SyncBatch
Turn a spreadsheet of people into phone-ready contacts in one pass — no manual entry, no cleanup.
The Problem
Anyone who runs events or communities knows the ritual: a form fills up with hundreds of names and numbers, and then someone has to type each one into a phone. It is slow, error-prone, and quietly demoralising.
The Solution
SyncBatch takes an Excel or CSV export and converts it straight into phone-ready contacts. You map your columns once, and it produces a clean VCF file or pushes contacts directly through the Google People API.
Research
I started by watching how student coordinators actually managed their lists. The messiness was in the middle — inconsistent headers, duplicate rows, half-formatted numbers — so the tool had to be forgiving about input, not strict.
Design
The interface is deliberately boring in the best way: upload, map, preview, export. One screen, one job. Nothing to learn.
Development
Built on Next.js with client-side parsing so files never need to leave the browser unless you choose to sync. Google integration is scoped to exactly the contact permissions it needs and nothing more.
Challenges
Phone numbers are a surprisingly deep rabbit hole — country codes, leading zeros, spreadsheet auto-formatting that mangles them. Normalising them without guessing wrong took most of the effort.
Outcome
What used to be an evening of typing became a two-minute task. It quietly became the tool I reach for before every event.
Lessons
The best utilities remove a chore people had stopped noticing. Solve the boring problem completely and it earns trust for the interesting ones.