My Plan to Code A Paperless Future
A year ago I was fresh out of law school working as a corporate lawyer. I hated it.
From a young age, I wanted to make a positive impact on the world and yet there I was preparing corporate contracts (or more often, just coffee).
It wasn’t all doom and gloom though. When I had the chance I loved solving complex legal problems which required me to think deeply about the subject. I also observed an interesting pattern which incited me to teach myself programming.
(Learning to code turned out to be the best decision of my life. I absolutely fell in love with the craft. But that’s for another article.)
What I observed was that all of my co-workers and bosses were always carrying huge stacks of their own business cards to meetings and always came out with huge stacks of business cards they collected.
They all seemed to dislike this even more than I did my job.
The cards would often get lost. Or they would forget to bring their cards to meetings. Or forget about someone and the card wouldn’t help them remember when, where and how they’ve met the person.
I think that’s understandable. Even the sharpest minds forget when and where they’ve met someone from time to time when they collect dozens of business cards every week.
I discovered a problem that awaited a solution.
Business cards aren’t new technology. They originated in 15th century China. From there they arrived in Europe and became widespread as visiting cards in the 17th century.
The aristocracy and other distinguished guests used these cards to announce their arrival to the host they were visiting.
The cousin of the visiting card was the trade card which became popular in 17th century London.
At that time the streets of London had no formal numbering system and Google Maps hasn’t been invented for another 400 years, so it was a mess to find the business you were looking for. That’s why those smart lads drew maps and wrote directions on the trade cards.
If you were to live then you would’ve likely collected dozens of these cards from the different businessmen and businesswomen you came into contact with.
An average Londoner in 1619 probably had the same problems with trade cards my ex-colleagues still have in 2019.
But they had no superior technology at hand. Just like Google Maps, smartphones had to wait another few hundred years for being invented.
This one is difficult to answer.
Today we all have technology under our fingertips that the Londoners would have thought to be magic.
If they had caught me talking into a strange luminous box with a half-eaten apple on it (certainly a sign of witchery) and listening to the voice of my friend instantly arriving from the other side of the planet, one quick second later I would have been roasting at the stake.
Fortunately, in 2019 we don’t have to fear being burned alive for witchcraft. Why is it then that we haven’t ditched the paper business card yet?
It would be nice to massage my ego and say that we haven’t ditched them because nobody has thought about this before. I’m the first one, the chosen one, an inventor, a genius, a visionary.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth though.
And indeed there are already blog posts dealing with this topic. The problem has already been acknowledged by people way smarter than me.
It is being felt by hundreds of people every day. Yet we keep on using those paper cards. Why?
If you search for the term ‘business card’ on the App Store or the Play Store you will find many brilliant apps that let you scan your paper business cards and store them on your phone. This is incredibly useful.
However, none of those apps tried to take paper business cards head on. They complement paper cards well. They do not disrupt the technology.
I can relate to this. By riding on the back of paper business cards and combining them with modern OCR technology, you have a solid business plan.
Paper cards’ age means they’ve become ubiquitous by now, so trying something seemingly out of the box instead might seem like a much riskier move. It is.
I think one of the reasons this 17th-century technology is so hard to change is, in fact, it’s age.
Business cards have been around for so long that they’ve become ingrained in our social structures. It’s almost like wearing a suit to a business meeting — a tradition so obvious that apart from a few forward thinkers and early adopters we as a society usually don’t question its viability.
Not even when it’s uncomfortable or — as with paper business cards — a serious burden on the environment.
But the fact that something has been done in a certain way for a long time in the past does not mean that we shouldn’t be working to swap it for something better.
I can’t help but quote my favorite entrepreneur here:
The first car accessible to the masses was the famous T-Model Ford, which came out in 1908. Up until that point, so basically for the entire history of mankind, people used horses.
Now that’s some pretty heavily ingrained habit. And yet the superior technology eventually took over.
The second important reason why paper business cards are still around is called the network effect.
The network effect means that the value that a product represents to the user increases in proportion to the number of users the product has.
In plain English, if a product becomes more valuable as more people start to use it, that’s because of the network effect.
Imagine if no one would use Instagram or Twitter but you. These billion dollar products would lose their value in a second if we would stop using them.
The same is true for paper money and paper business cards.
