Taply
Digital business card platform. NFC, QR, analytics, and teams.
Problem
88% of paper business cards are thrown away in a week. No tracking, no updates, dead channel.
Built
Full-stack SaaS built around NFC+QR sharing, real-time analytics, a team RBAC console, and Stripe billing. Architected and built the entire backend from scratch as co-founder.
<100ms
profile load
4
subscription tiers
11
profile section types
1
enterprise customer live
The build
[Idea]
Taply came out of a real pain. Paper business cards get thrown out within a week. You can't update them. You can't tell if anyone looked at yours. The first version was a weekend hack, an NFC sticker with a URL slug that opened a public profile. It worked in my own network but had no sharing layer. You couldn't tap and have the contact saved to your phone in one motion. That's what 'tap or scan' really meant. Not a fancy QR code, but a single vCard save that just works.
[Framing]
The backend got rebuilt three times before it became Taply v1. Django 5.1 and DRF stayed across all three versions because nothing else handled the relational shape of an editable profile, with eleven section types, version history, and rollback. Redis came in for the read path because re-rendering a profile from Postgres on every tap wasn't going to hit the under-100ms target we'd promised.
[Build]
Stripe was the other big learning. The first integration was rough. Subscriptions, one-time upgrades, webhooks, customer portal, and dunning. We hit every edge case. The first enterprise customer came through the team management console, with bulk CSV onboarding, per-rep analytics, and role-based branding. That feature set was the one that finally got someone to pay.
[Deploy]
We're now iterating on v2 with a drag-and-drop profile builder and a leads inbox that captures who tapped, when, and how often. The analytics layer is the one that closes the loop on the original promise. Knowing if anyone actually looked at your card.
[What's next]
What's next if we keep building. A tier-1 enterprise tier with SAML SSO. UTM-aware links and A/B-tested profile versions for a deeper analytics surface. A public Taply API so other SaaS products can plug into Taply profiles as a primary identity, which is also a route toward a 'Taply as identity provider' positioning.
Stack
9 techs · grouped by layerBackend
- Django
- DRF
- Celery
- JWT/OAuth2
- Stripe
Infrastructure
- AWS
- CI/CD
Data layer
- PostgreSQL
- Redis
Also used
Links
Related writing
5 posts reference Taply- PostgreSQL Part 1: Install, Setup, Creating Tables and CRUD Operations
medium · 7 min read · postgresql · database · sql · crud
- SQL Joins in PostgreSQL: Query Across Multiple Tables and Actually Understand What You Are Asking
medium · 8 min read · postgresql · sql · joins
- Aggregations & Grouping in SQL: The Queries Behind Every Dashboard and Report
medium · 8 min read · postgresql · sql · aggregations
- Your Easy Guide to Design Highly Available Systems With Redis. Part 1
medium · 8 min read · redis · high-availability · cache · distributed
- Step-by-Step Guide to Deploy Redis Cluster in AWS to Achieve High Availability. Part 2
medium · 10 min read · redis · aws · cluster · high-availability