How Popl Turns Badge Scans Into Clean Contacts at 99% Email Coverage With Apollo

Jason Alco has watched the same routine play out at hundreds of trade show booths: purchase a badge scanner from the event organizer, pass it around all day, then wait days or weeks for a CSV of leads to land in an inbox. By the time the data showed up, the conversation was long over.

As founder and CEO of Popl, Jason set out to fix that. Not with a faster scanner, but with better data underneath it. 

Here's how Apollo became the foundation for a category that didn't exist yet.

Event lead capture hasn't changed in decades

Hosts borrow hardware, reps scan badges all day, and the resulting list shows up whenever the organizer gets around to exporting it. By then, most of the context from the actual conversation is gone.

Jason wanted to scan a badge, a paper business card, or a LinkedIn QR code and get back a clean, enriched, CRM-ready record on the spot. But he knew a fast scanner is only as good as what it returns. If the enrichment underneath was slow or wrong, speed at the point of scan wouldn't matter.

Sitting on the answer since 2024

Popl's own go-to-market team had been running outbound on Apollo since mid-2024 for prospecting and sequencing, which meant the Popl team had live API access and real usage data before he ever built a product around it.

That head start let the team test coverage and accuracy against real data from day one, instead of taking a vendor's word for it.

Raw match rate was the wrong question

Popl still spent years testing data providers before committing, mapping out where each one was strong and where it fell apart. 

The Popl team wasn't looking for whoever returned the most emails. They were looking for whoever returned emails that worked.

That distinction mattered because a bad address doesn't just fail quietly. A stale or pattern-matched email bounces, flags the sending domain, and can sink an entire campaign. For Popl's product to hold up, every contact had to be reachable, not just present.

Three things convinced him Apollo could hold up at scale:

• Accuracy — every email runs through multi-step, real-time verification before a customer ever sees it.

• Cleanliness — Apollo strips out stale records instead of padding the count. The goal isn't the biggest database, it's a usable one.

• Speed — In-person enrichment needs to happen in real time. Apollo returns data fast enough for reps to see enriched emails in seconds, not hours.

Apollo returned fewer emails than some competitors. But each one had a much better shot at reaching a real person, and that was the number that actually moved pipeline for Popl's customers.

Turning good data into a new category

Popl calls what it's building “in-person go-to-market”: scan a badge, a card, or a QR code, and the platform enriches it, qualifies it, and syncs a clean record straight into the CRM.

But none of that works if the data is wrong. That’s why Apollo sits at the top of Popl's data waterfall as one of their tier-one providers, resolving contact and company data at the heart of each record. From there, Popl's own AI agents take over the hardest records (the ones with no clean public trail) and run discovery across the web to fill in what's missing.

Popl built directly on top of Apollo's open architecture rather than working around it, and used that access to give event lead capture something it never had: enrichment fast enough to put a usable record in a rep's hand before they've turned to greet the next person in line.

Over 1M badges and counting

Popl is the leader in the event lead capture category and has now scanned more than 1 million event badges with Apollo as one of their tier-one providers, and Jason expects that number to keep climbing. 

Enrichment returns in about three seconds on average — fast enough to hand a rep a CRM-ready record while the conversation is still warm. 

Badge scans hit 99% email coverage, combining Apollo's data with Popl's own AI-native layer.

"Disrupting how event lead capture is done wouldn't be possible without Apollo as a key piece of our data stack," Jason says. "Having that speed from a partner like Apollo, instead of waiting on a webhook or slower data, is exactly what our use case needs."

The relationship has grown alongside the product. "It's been awesome going from a standard customer to actually learning and meeting more with the team," Jason says. "The team has been incredible. Everyone is high energy and excited to get things done. Now we feel very supported, and excited for what's ahead."

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