Cigar Social Network: AI-Powered Catalog at Scale
Cigar Social Network is a partnership project — a community platform for cigar enthusiasts. The challenge was catalog scale: getting hundreds of cigars into the database quickly and accurately. Drive Phase built the Foundation layer that made it possible to add 300+ cigars in under 10 minutes, turning what would have been days of manual data entry into a repeatable, AI-assisted workflow.
The problem
Building a cigar community platform means maintaining a large, accurate product catalog. Manually entering hundreds of cigar records — with names, origins, strengths, wrappers, and tasting notes — is slow, error-prone work that doesn't scale. The team needed a way to populate and maintain the catalog without the process becoming a full-time job.
The solution
Foundation — owned, structured data
We built a clean, well-structured data foundation for the catalog. The structure made it possible to connect an AI-assisted workflow that takes raw cigar data and populates the database in bulk, with no manual formatting required.
Intelligence — AI-assisted catalog entry
With the Foundation in place, adding new cigars became an AI-driven workflow rather than a manual task. The team can hand raw product information to the system and have it structured, validated, and in the database in minutes — not hours.
Results
300+ cigars added to the database in under 10 minutes
What would have taken days of manual data entry now takes minutes — the Foundation and Intelligence components working together. The catalog can grow as fast as the community does, without adding headcount or hours.