I'm great at meeting people. Conferences, meetups, coffee chats — I leave with three new contacts and genuine plans to stay in touch. Then I get home, life happens, and those 'let's definitely collaborate' conversations evaporate. A week later I find a business card in my jacket pocket and feel guilty enough to do nothing.
The maths on that is brutal. Each event costs me time, travel, sometimes a ticket. Losing every lead to a forgotten follow-up means I'm paying full price for zero return.
So I started dictating follow-ups before I even get home.
Walking to the station or sitting in the back of the bus, I talk for sixty seconds per person while the conversation is still fresh. Names, what we discussed, what I promised to send.
"Okay, follow-ups. Sarah from the fintech panel — she asked about my Vinted flipping writeup, send her the link plus the spreadsheet. Mentioned her brother does voiceover work, might be useful for Fortune and Folly. James — runs the co-working space in Leeds, wants to chat about a lunch-and-learn on side hustles in November, reply with two dates."
Wispr Flow turns that ramble into clean, sendable text — names spelled right, my 'umms' gone, each follow-up separated and readable. I paste them into emails or LinkedIn messages the same evening. Total time from event to sent: under twenty minutes.
Here's why it beats every networking system I've tried. First, memory decays fast. The detail that makes a follow-up land — the brother who does voiceover, the November date — is gone by morning. Dictating in the moment captures the specifics that turn a generic 'great to meet you' into a message that actually gets a reply.
Second, it kills the blank-page problem. Staring at an empty email the next day, trying to remember what James even does, is why follow-ups never happen. Talking first gives me a draft to polish instead of a void to fill. Editing a paragraph takes two minutes. Writing one from scratch takes twenty and usually loses.
Third, same-evening follow-ups get dramatically better responses. I've sent eleven follow-ups this way in the last month and had nine replies — including the Leeds lunch-and-learn, which is now booked and paid. My old record was maybe one reply out of five, sent a week late with an apology baked in.
If your networking ROI is zero because the follow-up never happens, try this at your next event: dictate each follow-up on the way home, while you still remember the details.
Start free with my link: https://ref.wisprflow.ai/hector-wheatley — and never lose a good conversation to a jacket pocket again.