later, and No due date, each card showing priority dot, contact, linked meeting, and due status.
"Suggested for you"
An AI/rule suggestion banner with "I already did this", "Save for later", and "Not interested".
Waiting-on-others tracking
The AI captures what the other person committed to; after 7 days the app nudges a gentle follow-up so you never forget to cash in on an offer.
Detail modal
Full description, dates, and the linked meeting with its notes and transcript in context.
Optimistic complete with undo
Completing or deleting is instant, with an undo countdown and an offered "Log conversation" follow-up.
Completed archive
A collapsible completed section with restore, edit, and delete.
Calendar & Inbox
Week & list calendar views
A week grid with hour lines, all-day row, current-time line, private-as-"Busy" events, and recurrence/video markers — plus a date-stamped list view.
Drag-to-create meetings
Drag on the grid to open a pre-filled meeting form that writes to Google Calendar with a Meet toggle and invite selection.
Contact-filtered calendar
Filter events by All / With contacts / No contacts, with silent background auto-sync.
Full Gmail inbox
Inbox, Sent, Scheduled, Follow-ups, Drafts, Trash, and Hidden tabs scoped to your networking, with a live unread badge in the nav.
Thread triage
Reply, move to a Gmail label, hide (keep in Gmail, hide from app), or trash/restore — with follow-up-count and linked-calendar badges.
Inbox filter panel
Filter by contact, direction, recency, thread type, and follow-up presence.
Follow-up sequence builder
Build or edit a multi-step sequence — per-step delay, send time, subject, rich body, AI-generate — that auto-cancels when the recipient replies.
Compose & global surfaces
Compose email modal
To/Cc/Bcc, rich-text body, contact autocomplete, provenance warnings, schedule-send, and auto-saved drafts — used from every surface.
Write with AI
Pick a built-in preset (Introduction, Follow-up, Thank you), a custom template, or your own prompt, optionally feeding prior meeting notes for personalization.
Guided intro flow
For first-touch emails: a "how you met / your goal" form → AI intro → editable draft → an AI follow-up plan that auto-schedules reply-aware follow-ups.
Availability insertion
Insert real open calendar slots (standard/priority/custom profiles) straight into the email body.
Adaptive top navigation
Home, Activity, Contacts, Companies, Actions, plus an unread-aware Inbox icon, Calendar, admin shield, and a back-trail that knows where to return you.
Setup banner
An app-wide prompt to connect Gmail and Calendar, with an expandable "why does Google show a warning?" explainer, dismissible per session.
Surface II — Intelligence & Automation the engine under the app
The systems that keep the network alive
Beneath the UI: AI drafting and extraction, reply-aware send automation, budget-capped LinkedIn enrichment, career-change detection, and a weekly discovery engine — every one guarded by rate limits, spend caps, and graceful failure.
AI drafting & suggestions
Draft intro email
Subject + HTML body for a first outreach, tone-adjusted for cold vs. warm and grounded in how you met, your goal, and past interactions.
Draft follow-up sequence
Exactly three reply-in-thread follow-ups, progressively shorter and spaced ~7/14/21 days: check-in → add-value → gentle final bump.
General AI composer
Free-form "write me an email about X" pulling in contact context and selected meeting notes, with an auto-generated subject line.
"Up Next" suggestion engine
Blends rule-based generators (graduation proximity, cadence miss, relationship decay, waiting-on reminders) with an LLM pass that mines history for a specific, timely reason to reach out.
Article-share pipeline
An agentic chain: extract a contact's interests → search the web (Serper) → loop an LLM evaluator ("would a real person forward this?") → write a warm reconnection email referencing the find.
Grounded, human-sounding drafts
A 32KB context budget keeps quality high; the prompt blocks generic phrases like "I stumbled upon" so emails sound like you wrote them.
Send automation & deliverability
Follow-up cron
Every 15 minutes: sends due follow-up steps, checks each thread for a reply and cancels the whole sequence if found, sends at most one step per tick, and respects the daily cap.