If nobody would use paper money and you would try to pay for your Grande, Iced, Sugar-Free, Vanilla Latte With Soy Milk at Starbucks with a piece of paper they’d think you are crazy and would politely ask you to leave.
If people had some other way of exchanging business contacts and nobody would use paper business cards your business partner would think you’re a weirdo if you’d try to hand her one.
So far we have seen two reasons why paper business cards are still around. Neither means that they are actually the best way to exchange contacts.
Now we’re going to see a reason why we might actually be a lot better without them (apart from them being impractical and unfit for the 21st century).
The fact is that they are a burden on the environment. A serious one.
That turns into nearly 10 billion business cards per year.
And here comes the punchline:
Just to make it sink: 8,800,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros. That’s how much paper we waste on business cards in a year.
According to a report by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, pulp and paper are responsible for the sixth largest amount of industrial air, water and land emissions in the US.
It’s hard to give an exact number on how much a single paper business card costs. You have multiple things to take into consideration.
It depends on the quality of the paper you use, whether you choose to hire a graphic designer, how many cards you print (you might get discounts if you print more) etc.
In my estimation, I’ll go with the simplest of examples, where you choose to do-it-yourself. DIY may not be the optimum solution because the quality of a DIY card versus a professionally designed one can differ substantially. It’s the cheapest option, however.
So let’s say that the cost of one DIY card is 0.10$. I think that’s a reasonable estimate taking into consideration the price of the ink, paper and time invested in creating your own design (assuming you’re not a professional designer and you don’t spend too much time with it).
And that’s an absolute bare minimum. The real amount is likely to be much higher than that.
To put it another way: we’re spending a minimum of 880 million dollars/year to advance deforestation.
That sounds terribly depressing.
I believe most of us could imagine better ways to invest that sum.
So now that you know my reasons I want to tell you about what I’ve come up with.
I designed and built an app.
My goals on the UI/UX front were to make the app as simple and easy to use as possible. To make it stick, after all, it has to be a lot easier than dealing with paper cards.
My target users aren’t just tech-savvy early adopters. I consider myself part of that customer segment so it would’ve been easier to design a product for them.
But there are all those people who are fairly confident with their smartphones but usually don’t use it for anything else than emails and phone calls and maybe surfing the web sometimes. A lot of those people have numerous business cards.
And even for tech-savvy people, simpler is usually better. Especially for sharing business contacts. It should be swift and it shouldn’t make you think.
That’s why I kept peeling off layers until I got to the core of my idea. Then I started designing and building.
When you sign in with the app the first thing you’d want to do is create your electronic business card. If you signed in with your LinkedIn account your details are automatically filled out and the creation literally takes like 5 seconds. Otherwise, it takes a bit longer because you fill your details manually.
The card you created is stored in a special QR Code which you can show to others and they can scan and store it in the app.
I chose a QR Code format because that’s probably the fastest way for scanning and getting the other person’s contact details.
My favorite part is that you can easily send your card to your Apple Watch.
No more ‘Where did I put my business cards?’ and no more ‘I really don’t want to burden my planet but I got to share my info somehow’.
Forgetting who’s who also gets harder because you can easily sort your contacts by their companies or the date or the place you have met them.
You can also add short notes to your contacts. It’s just as easy as jotting down a few words on the back of a paper card.
I also realized that many of my users will still keep on receiving paper business cards.
I really hope that more and more people will start to use my app because I believe in the vision with all my heart, but it will surely take some time.
That’s why the app has functionality that lets you scan paper business cards and save them into your contacts.
Building out my own machine learning model for recognizing the details on paper cards was certainly the most challenging part in engineering my product.
It’s still not perfect and it’s part of the reason why I’m first releasing the app only in countries where the official language is English. It only works with English names yet.
If I’m seeing some positive feedback I’ll get to work immediately and release to other countries as soon as possible.
That’s it.
This is the absolute core of what business networking should be about. Sharing your info in a flash and scanning others’ info just as fast. Storing them all in an easily accessible and sortable way.
Saving you time and mental energy.
If I haven’t lost you at the part where I’ve talked about burning people alive, thanks a lot for sticking with me till the end!
I would honestly love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
If what I’ve talked about resonates with you please visit my app’s landing page where you can sign up to get notified about our launch in the App Store.
My Plan to Code A Paperless Future
Research & References of My Plan to Code A Paperless Future|A&C Accounting And Tax Services
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