How I turned a WhatsApp frustration into an AI product 💬🤖

Circli App — Sat, 04 Apr 2026 15:28:06 +0000

I'm Matias, founder of Circli
. I want to share how an everyday frustration turned into a product that uses AI to solve a problem we all have.

The problem: the best recommendations get lost in WhatsApp 😩📱

In Argentina (and most of Latin America), when you need a plumber, dentist, or electrician, the first thing you do is ask in your WhatsApp group.

Someone shares a contact, it works. But that contact gets buried under thousands of messages.

Next time someone in the group needs the same thing, they ask again. And the answer was already there — lost in the chat. 🫠

I thought: what if all that valuable information circulating in our groups actually stayed organized? 💡

The solution: Circli 🔄

Circli transforms the recommendations already flowing through your WhatsApp groups into a private, searchable directory.

It works 100% inside WhatsApp — no app to download, no account to create. ✅

How it works ⚙️
Create a circle — Type CREATE in the Circli WhatsApp chat. Your circle is active in 30 seconds. ⚡
Import your group's contacts — Export your WhatsApp group history and upload it. The AI automatically extracts every shared contact and organizes them by category. 🧠
Invite your group — Type SHARE to generate a link. They join with one tap. 🔗
Search your directory — Type LIST and get a private link to a web directory where you can filter by category and see who vouched for whom. 🔍

The most interesting technical challenge is how we categorize contacts. We use a 3-layer system:

Layer 1 — Keyword fast path ⚡
Instant detection of obvious professions from contact name or WhatsApp Business metadata. If the contact is named "Garcia Dental Clinic" or has X-WA-BIZ-DESCRIPTION: dental services, we know immediately.

Layer 2 — Name-only LLM 🏷️
For contacts without clear keywords, a model analyzes the name looking for professional signals (titles like "Dr.", "Lic.", business suffixes like "LLC", "Corp").

Layer 3 — Context-enriched LLM 💬
The most powerful layer. We analyze the messages surrounding the shared contact. If someone asked "does anyone have a good dentist?" and another person responded by sharing a contact, Circli understands it's a dentist.

Chat context:
"Ana: does anyone have a good dentist?"
"Juan: Here's María García"
[María García.vcf shared]
"Ana: Thanks! What area does she cover?"

→ Result: María García → Category: Dentist (confidence: HIGH)

The system was designed to understand patterns in Latin American Spanish 🌎: it detects phrases like "necesito" (I need), "alguien tiene" (does anyone have), "te paso a" (let me share), and "recomiendo" (I recommend) as evidence to classify each professional.

Bulk upload: from group to directory in minutes 📂➡️📇

Users can export the complete history of their WhatsApp group and upload it to Circli.

The AI automatically extracts every contact shared over months or years of conversation, categorizes them, removes duplicates, and organizes them into a ready-to-use directory. ✨

A group with 3 years of history might have dozens of recommended professionals that nobody remembered.

Privacy as a first principle 🔐

This is critical: we're processing WhatsApp conversations. Privacy has to be at the core of everything.

Every circle is 100% private — only invited members see the contacts 🛡️
Chat data is anonymized for the AI and not stored after processing 🧼
No ads, no data selling, no unsolicited messages 🚫
Access links expire after 15 minutes ⏳
Users can leave any circle at any time 👋
What I learned building this 📚

WhatsApp as a platform is underestimated 📲

In Argentina (and much of LATAM), WhatsApp isn't just a messenger — it's social infrastructure.

Building on WhatsApp eliminates the biggest friction: you don't have to convince anyone to download a new app.

Useful AI is invisible 🤖

The best uses of AI aren't the ones that say "look, I use AI."

They're the ones that solve something that used to be tedious. Manually categorizing 50 contacts would take hours. With AI, it takes seconds. ⏱️

Trust is the product 🤝

Circli doesn't compete with Google Maps or Yelp.

It competes with the question "does anyone have a good...?" in a WhatsApp group.

The difference is that it organizes the answers so they don't get lost. 🧭

Current state and what's next 🚀

We're in the early growth stage in Argentina, with active circles sharing real recommendations.

We're looking for people with active networks who want to try it and give us feedback.

If you want to try it, send "Hi" to the bot on WhatsApp and you'll have your first circle in 30 seconds:

👉 Try Circli on WhatsApp

Or visit www.circli.app
for more info.

DEV Community: Circli App

How I turned a WhatsApp frustration into an AI product 💬🤖