Scheduled-email cron
Every 15 minutes: sends due scheduled emails across all users, isolating per-user failures and reporting throughput/delay telemetry.
Daily send cap
A 100/day Gmail send limit protects deliverability; the guard is re-checked on every send path, app and MCP alike.
Bounce detection & refusal
Gmail delivery failures (NDRs) are parsed to flag bounced addresses, cancel their pending sequences, and refuse them everywhere — draft, send, schedule, sequence.
Reply-aware graduation
When a prospect or archived contact replies, they graduate into the active network and their follow-up clock resets.
Contact-email sync
A resumable, time-budgeted pass pulls 90 days of Gmail history per contact and thread-matches inbound replies to fire the reply-received signal.
LinkedIn enrichment & change detection
On-demand enrichment
Re-scrape one contact's LinkedIn profile or find their email via Apify — idempotent, debounced, and monthly-cap-gated, completing async via webhook.
Daily cadence refresh
Each day, per user, the ~80 stalest contacts are batch-scraped within spend caps so profile data stays current on its own.
Monthly spend caps & kill switches
A hard monthly USD cap, a softer cadence cap, and per-account enrichment/diff/discovery switches keep paid scraping bounded and controllable.
Change-event diff engine
Compares before/after snapshots into tiered events: promotion, company change, boomerang, open-to-work and hiring flips, location change, new certification — with false-positive guards.
Work-anniversary events
Detects whole-year anniversaries this month and surfaces a "congratulate them" touchpoint, throttled and bench-excluded.
Change-event feed & dismiss
Surfaceable events flow into "Up Next" (Tier 1 outranks Tier 2); dismissals are permanent via stable dedupe keys.
Discovery & analytics
Weekly discovery engine
For opted-in users, searches the stalest high-priority target companies for PMs who joined in the last 90 days — the warmest cold outreach there is.
Candidate dedupe & ingest
New profiles are deduped against existing contacts, tombstones, and known candidates before surfacing; people you already know never appear.
Add or dismiss candidates
One click adds a candidate as an auto-enriched prospect at the right company; one click dismisses them forever.
Cross-surface event registry
One typed vocabulary shared by web, server, MCP, and extension, keyed to a north-star metric: replies received.
Outcome analytics with first-party mirror
Every AI draft records whether it was sent as-is, edited (and how much), or discarded; sends, replies, and meetings mirror into CareerVine's own database so data outlives any vendor.
Activation milestones
Fires once per user at contacts-5 and companies-emailed-5, with internal-user activity filtered out of product metrics.
Cross-cutting guardrails. Every route is wrapped with auth, schema validation, per-route hourly rate limits, and awaited analytics. AI features route through a "bring-your-own-key or shared-key" runner with a 24-hour trial and graceful degradation — when a key is out of quota, rejected, or missing, the feature says exactly what's wrong with a one-click path to fix it, never a spinner that never resolves.
Surface III — Chrome Extension LinkedIn → CRM in one click
Import anyone without copy-paste
A Manifest V3 extension that scrapes a LinkedIn profile, has AI structure it into clean fields, lets you review and edit in a side panel, and saves it as a CareerVine contact — all inside a closed Shadow DOM that can't fight the host page.
Floating action button
A CareerVine vine icon appears only on LinkedIn profile pages; one click toggles the side panel open.
Shadow-DOM side panel
The full React panel app renders in a closed Shadow DOM with all: initial isolation, so LinkedIn's CSS can't leak in and the extension can't break LinkedIn.
Profile scraping & cleaning
Waits for lazy-loaded sections, then aggressively strips pronouns, follower counts, activity, and UI junk down to Header, About, Experience, Education — so the AI parse is accurate and cheap.
Profile photo capture
Grabs a real 400×400 photo with a three-tier fallback (rewrite from 100×100, graceful null for ghost avatars) so the saved contact is recognizable.
