Building with AI Before Breakfast: A digital business card built faster than installed

It’s that sweet spot in the Middle East right now: the weather’s good, the calendar’s full with events and activities, and you’re meeting people constantly.

Which means you hit the same awkward moment again and again:

• “What’s your number?”

• “Are you on WhatsApp?”

• “Connect on LinkedIn?”

• fumble… unlock phone… open app… search… spell name… confirm…

I don’t carry business cards, and honestly I don’t want to. In UAE networking is mostly WhatsApp and LinkedIn. In other places it’s email and phone numbers. Either way, the exchange is weirdly high-friction for something we do all the time.

The “business card app” trap

At an event the other day I finally caved and downloaded one of those digital business card apps.

You know the pattern:

1. Download (not tiny) over 4G in a low signal conference hall.

2. Create an account (thankfully Apple ID helped).

3. Fill in your profile… but only some fields.

4. Want it to look decent? Upgrade.

5. Want it to feel like you? Upgrade again.

6. After all that… the end result still looks like a template.

It wasn’t expensive. It was just bottleneck after bottleneck after bottleneck - all to produce something that didn’t match my aesthetic and didn’t feel “mine”.

The idea: one link that does the whole job

What I actually wanted was simple, a single page I control that:

• shows the ways I actually connect (email, LinkedIn, WhatsApp)

• links out to my work (newsletter, podcast)

• lets someone save me as a contact in one tap

• works on any phone

• looks good

• loads instantly

• can be updated in seconds

So I built it: vcard.leamallon.com.

Now when someone says “How do we connect?”, I tap one button on my home screen and show the QR code.

They pick the channel they prefer or they can save all your details to their phone in 1 click as you can see in this video.

▶ Watch the video on Substack

You can check it out at vcard.leamallon.com.

This one’s a slightly more technical build than some of the usual “quick wins” - but it’s still very doable if you’re happy deploying a simple page and hosting a file or two.

The funniest part for me is the time comparison: it was genuinely quicker to build and deploy my own vCard page than it was to download a business card app, log in, fill in the details, hit the upgrade paywall, and then figure out how the app actually wanted me to use it.

And that’s the bit that feels like the real signal for 2026: we’re going to see more people generating small, personal “apps” on the fly - tailored to exactly what they need - rather than squeezing themselves through the bottlenecks of established apps that are optimised for subscriptions, upsells, and constraints.