It's Friday afternoon and there are 90 business cards on your desk. You collected every one on purpose. Each came with a real conversation: the VP who's standing up a new team, the founder two booths down who's solving the exact problem you are, the person who said 'email me, we should talk.' Right now, sitting in your hand, they're worth something. By the Tuesday after the event, most of them are anonymous strangers with a logo. You remember the card. You don't remember why you kept it. The pile didn't shrink while you were gone; the context inside it did.
Card load is a number, so treat it like one
Most people walk into an event with a vague sense that they'll 'do some networking' and walk out with a vague sense that they have 'a lot of follow-up.' Vague is what kills it. The Conference Card Load Estimator turns the vague into two hard numbers before you go: how many contacts you'll realistically collect, and how many hours of follow-up that buries you in afterward. Call it your card load. Once it's a number, you can plan for it, staff for it, or decide the math doesn't work and skip the booth-crawl day entirely. The estimator runs entirely in your browser, takes four inputs, and gives you the answer in the time it takes to read this paragraph.
The four inputs
You give it four things. Event days: a two-day summit and a five-day expo are different animals. Hours per day you're actually meeting people: not the hours the hall is open, the hours you're working it. Event type: an expo floor hands you cards far faster than a seated-session conference, so picking the event type sets a starting density you can then nudge up or down to match your style. And minutes of follow-up per contact: a real, context-aware note that lands takes longer than a copy-paste blast, and that gap is the whole point. Every preset is an adjustable starting estimate, not a measured fact. Change any input and both output numbers move live, so you can see exactly which day or which booth-crawl is the one inflating your debt.
The output, and the curve that explains the deadline
Two things come back. First, total contacts: days times hours times density. Second, follow-up hours: contacts times your per-card minutes, shown in hours and again in workdays because 'ten hours' and 'a day and a half of your week gone' land differently. Then there's the curve. It plots how much of each conversation's context you can still recall against the days since you had it, with one marker at the event's last day and one at the Tuesday you're back at your desk. The shaded gap between them is the share of context that's already gone if your follow-up waits for 'when things calm down.' That gap is why a 90-card haul and a busy re-entry week is a quiet disaster: the volume peaks exactly when your recall is collapsing.
Why 'just follow up when you're back' fails
The standard advice is to scan everything into a CRM and work the list when you're back in the office. It fails for a reason the estimator makes visible: the list arrives complete, but the context arrives perishable. A CRM entry preserves the card. It does not preserve the half-sentence about their re-org, the reason you two hit it off, the specific ask you agreed to make. Tools built for the steady-state sales pipeline assume you already know who someone is before they enter the system; an event hands you 90 people you met once, in a hallway, with the band playing. The bottleneck was never storage. It's that the warm window is short and the load is heavy, and almost nothing in the category is built for that specific 72-hour crunch.
Capture the context, not just the card
The estimator tells you the size of the problem. Solving it means closing the gap between the moment you meet someone and the moment the context is gone, which means capturing the why at the table, not reconstructing it Tuesday from a logo. Met's Event Mode is built for exactly the crunch this tool quantifies: keep capturing the room (the name, the context, the next step) while you keep talking, so the 90 cards arrive already carrying the reason you kept them. Storage stays on your device, in iCloud, not on someone's server. Run your real numbers above first. If the follow-up hours look survivable, good. If they don't, the fix is upstream, at the moment of the conversation.
Run your numbers, then capture the context while it's still warm. Get Met.
Met was built for the person whose week is wrecked by a good conference: dozens of conversations worth remembering, a re-entry calendar that gives you no time to remember them, and a warm window closing fast. Event Mode keeps the room captured while you keep talking, and everything stays on your device in iCloud, not sold and not on someone's server.
