a.Ahoyy
Guides for people who meet a lot of people
How to make a card people actually save, how to stop losing numbers, and how to get your shop found by someone standing two streets away.
Digital visiting cards
- Fourteen people, fourteen versions of the same cardThe problem with team cards is not design. It is that half your team is carrying cards with last year job title on them. · 6 min read
- Your clients are yours. The gym they train at is a detail.You change gyms. The gym keeps the members. What you take with you is the list of people who saved your number. · 6 min read
- Every enquiry starts with a date, a headcount and a per plate rateYou have typed the same reply about per plate rates four hundred times. It should have been a page. · 6 min read
- Nobody looks for a plumber until eleven at nightYou are not competing with other plumbers. You are competing with a search bar in a phonebook full of duplicates. · 6 min read
- The mirror is the most valuable advertising space you ownA customer sits in your chair for forty minutes with nothing to look at. That is the moment your card should exist. · 6 min read
- They loved your ideas. Now they have to convince someone who never met you.Interiors are never signed in the room where they are pitched. Your card has to work when you are not there. · 6 min read
- You talked to twenty people this week. Will any of them remember you in March?The sale takes one meeting. The relationship takes fifteen years. Almost nothing about a paper card helps with the second part. · 6 min read
- The school gate is your best marketing channel and you have nothing to hand overOne parent recommends you in a class group of forty. What lands there decides your next three admissions. · 6 min read
- Nobody books a photographer from a phone numberA paper card asks a client to imagine your work. A link can just show it. · 6 min read
- Your best clients come from one client telling another. Give them something to forward.A client wants to recommend you to his brother-in-law. Right now the best he can do is paste ten digits. · 6 min read
- Patients do not need your mobile number. They need your clinic timings.Most calls to a clinic are not medical. They are about which day, which clinic and what time. · 6 min read
- No office, no letterhead, no company name. Just a link.A salaried person borrows credibility from a company logo. You have to build yours out of one page. · 6 min read
- You met eleven people at that site visit. You remember two.The stack of cards in your glovebox is a follow up list you never made. Here is how to turn it into one. · 6 min read
- Your rate list is stuck on the wall. It should be a link.Only people standing inside your shop can read your prices. That is a very small number of people. · 6 min read
- The card an electrician can hand over without washing his handsYour number gets spoken from the top of a ladder and typed wrong at the bottom. Here is a way to fix the handover. · 6 min read
- A guide to sharing your contact info on WhatsApp politelyThe days of dictating your number over the phone are over. Here is the cleanest, most polite way to hand your details to a new client. · 5 min read
- The end of the paper visiting card in IndiaVisiting cards are still everywhere, but we rarely keep them any more. Here is how people are bridging the gap between paper boards and digital phones. · 5 min read
For your business
Phonebook and contacts
- Three Rajus in your phone, and how to clean that upAndroid merges the easy duplicates by itself. The hard ones, like Raju Plumber and Raju Plumber New, need a different trick. · 6 min read
- Keeping your own copy of your contactsA .vcf file on your own laptop is the backup nobody can lock you out of. Here is how to make one on any phone. · 5 min read
- When your phonebook has grown past five thousand namesYou do not fix a huge phonebook by deleting. You fix it by making the names findable. Here is the order to do it in. · 6 min read
- You remember the shop, not the nameThe number is in your phone somewhere. The name is not what you remember. Here is how to get to it anyway. · 5 min read
- Moving to a new phone without losing half your contactsMost contacts get lost in the gap between two phones. Find out where yours are actually stored before you switch. · 6 min read
- Half your phonebook is numbers you cannot placeNobody saved a number planning to forget who it was. Here is how the nameless entries pile up, and what to do with them. · 5 min read
- A way of naming contacts that still works in two yearsTiffin aunty made sense on the day you saved her. Here is a format that still makes sense two years later. · 5 min read
- Turning a photo of a visiting card into a saved contactThe card is in your gallery with two hundred other photos. Here is how to get the number out of it and into your phone. · 5 min read
- Why "Raju AC 2" keeps happening to all of usWe have all done it. You meet a new plumber, you already have a "Raju Plumber" in your phone, so you save him as "Raju Plumber New". Here is why our phonebooks are failing us. · 5 min read
- The case for keeping work and personal contacts separateYour boss, your accountant and your mother should not be sitting next to each other in one app. Here is what separating them actually buys you. · 5 min read
- How to remember where you met someoneHuman memory is tied to places, not alphabetical lists. If you cannot remember a name but you do remember the shop, you should not lose the contact. · 5 min read
Comparisons
- Mobilo alternatives if you would rather not ship a plastic card to IndiaAn NFC card is a lovely object. It is also a thing you have to order, wait for, carry and remember. · 6 min read
- Uniqode alternatives when you do not want to pay for a year up frontA yearly commitment is a small thing for a company and a large thing for a business with a slow season. · 6 min read
- Popl does not publish a price. Here is what else you can look at.You cannot compare a price you cannot see. For a small Indian business, that alone rules a product out. · 6 min read
- HiHello alternatives, if the scan limit is what is stopping youHiHello gives you four free cards and five scans a month. In India the cards you receive outnumber the ones you send. · 6 min read
- Looking past Blinq: what else works for an Indian userBlinq is good software. The friction for most Indian users is not the product, it is the currency and the free tier. · 6 min read