The Secret Tech That Makes Customers Addicted to Brands: AI + NFC

Manav: Ishita Agarwal is the founder and CEO of The Tap, a game-changing platform turning everyday products into interactive, gamified brand experiences. Today on the show we have Ishita Agarwal — The Tap is a gamified membership experience that lives on your mobile device. Ishita, can you explain what problem you're solving at The Tap?

Ishita: Yeah, absolutely. We're solving a couple of different problems, but the main one is: when you think about commerce from the consumer's perspective, the experience feels pretty broken. There's a crazy statistic that today, in every single category, there are six times as many brands as there were just five years ago. Competition has gotten that intense. But the crazier thing is, the customer still picked your product over fifty others essentially claiming to do the same thing. So that person didn't just buy the product or its benefits — they bought into your brand, your ethos, your mission. Something about your brand actually resonated with them.

But today, the way brands engage with customers post-purchase is basically limited to email, SMS, retargeting, and maybe your website. One of the earliest insights we had when founding the company was that there's really only one moment when customers are excited to engage with the brands they buy from — and it's not in their inbox, their social feed, or on your website. It's when they're actually using your product.

So we wanted to build a new way for brands to engage customers in that moment and bring them into the brand experience they've created. What The Tap does, at the core, is put smart stickers on products. These stickers are tappable — it feels like Apple Pay. When a customer taps it, it launches a web-based portal, no app download required. That portal has different modules — tutorials, branded games, polls, community walls, lots of ways to meaningfully bring the customer into your brand — and you can refresh those modules monthly, quarterly, whatever cadence makes sense. As customers go through the modules, they earn points, which they can redeem for merch or other rewards on their next order. It's one platform, a membership experience that helps customers feel like they're still part of the brand and can engage with it interactively, instead of it being a one-way conversation from brand to customer, which is how it works today.

Manav: That's a great idea. I've launched a few e-commerce companies myself, and the cost of acquiring a customer is incredibly high.

Ishita: Yeah, and then re-engaging them through email newsletters is getting oversaturated too — how many newsletters can someone realistically subscribe to?

Manav: Right. Walk me through the actual journey — how does someone engage with the tap? Do they scan a code, how does it work?

Ishita: Let's start with what the experience looks like, forgetting the physical tag for a second. However you get into it, it's a web application — it feels like an app, but it lives in a browser, so no downloads required, though it still feels app-like once you're in it. You get onboarded, and we tell you: every month, every quarter, whatever the cadence is for that brand, you'll see a fresh set of challenges here. For a supplement brand, that might be little brain-training challenges or games. For a beauty brand, it might be something more playful. You might have polls — "what should we launch next, what should we name our next product" — or community walls where people can see what others in that community are saying.

The idea, when you're building a community, is that there needs to be one foundation you're building it on — and the beautiful thing about brands is that everyone who buys your product is, by definition, already part of a community, because they've bought into whatever foundation your brand represents. We just want to be the platform that builds on top of that foundation, bringing people in and letting them engage more meaningfully with brands they already care about.

Now, to your actual question — how do people access the experience without an app download? There are essentially three levels, from easiest to most effective. The easiest is just plugging it into your existing digital channels — email, SMS, or as a membership portal on your website. The issue there is you're limited to your DTC customers, and to however many people actually engage with your emails or texts.

Manav: Yeah.

Ishita: The second level is using inserts — some brands put little QR-code inserts in their packaging. This works great for Amazon sellers, for example: you include an insert inviting people into this exclusive membership experience, and suddenly brands get visibility into who's buying from them even through channels like Amazon or TikTok Shop, while customers get access to the full brand experience instead of feeling like they just bought another anonymous product off Amazon.

But the best experience is putting the actual stickers on products. They're literally just stickers — they can go anywhere on your packaging, so they don't disrupt your supply chain, and they slot into any kitting process with your 3PL or co-packer. What they let customers do is tap, just like Apple Pay. To put the numbers in perspective — brands have tried this with QR codes before, but QR codes on packaging just don't work well; scan rates average 1 to 3% on a good day. Our tap tags have tap rates between 20 and 40% — exponentially higher. That tells us customers do want to engage with the brands they buy from — there just hasn't been a great channel for it until now.

