Second Brain Is Live. Here's What's In It.
We just shipped Second Brain, a desktop app that puts your entire business knowledge base on your own computer. No cloud dependency. No third-party storage. One local database you fully control.
Download it at brain.hexact.io and subscribe for updates.
Why we built this
Every business runs on scattered data. Contacts in one place, billing in another, notes in a third, emails buried somewhere else. We built Second Brain because we needed it ourselves at Hexact. The idea is simple: one local app that pulls everything together and lets you query it, connect it, and actually use it.
It started as an internal tool. Now it’s available to everyone.
What you get right now
Second Brain ships with a working set of features across six areas. Here’s what’s already in the app.
Your local knowledge base
Everything runs on a local SQLite database on your machine. The dashboard gives you a quick snapshot of what’s stored and where your database lives. You can browse your data table by table with the built-in database explorer. Light and dark modes are included.
Data imports
You can bring data in from multiple sources:
Stripe and PayPal billing data from CSV exports (subscriptions and payments)
Email archives from common mailbox formats (individual messages, mailbox bundles, zipped bundles)
Google Contacts and Google Calendar exports
Survey responses from CSV
Substack content exports
Knowledge files (documents you want searchable in the system)
A universal CSV import for anything else you want to map in
Every import supports dry run mode, so you can preview parsing results before anything gets written.
Contacts hub
A dedicated contacts area with multiple ready-made views: recent, newsletters, missing email, by source, businesses, and more. Search works across large datasets. Each person gets a profile with a timeline view of related activity, including calendar context where available. You can edit records, export a person as a portable summary, delete, or suppress contacts you don’t want surfaced.
Writing and notes
An entries system for notes, records, and long-form writing. Articles get their own filtered view for longer content. Everything lives in the same underlying system, just different lenses on the same data.
Live automations
While the app is open, background sync runs periodically. You can connect:
Hexomatic (workflow mapping) With Hexomatic, you can set up web scraping workflows that run on a schedule. The scraped data gets inserted into your local database automatically, no manual exports or copy-pasting. You define what to scrape, map it to a company, and the app handles the rest in the background while it's running.
Stripe and PayPal (API key per company, billing sync)
Claude Desktop integration
This is the part that makes Second Brain more than a database. You can connect Claude Desktop directly to your local knowledge base. The app walks you through the setup right on the main page. It also generates a starter skill document that teaches Claude how to work with your data safely, with permission-first rules baked in.
Once connected, you can talk to Claude about your contacts, customers, articles, notes, and billing data as if it already knows your business. It reads directly from your local database. It can also write to it. Ask Claude to add a contact, update a record, save a note, or log a meeting, and it does it right in your knowledge base. The skill document enforces permission-first rules, so nothing gets written without your explicit say-so.
Settings and housekeeping
Owner profile with multiple emails, phones, companies, roles, and domains. Timezone selection so dates read correctly. Database cleanup tools to remove junk and duplicates, with tuning for blocked email domains and junk name patterns.
This is an early release
Some things still need polishing. We’re shipping updates regularly. If something feels off or breaks, please contact support@hexact.io. Feedback shapes what gets built next.
Download Second Brain at brain.hexact.io.