Wanna stay in touch but not give out your phone number? Try this app

D.C. is a networking town. And Rajdeep Junnarkar, a longtime local mobile product developer, has done lots of it. But there was always something that sort of bothered him — a wrinkle in the process.

Say you go out networking (or, you know, you just go out) and you meet someone interesting and then you walk away with either a business card or a phone number. From there, the process of adding that person to the relevant social media is a multi-step process and will they even remember who you are when you text?

So, as mobile product guys are wont to do, Junnarkar decided to make an app to solve this problem. “The problem itself was intriguing enough for me to want to go and solve,” he told Technical.ly in a recent interview. And given his years developing mobile apps for other companies, making his own was a “natural evolution.”

Waiting for someone to come hang on AddyMate. (Screenshot)

Enter AddyMate, a “mobile app that helps you quickly connect with the people you meet in real life” without giving up privacy (unless you want to).

The app allows users to find an add other users who are nearby (within a 100 foot radius) and then share contact information with them. Users create profiles (as many as they want) within the app and can choose which profile to share with which new contact. You can share as little as a name and a photo, or as much as your phone number, email, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. — all from one place.

The goal, Junnarkar said, is that the app helps users “pick up where they left off” in that first IRL interaction.

Junnarkar, who has lived in the DMV area for 21 years, started working on the app about a year ago. The project is bootstrapped and staffed by freelancers and contractors. He officially launched the app in late August of 2016 and describes the current state as a “soft launch.”

In a way, AddyMate is not dissimilar from Switchit, an app we wrote about back in December. Both think aspects of the networking process could be streamlined, though they go about it in different ways — AddyMate distinguishes itself with the location-based component.

But both apps (and so many more), as we wrote in our story about Switchit, have to contend with the fact that many have tried to solve this networking, staying in touch, dealing with unruly information, etc. problem — and none have nailed it. That means, as we also wrote before, that this is a tough nut to crack, but also that there remains the opportunity to be the one.

In contrast to Switchit’s business model of going after companies as clients, AddyMate is a consumer-focused app. So Junnarkar’s focus for the foreseeable future will be on gaining users — he intends to get the word out and grow by attending local tech and networking events, he said.