How to actually meet people at a conference

Conferences are full of meetings that never happen. “We should grab a coffee” is said hundreds of times a day at any large event, and most of it evaporates, because it contains no time, no place, and no commitment.

The venues do not help: enormous halls, several floors, parallel tracks, and a schedule that slips from mid-morning onward.

Convert intent into a slot, immediately

The single highest-value habit: when someone says “let’s grab coffee”, pick the time there and then.

“Great - 2:15, the coffee stand by hall 3 entrance?”

Ten seconds. It either becomes real or the person declines, and both outcomes are better than a vague intention that dies quietly. Put it in your calendar with the location in the title, because you will not remember by the afternoon.

Use the venue’s coordinate system

Convention centres are large indoor metal-and-concrete buildings, often on several levels. GPS is poor inside them and a map pin can put you on the wrong floor.

The venue has already solved this with signage:

• Hall numbers. The primary division of any exhibition space.
• Stand numbers. Genuinely precise, printed on the floorplan, and how everyone at a trade show navigates.
• Room names for sessions.
• Named catering points - “the coffee cart by the north entrance.”

“Stand D42” beats any live map inside a hall. Use the app or floorplan the organiser provides.

Plan around the schedule slipping

• Do not book back-to-back meetings across a huge site. Allow fifteen minutes to walk anywhere and ten more for the conversation you will be pulled into.
• Avoid the main entrance as a meeting point. It is the densest, least distinguishable place in the building.
• Meet just after a session ends, not just before. Before, people are anxious about seats; after, they are free.
• Have a fallback. “If we miss each other, I’ll be at the same spot at 4.”

Group logistics around the event

The evenings are usually messier than the days: a team spread across different hotels, dinners booked for eight, people leaving sessions at different times, and a city nobody knows.

That is where coordination actually costs time, and where a shared map is worth having - not for finding someone inside hall 3.

Where Nearby fits

We build Nearby, so treat this as interested, and the limits matter here.

Inside a convention centre, use the stand number. A live map will not reliably beat the venue’s own floorplan, and claiming otherwise would be nonsense.

Where it works at a conference is outside the halls: the team spread across hotels in the morning, the group converging on a restaurant in an unfamiliar city, the after-party nobody can find, and the airport run at the end. Drop the pin, share one link, and colleagues join from a browser with just a name - which is useful when half the group is on a corporate phone they cannot install things on.

Up to ten people, no account, expires afterwards - which is the right shape for a work trip, since nobody wants an ongoing location arrangement with colleagues.

The conference checklist

1. Turn every “let’s grab coffee” into a time and a named place, on the spot.
2. Put the location in the calendar entry title.
3. Use hall and stand numbers indoors, not map pins.
4. Allow fifteen minutes of walking between anything.
5. Meet after sessions, not before.
6. Save the shared map for evenings and the city, not the halls.

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Nearby is free on Google Play, and colleagues join from any browser.