AI-structured parsing
Cleaned text returns as structured fields — name, location, industry, dated experience, education, status, suggested tags, and generated notes.
"Already in CareerVine" check
Every profile is checked by LinkedIn URL before scraping; a match shows the existing contact and offers "Refresh from LinkedIn" instead of a blind re-import.
Review & edit before saving
Every field is editable — status toggle, follow-up cadence, add/remove experience and education rows with month/year pickers — and edits persist in the per-profile cache.
Save to CareerVine
One click creates or updates the contact with photo; the header switches to a deep link into the web app.
Auto-analyze mode
An opt-in toggle that scrapes and parses each profile automatically as you browse, for power users batching profiles.
Two-hour per-profile cache
Parsed profiles, photos, and edits cache per LinkedIn slug so revisits load instantly with no redundant AI cost or cross-tab collisions.
SPA navigation tracking
Detects LinkedIn's client-side route changes and re-checks the DB, cache, and auto-analyze state as you click around without full reloads.
Progress UI & cooldown
Staged progress ("Reading profile…", "Enriching…") with a 30-second scrape cooldown that protects LinkedIn and the backend.
Toolbar popup
A home base with sign-in, an Import tab (live "is this a profile?" indicator + quick-start), and a Recent tab listing your last imports with relative timestamps.
Secure session handling
Auth tokens live only in the background service worker, auto-refresh with a single-flight guard, and never touch the content script or page — XSS-resistant.
Graceful failure states
Specific, friendly panels for no/invalid/quota-exhausted AI key and hourly import limits, mirroring the web app's copy with a one-click fix path.
Surface IV — MCP Server 27 tools · an AI operator for your network
Hand your whole network to Claude
An OAuth-protected Model Context Protocol server lets an AI assistant research contacts, write and send grounded Gmail, work the outreach queue, and manage meetings — under the exact same guardrails as the app. The same tools run locally over stdio for development. By design it exposes data and actions only; Claude is the generator, so there are no AI-generation tools.
Contacts & research
search_contacts
Search the network by name, email, company, title, school, industry, or tag; filter by tier, returns compact rows with stage and last-touch.
get_contact_dossier
Everything known about one person in one document — the grounding Claude reads before writing an email, including email provenance and history.
add_contact
Create a contact with emails, phones, company, title, school, and location, find-or-creating entities to avoid duplicates.
add_contact_note
Append a timestamped note straight from conversation.
tag_contact
Apply one or more tags, creating any that are missing.
set_network_status
Manually move a contact between active, prospect, and bench tiers.
create_email_draft
The default path — a real Gmail draft (markdown→HTML, thread-aware) for human review; refuses bounced addresses.
send_email
Sends immediately, but requires confirm: true, enforces the daily cap and bounce refusal, and logs an interaction.
schedule_email
Queue an email for a future ISO timestamp, delivered by the app's cron.
create_follow_up_sequence
Attach timed follow-ups to a sent thread that auto-cancel the moment the contact replies.
list_scheduled
List pending scheduled emails and active sequences with next send times.
cancel_scheduled
Cancel a pending scheduled email or an entire follow-up sequence.
search_email_history
Full-text search over cached Gmail, optionally scoped to one contact.
get_email_thread
Live-fetch full message bodies for a thread for reply context.
Outreach engine
list_outreach_queue
The company-by-company queue, ordered by deadline then priority, with a "why" reason per entry.
list_companies
Companies in the network with people counts, target status, priority, and traction.
get_company
The full company picture — roster, offices, target status, and the recruiting-intel log.
add_company_intel
Append a timestamped recruiting note, auto-promoting the company to a target.
set_stage_override
Manually set a contact's outreach stage for off-platform activity like a LinkedIn DM.
