Events
You will meet forty people. You will remember four.
Events are the one place where contact swapping still happens face to face, at speed, with a drink in one hand. You come home with a lanyard, a tote bag and a pile of cards, and by the following Tuesday you cannot tell which card belongs to the person you actually wanted to talk to.
Ahoyy is a free app for that pile. Your own card is a web page with a QR code on it, so anyone can point their normal phone camera at your screen and your details open. No app on their side. When someone hands you a paper card instead, you scan it and it saves, along with the place you were standing when you met.
This section covers the different shapes of event networking. Start with the one that matches the event you are going to.
The three jobs an event app has to do
Strip away the branding and every product in this space is trying to do three things. Getting your details to a stranger in under ten seconds. Getting their details back. Keeping enough context that the follow-up email does not start with "we met at, um".
- • Give out your details. A link and a QR code beat paper because you can fix a typo after you have handed it over.
- • Take in their details. Some people will hand you a card. Scanning it beats typing it into your notes app at midnight.
- • Keep the context. Which event, which day, which room. This is the part almost every product skips, and it is the part you actually forget.
Where we are genuinely good
Location memory is the piece worth reading twice. Every contact you save in Ahoyy records where you were when you saved it. Later, the contact does not just say a name and a company. It says you met them at the coffee stand in Hall 2 on the first morning.
That single detail is what makes a cold follow-up warm. People do not remember names. They remember rooms, queues, panel sessions and the person who was also hiding from the keynote.
The rest is simple by design. Your card is free, it works from a browser, and the person receiving it installs nothing.
What Ahoyy does not do
Being straight about this saves you a wasted afternoon. Ahoyy is not a lead capture platform.
- • No badge scanning. We cannot read the barcode or the RFID chip on an event badge. Badge data belongs to the event organiser and reaching it needs their lead retrieval licence.
- • No CRM sync. Nothing you save flows into Salesforce or HubSpot on its own.
- • No lead capture mode with custom qualifying questions, hot or cold ratings, or a team leaderboard.
- • No team lead dashboard showing who scanned what at which booth.
- • No NFC hardware. We sell nothing physical. Your QR code is free and does the same job on any camera phone.
If you need the things above, buy them
If your team is measured on leads per booth hour and the numbers have to land in a CRM by Friday, you need a real lead capture platform. Popl and Blinq both sell one. We wrote honest comparisons of both, including the parts where they beat us.
A page that sends the wrong reader somewhere better is doing its job. Come back when you want a free card and a memory of who you met.
Getting ready before you travel
- 1. Make your card and put your role and company on it, not just your name.
- 2. Open the QR screen once at home so you know where it lives. On the floor you want it in two taps.
- 3. Save the QR image to your phone photos as a backup for when the venue wifi dies.
- 4. Charge a small power bank. Every contact swap on your phone costs battery, and event days are long.
- 5. After each day, open your saved contacts while the place names are still fresh and add one line of note to each.
Common questions
- What is an event networking app?
- It is an app that handles contact swapping at an event: giving your details to someone quickly, capturing theirs, and keeping enough context to follow up. Some products in this category also do badge scanning and CRM routing for sales teams, which is a different and heavier job.
- Does the other person need the app?
- No. Your Ahoyy card is a normal web page. They point their phone camera at your QR code and it opens in their browser. Nothing to install, no account, no sign-up wall between them and your phone number.
- Does Ahoyy scan event badges?
- No. Badge scanning reads a barcode or RFID chip that belongs to the event organiser, and access to that data is sold as a lead retrieval licence. Ahoyy scans the printed business cards people hand you, not badges.
- Can I push my event contacts into a CRM?
- Not automatically. Ahoyy has no CRM integration. If automatic CRM routing is a requirement for your team, look at Popl or Blinq instead.
- What happens to my normal phonebook?
- Nothing. Contacts you save in Ahoyy stay in Ahoyy. Your personal phonebook does not fill up with three hundred people you met once at a stand.
- Does it work without signal in a big hall?
- Card scanning runs on your device, so reading the text off a card works with no signal. Opening someone else’s card page needs a connection, which is why saving your own QR code as an image is worth the ten seconds.
- Is it free?
- Yes. Your card, the QR code, sharing and saving contacts are free. There are paid plans for heavier use of our business directory, but nothing about event contact swapping sits behind them.
Sort your card out before the next one
It takes about a minute, and there is nothing to print.
Create my card freeRead next: Conference networking, Trade show contact exchange, Event lead capture.