Tapglyph

Roughly 90% of museum-commissioned apps see usage rates below 3% of visitors. The reason is not the content. It's the download barrier. Visitors won't install an application for a single afternoon, and institutions can't justify spending tens of thousands of euros on something almost nobody uses. The content that could make a visit richer just sits there, locked behind an app store.

Tapglyph removes the barrier. An NFC tag placed next to an exhibit lets visitors tap their phone and access audio guides, historical context, and multimedia content instantly in their mobile browser. No app, no account, no friction. I'm the sole designer, developer, and strategist behind the product.

The process started with the riskiest assumption: would museums see this as solving a problem they already recognised, or as adding a new one? I ran discovery interviews with five curators across three institutions and watched twenty visitors interact with existing digital offerings. What I kept hearing was that institutions wanted better visitor engagement but had stopped believing apps could deliver it. NFC-to-browser landed in a category they could already make sense of.

The business model took more work than the product itself. Museums move slowly and are cautious with new vendors. The pricing structure ended up as tiered monthly subscriptions, from 150 to 1,200 euros per month based on exhibit count. Monthly billing rather than annual, because monthly costs clear smaller approval thresholds at most institutions. I modelled the unit economics carefully. Digital delivery runs at 95% plus gross margins. Breakeven sits at 18 mid-tier partners. That number exists because I needed to know it before making an honest case to anyone.

I built less than I could have and talked to people more than I wanted to. Before writing a line of product code, I validated the core assumption through curator interviews. Before setting a price, I tested it against real budget figures from museum annual reports. The prototype exists to support pilot conversations, not to be a finished product.

The technical side is straightforward. The web app uses the Web NFC API for tag reading on Android, with a URL-based fallback for iOS. Museum staff manage content through a simple CMS with no technical knowledge required. NFC tags are passive and cheap, which keeps the hardware economics clean. Most of the work was on the business side.

Tapglyph has a working prototype and a value proposition that has held up in every conversation I've had with museum professionals. It's pre-revenue. I'm not going to frame it otherwise.

The next step is a live pilot. The first deployment will answer questions I can't answer sitting at a desk: what's the actual tap rate in a real museum, how do visitors respond to tap-activated content, and what does the feedback look like when curators have real data to look at.

The longer-term goal is a self-serve platform where any cultural institution can set up a tap experience without needing me to do it for them. That's what the pricing model is sized around. That's the business I'm building toward.