Relationship upkeep
log_interaction
Record a touchpoint that graduates prospects and resets the follow-up clock.
create_action_item
Create a to-do or a "waiting-on" item linked to one or more contacts.
list_action_items
Open items filtered by due window, direction, or contact, with age for waiting-on items.
update_action_item
Complete, snooze, reschedule, or edit an item.
list_due_followups
The "who should I reach out to today" list, most-overdue first.
get_network_health
The "how am I doing?" dashboard — streak, on-track ratio, most-neglected contacts, per-tier counts, 30-day activity.
Calendar
list_meetings
Upcoming events from the synced calendar with attendees matched to contacts and Meet/Zoom links.
create_meeting
Create a Google Calendar event with an invite and optional Meet link; linking it graduates a prospect.
Two shells, one implementation. The hosted server at /api/mcp is an OAuth 2.0 protected resource verifying Supabase-issued JWTs, scoped per request and rate-limited to 100 calls/hour/user. The local careervine-mcp/ package runs the identical 27 tools over stdio for development. A dedicated OAuth consent screen shows the requesting client and exact scopes before any access is granted — and there are no delete tools anywhere.
Surface V — Platform & Data accounts, keys, bundles, admin
The layer that makes it a product
Authentication, a bring-your-own-key cost model, living data subscriptions, an admin control plane, and the content pipeline that seeds new users with a real network instead of an empty page.
Data subscriptions
free, living bundles — never a paywallSubscribe to curated lists
Import admin-published bundles — say, every IB analyst at the NYC boutiques plus the banks and their offices — straight into contacts as ready-to-work prospects.
Living updates
When a bundle is re-published with new people or corrected emails, subscribers receive the changes automatically within minutes.
Fill-empty merge
The merge only ever fills in blanks — nothing you've edited, tagged, or annotated is overwritten.
Respectful unsubscribe
Keep everything, or remove only the contacts you never touched; anyone you've emailed or edited always stays.
Resilient apply loop
A chunked, cursor-driven copy with a live progress bar, backed by a QStash worker and daily cron sweep in case the tab closes mid-import.
Accounts, keys & settings
Bring your own AI keys
Add an OpenAI key for text features and/or a Deepgram key for transcription so usage bills to you — each encrypted at rest, never returned to the browser, and live-validated before saving.
First-day free AI trial
New accounts get shared-key AI "on us" for a day, then are guided to add their own key or request continued access.
Supabase auth flows
Email/password sign-up, sign-in, forgot-password, resend-confirmation with cooldown, and a confirm link that signs you in immediately even on a fresh device.
Availability profiles
Standard and Priority working-hour presets per weekday with buffers, plus a "count as busy" calendar selection and timezone detection.
AI templates
Create, edit, and delete custom "Write with AI" prompt templates that appear alongside built-in presets.
Connect-an-AI-client card
Copy the hosted MCP URL with per-client setup steps for Claude, Claude Code CLI, ChatGPT, Codex, and Cursor.
Data & scraping dashboard
A read-only view of month-to-date Apify spend vs. cap, run health, last refresh time, and discovery spend.
Privacy policy & Limited Use
A full policy page documenting data handling, Google Limited-Use disclosure, RLS security, and the extension's on-LinkedIn-only scope.
Admin control plane & content pipeline
operator-onlyUser management
Search users; set role, status (suspend/reactivate freezes queued work), and password; manage a user's contacts and inject bundles.
Per-account toggles
Inline reversible switches for shared-AI fallback, Apify enrichment, change detection, discovery feed, and per-bundle visibility.
Tenant-wide bulk controls
Flip enrichment, change detection, and discovery for every account at once, with an audit log.
Bundle publishing
A token-authenticated publish flow (begin → chunk → finalize → resolve) that fans changes out to subscribers, with a zero-change no-op.
IB recruiting pipeline
A staged Apify + agent-reviewed data pipeline that produces a curated dataset of BYU-family alumni and per-office bankers across 30 banks and 228 offices to seed a bundle — spend hard-capped per run.
Durable photo mirroring
Bundle publishing mirrors LinkedIn photo URLs to Cloudflare R2 so avatars stay durable after LinkedIn's temporary URLs expire.