HiHello - Exchange contacts, seamlessly.

The big problem is that the personn needs to have this app too... Anyway hope you can convice them to install it anyway. UI seems simple, good job

Product Hunters! Hi. Hello. This is Manu from HiHello. Excited to have you take a look at the HiHello app. Here's a little more of the backstory for how this came about. For as far back as I can remember, I've had a love-hate relationship with business cards. At one point the entire side of my desk was full of a sea of business cards. I figured that even if I was able to scan a card every 5-10 seconds it would still take weeks to get through all the cards. Worse yet, the scans would never be accurate. So in 2009 I co-founded CardMunch to solve this problem. We launched our product in August 2010 and a few months later were acquired by LinkedIn in January 2011. LinkedIn talked a big game about how they were going to distribute and offer the product to their 500M users. Instead they proceeded to ruin and kill the product. They eventually gave it to Evernote. I was more than peeved, and worse yet, my problem still hadn't been solved. Last year, when I was playing with the iOS 11 beta I accidentally discovered that the native camera on iOS11 is now capable of reading QR codes. Around the same time I was introduced to Hari Ravi, who was interested in co-founding a company. Hari and I got to chatting about startup ideas and we both felt that the business card problem has just never had a good solution. There have been lots of attempts and lots of interesting ideas in this space, like Plaxo, Bump and CardMunch along the way, but none of those exist today. That just didn't make any sense to us. Together we decided to take on this problem one more time. And with that HiHello was born. This time we decided to try something different and try to remove the need for paper business cards to start. Please see the full blog post linked above that talks about this. We're a small team of of 5 and we're determined to make a dent in this space. The app you see on ProductHunt today is our first public release. It's just a starting point along our long roadmap of features we want to build. We want to do that with your feedback. So please help us, by trying out the app and emailing us your feedback at support@hihello.me. We promise to read every single email we receive and give it full consideration as we prioritize what features to build next. Oh, and if you like what you see, we'd welcome the upvote on PH as well. On behalf of the HiHello team, Thank you! Manu Kumar Co-founder, HiHello

Disclosure: I am an investor in HiHello. I’ve been using this app since its earliest versions and it’s great. I seem to never have my cards when I need them, but I always have my phone. This problem has bugged me for years and others, like Bump, have tried to solve it. HiHello is the first to crack the bootstrap problem, giving users immediate value without needing others to have the app (though things will be even better once they do). There’s an ‘aha moment’ when people see how easy it is to add my info right into their contacts. Can’t wait to see new features roll out and for more people to get the app!

Pros:

No need to carry business cards. Can share contacts with people who don't have the app.

Cons:

Looking forward to more features and users.

This is a super cool concept and well executed. I meet a lot of people so this has been great and quickly became a habit. I really like that I can just choose what I want to share with someone, tell them to point their phone's camera at the code, and boom they get my contact info! No need for them to have HiHello (though they usually ask how I did that).

Pros:

I can easily share my contact info with people that don't have the app

Cons:

None. Want more features though.

I've been using this in TestFlight for a couple months now, and it's pretty darned cool. If you meet someone with an iPhone, they just need to use their built-in camera app to get your contact info. It's a little tougher for Android users who aren't in the tech world (they need an app that can read QR codes, and they need to know how to make it do it), but it's light years ahead of apps where everyone you meet already needs to be using the app for it to be useful. Once folks do have it installed (and they will, because it's much easier than handing my phone to someone so they can type in their email address), it'll get even better!

There is a true painpoint and a good initiative- but I don't see this product addressing one of the most fundamental needs - verifying the authenticity of a card. That is one of the key things that a business card achieves, especially when an interaction is not 1/1 and in conferences etc where the need to share is often and instant. True, one can print any biz card, but they would think twice distributing something like this on paper. There is the need to validate auth of a claim made in each card at any given time before sharing. Else, anyone can say anything and the connections you make won't make much of a diff. So, I would suggest adding some work email authentication and challenge/resp periodically to make sure cards are accurate. Also, there is a need to differentiate a bit - I can create QR code of my LinkedIN, save it on MS OfficeLens and share at will using the exact same mechanisms just as easily.

this seems more like a feature that could be inside LinkedIn than product – what am i missing?

Faceted identity exchange for the phone, congrats Manu and team 🚀

Interesting.

As far as I can see you're not handling well internationial phone number (Italian). I cannot add them to my account.