The tradesperson who pitched us NFC in three words
Six months into building TapTrust, I received a message from a plumber in Manchester. It said: 'Just tap it.' Three words. I spent the next hour staring at my phone wondering why those three words had rattled me so much.
Why a plumber knows what we didn't
The plumber had been testing an early version of TapTrust. He was one of those users who didn't read the help docs, didn't watch the tutorial video, and didn't overthink the concept. He just held his phone to the NFC card and expected something to happen. When it did, he got it immediately. When I asked him what made sense about it, his reply was brutally honest: 'Just tap it. That's all people care about. Nothing else matters.'
He was right. We'd been building this product thinking about lead capture and Google reviews and analytics dashboards. All of those things matter, obviously. But what he'd identified was the moment of friction. In business, especially for people running tight operations, complexity kills adoption. A tradesperson doesn't want to fumble through a login, fill out a form, remember a password. They want to hand someone a card. That card needs to work. Tap, done.
I'd been so focused on what TapTrust could do that I'd missed what it needed to do first: disappear. The mechanism should be invisible. The value should appear instantly.
The card that works when you're in someone's hallway
After that message, we rebuilt the entire tap flow. Every millisecond mattered. The card loads on contact with the phone. Your smart profile appears instantly. The customer sees your contact details, and there's the review prompt right there. No loading screen. No redirect. No 'please wait for the next page.'
What surprised us during testing was that this simplicity unlocked something unexpected. Clients started using the same card differently than we'd anticipated. A mortgage broker was handing it to prospects as a digital business card during meetings. A salon was taping one to the counter as a review collection point. A restaurant owner was giving them out at the till, and customers were tapping before they'd even left the building.
The technical part, the NFC writing, the multiple profile cards, the tap analytics that shows you exactly where and when someone engaged with your business, all of that became secondary. The primary insight was the plumber's insight: just make it work when someone taps it.
What happens when the card becomes the system
Once we'd nailed the tap, other features fell into place naturally. A client-facing business, whether that's an estate agent, a freelancer, or a gym owner, needs to know if their card is actually generating leads. So we built tap analytics with location data. You see not just that someone tapped your card, but where they tapped it and when. That matters if you're at an event or a networking group and want to know which conversations actually converted to interest.
The Google review collection piece evolved the same way. If someone's already tapping your card, they've already chosen to engage with you. The moment they're looking at your profile is the moment they're most likely to leave a review. We built the review prompt to load on that tap, sent through Google's verification system, so the reviews you collect are genuine and visible on your business listing.
For clients running teams, we added the ability to export leads as CSV and sync them to other systems. For those wanting to rebrand TapTrust as their own service, we built white label. But all of it orbited the central insight: the card is your system. Everything flows from that single tap.
Why 'just tap it' changed how we talk about the product
I realised that most digital products fail because they ask too much of the user before delivering value. They ask you to understand the premise first. TapTrust doesn't. You tap. Your phone recognises the NFC signal. A profile loads. That's the entire proposition right there. The lead capture happens because the customer is already in a moment of trust. The review collection happens for the same reason.
The plumber wasn't saying 'just tap it' because he wanted the interface to be simple. He was saying it because in his world, friction is money. Every second a customer spends fiddling with your card is a second they're not thinking about booking you. Every step they have to take to leave you a review is a reason not to bother.
That's shaped how we've built every tier of TapTrust since. The Free version gives you one smart profile, unlimited reviews and shares, and a working NFC card right out of the box. No credit card required to start. The Pro tier adds NFC tag writing, so if you want to reprogram your own tags, you can. The Business+ tier adds team management, CRM export, and custom domain. But the core experience, the moment that matters, never changed: tap, load, engage.
The thing nobody told us about business cards
What surprised me most is how many people were still using paper business cards in 2024. I'd expected them to be obsolete. Instead, what we've found is that the paper card isn't the problem. The problem is that once you hand someone your card, you've lost them. They toss it in a drawer. You never know if they read it, never mind if they acted on it.
The NFC card solves that. It's still physical. It still feels like a business card. But when someone taps it, you know they did. You know where they were, and whether they engaged further. You get the lead data, and if they've left a review, you get verified social proof without having to chase them for testimonials.
For freelancers, creatives, networkers, this changes the entire equation of whether networking events are worth their time. For businesses like estate agents and mortgage brokers, it means you're not just handing out cards and hoping. For restaurants, salons, gyms, it's a way to turn a transaction into a review and a lead simultaneously.
That plumber in Manchester probably doesn't remember sending that message. But every time someone taps a TapTrust card, I think about those three words. They remind me that the best product is the one that gets out of the way. The question is: how much friction are you still asking your customers to accept before they can engage with you?
Ready to try TapTrust?
One tap to download. No sign-up wall.