Today we're launching Lead Retrieval. Sponsors and exhibitors capture leads inside the same event app attendees already use. No hardware, no separate app, and no per-scanner fees for scanners that never scanned. You activate it free and pay $20 per scanner, only after the 3rd successful scan.
That's the whole pitch. Here's what it actually does, and why we built it this specific way...
Lead retrieval is how exhibitors capture leads at a booth. Someone walks up, you scan their badge, you walk away with their contact info and some context. It's one of the few event features sponsors reliably pay for, because it ties straight to the only question they ask: did this booth produce pipeline?
In Highbar, there is no separate tool to deploy, learn, or support. Lead retrieval lives inside the event app exhibitors are already signed into, the same one attendees use. There's nothing to download and nothing to log into separately. If an exhibitor can scan a QR code at lunch, they can scan a lead.
Three things fall out of that decision.
Provisioning a scanner takes seconds. Turning an exhibitor into a scanner is as simple as adding a tag to their profile. No separate accounts, no invites to chase, no devices to ship or pick up. No scanner shows up on your invoice unless they actually scanned.
Every scan comes with context. Because lead retrieval lives where the event lives, a scan isn't just a name and a title. It comes with the lead's full event activity. Your sponsors get real signal about who they captured, not a business card they could have grabbed in the hallway.
You see the floor in real time. Your dashboard shows every scan across every exhibitor as it happens. You can spot the booths winning the event and the ones struggling early enough to actually help. Export everything for post-event sponsor reports without the week of manual cleanup.
Activation is free. There are no contracts and no credit card required to turn it on.
You pay $20 per scanner, and only after that scanner's 3rd successful scan. Inactive scanners are always free. We make money only when a sponsor actually puts the tool to work, and you charge your sponsors whatever feels fair on top of that.
The pricing is one sentence. It doesn't need a finance team to operate or a negotiation to close. When your sponsors win, we win, everyone wins, and it's easy to predict your maximum exposure (all your exhibitors x $20). Plenty of room to add margin and upsell.
You can see all the details on our pricing page and get an instant, 100% transparent quote for your event in seconds...
We've shipped lead retrieval before. Ten years ago at Attendify, we launched a version of it. It worked and it made money, just under 10% of our revenue. But it was a healthy add-on when it should have been a foundation, and the reasons why shaped every decision above.
We made three mistakes...
We made it a separate app. Exhibitors had to find, download, and log into a second app, apart from the event app attendees were using. Every download was a point of failure and every login was a support ticket. The feature didn't underperform because it was bad. It underperformed because nobody could get to it. That's why Highbar's version lives in the app you're already promoting.
We built a revenue share model. It looked clever on a whiteboard. In practice it took far more effort to set up than it was worth, with billing plumbing and payout logic for a line of business that was supposed to be lightweight. The lesson: if your pricing needs its own engineering roadmap, your pricing is wrong. That's why this one is $20 per active scanner and nothing else.
We put our best feature where nobody would see it. We surfaced social posts and intent signals from the leads exhibitors scanned. Real buying signals, automatically. When it worked it was magic, and because of the separate-app problem, it rarely worked. The best feature we built lived in an app almost nobody opened. That's why every scan in Highbar carries the lead's full activity, right inside the app the exhibitor is already in.
Three mistakes, but just one root cause... we treated lead retrieval as a bolt-on instead of building it into the event itself.
The same scan infrastructure runs across the whole app, so peer networking comes along for the ride. Any attendee can tap to exchange contacts with any other attendee, no exhibitor status required. More connections made, more reasons to open the app, and more value your attendees remember when it's time to register for next year.
Value doesn't come from having the feature. It comes from removing every reason the feature goes unused, and from pricing it so you only pay when it works. Built in, not bolted on. Pay for results, not for inventory. Put the signal where the human already is.
Lead Retrieval is live in Highbar today. Activate it free, no contract, and only pay when it works.
