What you are actually selling

A review card is a plastic card with a small chip inside. The chip holds one thing: a web address. Touch a phone to the card and the phone opens that address. The address is the business's own Google review page, the one with the five stars and the text box.

• No app, no battery, no wifi, no subscription.
• The chip runs on the phone's own field for the half second they touch.
• It cannot see who tapped it, does not count taps, and sends nothing anywhere.

Owners ask about this, so learn it now: the card is a printed link, and the printing happens to be electronic.

Without one, a customer unlocks the phone, opens Maps, types a name with two or three similar results in the same town, picks the right one, scrolls past photos and hours, finds the reviews, taps the stars. That is a lot to ask of someone standing at a counter with keys in one hand and a bag in the other.

The card deletes the middle. Tap, stars, done.

Not reviews. A shorter path for the reviews the business was going to earn anyway. Whether that path gets used depends on two things you do not control: whether the staff ask, and whether the service was good enough that somebody wants to say so. You can improve the first, in five minutes, at delivery. You cannot touch the second, and any pitch that pretends otherwise is one you have to defend later.

• A wallet-sized card in a small counter stand. The default.
• A sticker or disc on a till, window or menu holder.
• A keyring tag for a mobile trade, so it travels with the van keys.
• A table tent, where the ask happens at the table.
• A card in the check presenter or invoice folder, handed over with the bill.

Choose by where the ask happens, not by what photographs well.

• Materials are small enough to test with pocket money, so the risk is your time rather than your savings.
• It is physical. The demo takes ten seconds instead of a slide deck.
• The buyer is on a street you can walk to, so the conversation is free to practise.
• Nothing to build: no code, no inventory system, no shipping, no returns from strangers.

Because the object costs almost nothing, the price is a price for a conversation, a correct link and a delivery. The whole business is the conversation, and the conversation is the easiest part to keep putting off.

There is also a rule you can break in your first week by copying a pitch you saw online. That rule is the next lesson.