Making a Business vCard QR Code with ChatGPT

A couple of months ago, I was heading to a charity event and didn’t have time to get business cards printed. Plus, as someone in technology, I felt I should really have something digital, right?

I spent a few hours researching various free services for generating QR codes because, thanks to Covid, everyone knows how to scan them now. However, I quickly found that using these services—whether paid or free—resulted in a poor user experience for the recipient. It was easy to assume that the card had been added to your phone, but without a few extra clicks, the information was lost. I wanted something simpler, more reliable.

In the end, I realised that I could encode my business card directly into a QR code without relying on any third-party services. The trick was to put the business card information into "vCard" format.

All modern phones will recognise this vCard information after scanning the QR code, which means the phone will display your card and offer the option to add it to contacts. Voila!

Here's how easy it was to do:

There’s a specific format for a vCard, which you can see from my request. Copying one is easy, so I’ve included all the common fields in mine below, making it simple to copy and customise.

Testing the QR code is straightforward, so make sure you do that before using it on your phone lock screen or physical cards.

This is what I asked ChatGPT:

The key thing to use here is "highest error correction" because it means you can afford to take out a chunk of the code or hold it at an angle, and it will still work. In my case, I was able to overlay my logo over the middle of it using an online photo editor—and it still worked fine!

After that, I simply added it as a wallpaper to my phone, like this:

Now, people can scan my business card without me having to unlock my phone. 🙂

I’m planning to add this to my physical business cards too, so that people don’t need to manually grab all the information and add it to their phone.

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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