Stop Searching LinkedIn Just to Save a Contact

Sep 12

4 min read

By Christian Medewitz

The LinkedIn Search Is the Problem

You know the routine. A good conversation wraps up, someone says "let's connect," and out comes the phone. Not to save a contact properly — to open LinkedIn and type a name into the search bar, hoping you spelled it right and picked the correct person out of a dozen matches. That's not networking. That's a workaround for the fact that exchanging contact details still doesn't just work.

It's a small thing, but it's also a genuinely inefficient and outdated way to exchange information for people who work in technology. So I built a digital version of the paper business card instead — one that ends the LinkedIn-search routine for good: one tap, and someone's name, number, email, and photo land in your contacts correctly, the first time.

The Paid Alternatives

There are plenty of digital business card services out there — HiHello, Blinq, Popl, and others — typically running somewhere between five and twenty-five dollars a month depending on the plan and how many cards or team seats you need. For a sales team deploying this across dozens of reps, that makes real sense. For me, it didn't. I liked bits and pieces of a few of the designs, but nothing was quite what I was looking for, and none of it felt like it was actually mine.

What I Built Instead

So I built my own, using Claude Code to do the heavy lifting. I'm invested in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem, so that's where it lives: Azure Static Web Apps, on the free tier. There's no virtual machine behind it, no server to patch, and no public IP address exposed to the internet. For a single static page reachable by NFC tap or QR code, that's not a compromise — it's simply the right amount of infrastructure for the job.

How It's Actually Put Together

The code lives in a GitHub repository, and GitHub Actions runs the deployment pipeline straight into the Static Web App on every push. The page itself is a mobile-first HTML site: a profile photo, a short description of what I do and where I'm based, tap-to-act buttons for LinkedIn and my booking page, a QR code for easy sharing, and — the part I'm most pleased with — a "Save Contact" button that drops a fully-formed vCard straight into someone's phone. Name spelled correctly, number correct, email included, photo attached. Nothing left on the table. I also attached a custom domain, which is an easy final step once the rest is live.

The Honest Trade-Off

Want something in five minutes with zero effort? Paying for one of the existing services is a perfectly fine choice. There's nothing wrong with that.
Reasonably handy, or already using Claude Code? This is an easy win. It's not a hard build, and the payoff is that it's completely yours — built around your own identity, not a template someone else designed for a different company.

Why This Matters Beyond a Business Card

This is really a bigger lesson than just a business card. Not everything needs a virtual machine behind it, and not everything needs a subscription either. Sometimes the right tool is the simplest one that actually does the job — and that's exactly the kind of thinking I bring into enterprise architecture too. Matching the infrastructure to the actual requirement, rather than defaulting to whatever's heaviest or most familiar, is the same discipline whether the workload is a single static page or a production cluster.

Prefer Watching to Reading?

I also put together a full video walkthrough covering the build end to end — the LinkedIn-search problem, the paid alternatives, and a live demo of the Save Contact flow in action.

Watch it on YouTube

Final Thoughts

I've put the full guide and AI prompt up on GitHub, free for anyone to use. It's not a template to fork and re-skin — it's a prompt written to make your own AI coding assistant interview you about your own identity, brand colors, and content, so what you end up with looks like yours, not a copy of mine. Here's the short version of what actually matters if you're considering building one:

Skip the recurring subscription if you don't need scale. A single free-tier static site is more than enough for one person.
Get the "Save Contact" flow right. It's the single feature that makes the whole thing worth building — a vCard with an embedded photo, not a link to a remote image.
Build your own version, not a clone of someone else's. The value is in it looking and feeling like you.
Match the infrastructure to the job. Free-tier static hosting for a business card, more for anything that actually needs it.