I wrote in July about lead lists going stale the day you download them. A lot of you wrote back, and most of the replies weren’t about lead lists at all. They were about other piles. Spreadsheets nobody can open, folders of contracts, exports from a project that ended in March.
The data isn’t gone. It’s sitting somewhere you can’t really use anymore.
Here are five setups from emails I’ve answered recently, with details changed so nobody’s identifiable.
The export that stops rotting
Many users now send their Hexomatic workflow results straight into their Second Brain database instead of downloading another CSV.
Same data, completely different shelf life. Refreshed on a schedule, it’s still answering questions in November. And sitting next to your contacts it answers better ones than it could alone. Which of these have I already emailed. Which are already paying me. Which did I talk to last year and never follow up.
If you have a Hexomatic account you already have the raw material for this. It’s usually the fastest first import.
Half a million rows nobody could open
One user had a company database of over half a million rows. Size, financials, category, contacts, websites. The spreadsheet took a minute to open and froze on anything real.
He owned that data and couldn’t touch it.
Uploading it to an AI doesn’t solve it either. Half a million rows won’t fit in a context window, so the AI ends up working with pieces of the dataset instead of querying the whole thing.
As a table it’s a different object. Filter by size and revenue in one pass. Pull every company in a category with no website. Then match the whole list against his own contacts, so his team stops cold-emailing people who are already clients.
Thirty gigabytes, no system
Another one wanted nothing to do with connectors. No Notion, no Stripe, no calendar. Just a folder on his laptop, about thirty gigs, years of contracts and proposals piled up. Can I work with this?
Easiest setup there is. Point it at the top folder and it walks everything underneath. PDF, DOCX, TXT, MD, RTF.
Files come in as indexed sections rather than whole documents. Once it’s indexed, the AI can search across thirty gigs without loading thirty gigs into the conversation. Ask about one clause from 2022 and you get the paragraphs back, not the file.
He hadn’t thought about the comparison side. Which agreements still carry a clause you stopped offering. Which proposals promised something you don’t do anymore. By hand that’s a week, so you won’t do it.
What this saves in AI context
When you hand an AI large files directly, the content has to be processed and pushed into the model’s context. Start a new session and much of that work happens again.
Second Brain indexes the material once, at import. After that a query retrieves the six sections that matter instead of two hundred pages. You pay for the reading once instead of every session, and the gap widens as your archive grows.
Five years of research
One setup has nothing to do with customers.
A user is studying a language and had the same problem in a different shape. Vocabulary in a spreadsheet, phrases in a notebook, a few apps that each track part of it. He wanted an honest count of what he actually knew and how it was moving.
We ended up building the Learn section because enough people described that exact thing. The same idea applies to any long project you’ve been accumulating for years. Papers, notes, drafts, interviews. Finding one file was never the hard part. Asking a question across all of them is.
Not betting on one AI vendor
Someone asked whether he could use it with local models instead of depending on one hosted AI company.
That’s the point of keeping the database local and connecting over MCP. Your data sits on your machine and compatible tools query it. You’re not building your knowledge base inside one vendor’s account, which also means it doesn’t depend on us being here.
Start with one pile
Don’t organize everything first. That’s another project you’ll never start.
Nobody above did that. They each picked the thing that had been bothering them and imported that one thing.
The export from March. The spreadsheet that won’t open. The folder of contracts.
Download at brain.hexact.io. Seven days free trial, no card required.
Import one source, then ask it something you couldn’t answer this morning. If you import a customer export, start here: which customers paid me last year and have gone quiet this year.
Want help setting it up?
Book a call and we’ll go through it together on your machine. Your imports, your order, and the questions worth asking once it’s in. Nothing leaves your computer, including during the call.
