Switching personal CRMs moves the names and leaves the context behind.

The notes column is where the move falls apart

You hit export, a file lands in Downloads, and you open it in a spreadsheet to check that everything made it. The first columns look perfect. First name, last name, company, title, email, phone. Hundreds of rows, all accounted for.

Then you scroll right to the column labeled notes.

Most of it is empty. A few cells hold a fragment: "met at booth," a stray date, half a sentence typed in a cab. The person who mentioned she was moving to Austin in the spring is a name and a phone number now. So is the founder halfway through a Series B, and so is the buyer you promised a case study by Friday.

The file is complete. It just doesn't contain anything you'd use to write a follow-up.

Contacts travel. Context stays behind.

Call it the blank-column problem. Every personal CRM can hand you a portable list of people, because names, numbers and emails are structured data with agreed-upon formats. What you knew about those people rarely had a structure to begin with. It lived in a meeting or a hallway, and it only reached the app if you typed it in at the time.

So the export is a diagnostic. It shows you what the old app actually held, which is usually much less than you assumed. And the new app can only import what's in the file.

Switching tools moves the rows. The context you never captured was gone long before you clicked export.

Why picking a better personal CRM doesn't fix it

The comparison threads on r/CRM keep running through the same checklist: sync, enrichment, reminders, price, how the import handles duplicates. Those are fair questions. They also assume the thing worth protecting is the contact list.

The contact list is the easy part. Your phone already keeps one. Your email client builds another, and LinkedIn holds a third. None of them hold the reason a person matters to you this quarter.

A new app with better reminders will remind you about a name. If the note behind that name is blank, the reminder fires on a stranger.

The capture habit was always the variable, and no import wizard carries a habit across.

What "portable" actually guarantees

Portability has a narrow, technical meaning. Contacts move between apps mostly as CSV or vCard files. vCard 4.0, defined in RFC 6350, has dedicated properties for name, organization, title, phone, email, address, birthday and a handful more. Everything you learned in conversation gets exactly one place to go: a single free-text property called NOTE.

Follow-ups have it worse. vCard has no property for a task or a due date. Tasks belong to a different standard, iCalendar (RFC 5545), which is why "send her the deck by Friday" tends to end up in a different app from the person it's about. Or nowhere.

The law sets the same floor. GDPR Article 20 gives people the right to receive their data "in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format." A file with the right columns satisfies that. Whether the columns contain anything is up to you.

A conference week, exported

Run the pattern through an ordinary trade show. Say you walk out with sixty new contacts. Scanning a card takes seconds, so all sixty make it into the app. Typing context takes a minute, and you're standing in an aisle with someone else waiting, so maybe a dozen get a real note. By the flight home, the other forty-eight are a face you half remember and a company name. Met has written about how fast that fades in [the 72-hour memory cliff](/articles/72-hour-memory-cliff/).

Two months later you switch apps. The import reports sixty contacts moved, zero errors. That's accurate, and it's close to meaningless.

The twelve with notes are the only ones you can act on. You could have acted on them in the old app too. The forty-eight blank rows were lost on the show floor, and the export just made that visible.

The import says sixty contacts moved. Twelve of them are people you can actually follow up with.

What should you look for in a personal CRM?

If the context is the asset, the evaluation changes. Four questions matter more than the feature grid.

How fast can you attach context at the moment you meet someone? If it takes longer than the natural pause in a conversation, it won't happen in a crowded room.

Where does the context live? Plain-language text survives any move. Context stored as proprietary scores, custom objects or activity timelines may not export at all.

Does the follow-up stay attached to the person? A promise filed in a separate task app is a promise you'll find late.

Who holds the data? Contacts and notes on a vendor's server are one pricing change away from an export you didn't plan.

Then test it before you commit.

Where Met fits

Met is built around the moment the blank column gets created: the conversation itself. Event Mode keeps capture running while you're still in the room, so the note gets attached before the next introduction instead of on the flight home. The follow-up draft is written from that context, which is the reason to capture it at all.

Storage is iCloud-only. Your contacts and the notes behind them sit in your own account, not on a server you'd have to negotiate an export from.

None of that makes the choice of app irrelevant. But it puts the effort where it pays off, which is the moment right after someone tells you something worth remembering. Fill the column there and every future move, to any tool, carries something real.