10 Miles, 200 Business Cards, and One Big Idea: How SnapCard Was Born at ITB Berlin
This March, I attended ITB Berlin, one of the world’s largest travel trade shows. Three days, 12 halls, over 10,000 exhibitors. It was electric — the kind of place where your next business deal, partnership, or career pivot could be hiding behind any handshake.
By the end of Day 3, my phone’s battery was dead, my feet had clocked 10 miles, and my backpack was bursting at the seams.
Not with swag.
Not with brochures.
But with paper business cards.
Cards from travel tech founders, hoteliers from Southeast Asia, DMCs from Latin America, tour operators from Eastern Europe. I had a stack. All slightly different sizes. Most with no photo. Some with handwriting I couldn’t decode. A few with names I didn’t even remember meeting.
I flew home from Berlin exhausted, optimistic — and frustrated.
The Problem No One Talks About
The real value of a trade show isn’t what you learn in a keynote or who you watch on a panel. It’s who you meet.
But after 72 hours of rapid-fire networking and caffeine-fueled conversations, I found myself sitting at my desk the next Monday morning with a pile of paper cards… and no clear memory of who half of them were, where we met, or what we talked about.
Some cards went in a drawer. Some went in the trash. A few, I forced myself to look up and follow up with — clumsily — on LinkedIn or email.
And I kept thinking:
Why is this still how we exchange contact information in 2025?
What Should Have Happened
Let’s rewind.
Imagine I meet someone at ITB — let’s call her Anya, Head of Partnerships at a growing OTA in Poland.
Instead of handing me a paper card, Anya shows me a QR code on her phone. I scan it. Instantly, I land on her SnapCard — a digital contact card with her photo, name, role, email, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn all in one place.
I’m offered three choices:
- Add Anya to my SnapCard contacts (and get my own SnapCard in 30 seconds)
- Download her vCard directly into my phone
- Sign in to SnapCard web if I already have an account
No app needed. No typing errors. No paper.
If I already had SnapCard installed, I could tag Anya (“ITB contact”, “potential collab”, “follow up in April”), add a note (“spoke about affiliate integrations”), and even set a reminder to reconnect in 2 weeks. SnapCard would log the date, time, and GPS location of our meeting — so I could recall that we talked near Hall 5, by the Brazil booth, on Day 2 right after lunch.
That’s how it should work.
So we built it.
From Problem to Product: SnapCard Was Born
That post-ITB fatigue — and the realization that modern business networking was stuck in the analog era — sparked the creation of SnapCard.
We wanted to solve the pain that every conference attendee, freelancer, founder, recruiter, and rainmaker knows too well:
- The forgotten follow-ups
- The lost context
- The shoebox full of cards that never get digitized
- The awkward “sorry, who are you again?” emails weeks later
So we built a tool that made your first contact with someone feel like just the beginning — not a missed opportunity waiting to happen.
SnapCard Today
SnapCard is now used by professionals across industries to:
- Instantly share a digital card with QR or link
- Save new contacts with rich context: where, when, why you met
- Add notes, tags, and reminders so your follow-up is thoughtful and timely
- Keep your network organized without spreadsheets or clunky CRMs
- Create multiple SnapCards for different roles or contexts (e.g., founder, advisor, investor)
And if you’re at an event and meet someone else on SnapCard? You can mutually save each other with a tap — and never forget the moment.
If You’re Going to Walk 10 Miles at a Trade Show…
...make it count.
Don’t come back with sore feet and a foggy memory. Come back with an organized, tagged, time-stamped pipeline of relationships that you can actually act on.
That’s what SnapCard does.
And that’s why we built it — at ITB Berlin, one paper card too many.