OpenProfile Is Live — And It's the Project I've Been Trying to Get Right Since 2024

OpenProfile Is Live

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I filed a provisional patent in November 2024 for something I called "System and Method for Digital Business Cards." The idea was simple: tap a card, get someone's contact info on your phone instantly, no app required. I built it,

called it Tap2Space, put it on Wix, and ran it as a real business for about two years. Over 100 real clients, custom-designed cards, a physical NFC card and keychain fob included. It worked. People paid for it. Some of them are still using the cards today.

But it was a Wix site bolted onto a service, not a platform. Every card was hand-built. There was no dashboard, no self-serve signup, no real backend — just me, a design template, and a queue of client requests. It scaled the way a service business scales, which is to say: it didn't, not without me in the loop on every single card. I'm not pulling any of the old assets forward into this one. The only thing that matters about Tap2Space is that it proves I've been circling this exact idea for two years, not chasing a trend that showed up last month.

This week I launched what that idea actually wanted to be. It's called OpenProfile, it's live at OpenProfile.space, and it's in a quiet 50-person private beta right now.

Yes, It's a .space Domain, and No, I'm Not Mad About It

Every name we tried was taken as a .com. We landed on OpenProfile.space almost by elimination — and then realized it actually fits. This isn't just a digital business card anymore. It's a space you build out: your identity card up top, then whatever you want stacked underneath it. The domain ended up being more accurate than anything we'd originally planned to call it.

What Actually Changed From Tap2Space

The core idea is the same — one link, one QR code, one NFC tap, and someone has your full contact card on their phone with zero app install. Where OpenProfile is genuinely different is everything underneath that.

It's a real platform, not a service. Anyone signs up, builds their own card, and goes live in minutes — no design queue, no me in the loop. We're still tuning the tier structure, but the current shape is: Free gets you one card, just the card itself, no add-on blocks. Pro gets you one card plus most of the blocks. VIP — the top tier — gets you up to three cards with every block unlocked. I'm running three of my own right now: myself under ARIA AI Labs, my partner Todd Colpron at Eliakim Capital, and Adam Silva's consulting practice, and I've already hit the VIP three-card limit on my own account.

It's modular, not fixed. Below your core card, you stack blocks — a link list, a video presentation with its own embedded YouTube player and CTA, an event page, a file locker for PDFs and decks, an image gallery, a sandboxed custom HTML embed for marketing snippets. A digital business card was always the entry point. The actual product is closer to a personal or company landing page you build like Lego blocks — and honestly, for a solo consultant or a small firm, this can function as a full website replacement. If there's demand for it, I'm looking at letting people point their own registered domain directly at their card, so it stops looking like a business card product at all and just becomes their site.

It's already generating real leads. Fifty beta users in, and the Leads dashboard is already tracking real contacts who left their info through a card's Contact Form block — status-tracked from New through Qualified, searchable, exportable to CSV.

And the traffic is real too. Across my own three cards, we're at 129 total views and 98 clicks in the last week alone, a 76% click-through rate. The File Locker block is the single top performer — people are actually opening the PDFs and decks I've attached, not just glancing at the card and leaving.

It solves the boring problem everyone gets wrong. When you share a link-in-bio card on iMessage, WhatsApp, or LinkedIn, most tools show a generic, ugly preview because the crawlers that generate those previews don't run JavaScript. OpenProfile routes every card link through a server-rendered endpoint that detects real bots — Facebook, Slack, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Discord, Google, and the rest — and serves them a proper, branded preview with your name, photo, and colors, while real human visitors get instantly redirected into the actual app. It's invisible when it works, which is exactly the point.

Where the AI Is Actually Going

I'm not bolting AI onto this for the sake of a feature list. One beta feature live right now: point the builder at your LinkedIn profile, drop in your email signature block, or just paste your website link, and it scrapes and infers most of what needs to go into your card's form fields to get you started — no blank-page problem. Next up is a block that puts an AI concierge directly on your card: something that can answer questions on your behalf, or on behalf of your brand or company, when someone lands on your page and you're not there to answer live.

And then there's the one I built purely because I could. Last night I wired up an interface to vdo.ninja — an open-source, Zoom-style video tool a lot of people use with OBS for remote production — as its own block. Now a card can host a live video meeting directly through the tap or scan. Someone scans your NFC card or QR code, and instead of getting a contact page, they can drop straight into a video call with you. I genuinely don't know who needs this yet. I built it because I was in a token-maxing mood and the idea wouldn't leave me alone. It's in there, it's beta, and it works.

I Know There's a Hundred of These

Popl, TapCard, AuraCard — the NFC-tap-digital-business-card space is crowded, and I'm not pretending otherwise. What I haven't seen anyone else do is treat the card as a true modular block system instead of a fixed template with a few toggles. The blocks are where the actual value lives — stack enough of them and you've built something closer to a small, mobile-first website than a business card. There's also a store on the site for the physical NFC hardware itself — Amazon affiliate links for now, keytags and rewritable cards, though I'd like to eventually source our own hardware and do something more distinctive there. And there's a longer-term connection I'm watching to Beacon, a separate wireless business card project of mine — for now OpenProfile stays scoped to NFC and QR, but there's an integration path there worth exploring down the road.

What's Still Rough — Because This Is a Real First Draft, Not a Demo

I'd rather tell you what's not finished than pretend it is. The checkout flow reads live pricing correctly, but we haven't run a real end-to-end paid transaction through it yet. Apple Wallet support is built out conceptually but shelved until an Apple Developer account renewal goes through; Google Wallet is next since it skips that yearly certificate hurdle. And the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy pages are live and wired up, but currently show placeholder copy — real legal language is coming before this leaves beta. That's the honest state of it. Fifty people are using it right now, on real cards, generating real leads, and it's holding up.

Why I'm Proud of This One Specifically

I've built a lot of things. This one's different because I already built it once, watched it work as a real business with real paying clients, and then had to sit with the fact that it couldn't scale past me. Coming back to it now — with a real modular architecture, real self-serve billing, a real CRM underneath the leads, AI doing the tedious parts of card setup, and the patent from 2024 still sitting behind it — feels less like a pivot and more like finishing a sentence I started two years ago.

If you want in on the beta, OpenProfile.space is live. I'll take feedback from anyone willing to actually use it.

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Rich Washburn is a technologist and strategist working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, and capital. He is Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital and CIO of Data Power Supply.