So: digital first, then inserts, but the best results come from putting the sticker directly on the packaging. We've seen it work incredibly well for brands that do it.

Manav: Charlie Munger said, "Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." What I mean is, consumers today are very incentive-driven, tech-savvy, and know the landscape — tools like Honey have made everyone very aware of promo codes; we all look for them now. I think this is a great idea, because —

Ishita: No one wants to scan a QR code, because —

Manav: — we know it's not going to lead to anything worthwhile. But if I knew tapping something would lead to a real experience, not just a promo code but something more, I'd actually be inclined to do it.

Ishita: Right — and just to be clear, you're tapping, not scanning. You're not pulling out your camera. The way it works — I actually have one right here, just a sticker that can go anywhere and be designed however you want, so it blends into your packaging, with whatever call-to-action you want on it. You unlock your phone and tap it, just like Apple Pay, and a little notification pops up that brings you into the experience. It's loading right now, but that's how it works.

Manav: Is it the same technology as when you tap two iPhones together to share something?

Ishita: Yeah, exactly the same technology as Apple Pay. There's an NFC sensor built into the top area of your iPhone. What that sensor does is read the output from nearby NFC-enabled devices. When two phones' NFC sensors get close, the phone recognizes it's trying to receive information. With our stickers, there's a tiny chip embedded in it, encoded with a URL or whatever you're trying to launch when someone taps it. It's actually pretty simple technology — it's been around for decades — it just hasn't really been applied to commerce, partly because the cost was prohibitive for a while. Recently the cost has come down enough that it's genuinely feasible for brands to embed this into their packaging and products.

Manav: I listened to another podcast you did, where you mentioned this originally started as an AR idea. How did that transform into The Tap?

Ishita: The Tap started as a company called Helper — Help AR. I had this vision of building the "how-to" app for everything. If you have a question — your printer breaks down, you get a new coffee machine — I always hated the little manuals you had to read through. I have a background in emerging technologies and I'm a big believer in extended reality — AR and VR. My idea was: what if, anytime something went wrong — my printer's not working — I could just hold my phone up to it, and it would tell me, "This light is blinking, meaning X is wrong, maybe it's jammed, or you need to replace the toner," and then walk me through fixing it visually, overlaid on my camera view — "press this button, open this drawer, remove the jam."

Now imagine doing that for any object in the world. The funny thing is, we actually got the technology to work — we even got a patent for using LLMs to scale the augmented reality piece of it. But I don't think the business model was quite there — who would actually pay for it, that kind of thing didn't fully add up. That said, the core findings from Helper are definitely what got us to where we are with The Tap.

Manav: Interesting — AR is still a bit underserved, I think it's not quite there yet. People would rather just take a screenshot and ask ChatGPT why something isn't working. And I agree — when you buy a printer, and it comes with that little how-to booklet —

Ishita: I hate that. I'd much rather watch a YouTube video than read a manual.

Manav: That's so interesting. What have you learned so far in your journey at The Tap, and how has the business evolved — what kind of customers are you working with now?

Ishita: What have we learned at The Tap? As a founder, I've really learned that patience is a virtue. Something I'm actively working on is being impatient with action but patient with results. We didn't set out to create a new category, but we found ourselves in that position, which is exciting and fun, but it takes time — and I'm a naturally impatient person when it comes to results. I'm learning to take it day by day and accept that things move at the pace they move; we can only control what we can control.

Beyond that, I've learned there's a lot of opportunity when you dig into a space and really try to understand it from the end user's perspective, especially in commerce — there's so much open space for cool innovation that both brands and their customers would genuinely appreciate. That's been exciting, finding little pockets we think we can actually improve through technology, design, and behavioral science.

As for how the company has evolved — when we started, we were still figuring out exactly which problem we were solving. Interestingly, the core product hasn't changed all that much since we pivoted from Helper to The Tap — it's gotten better, obviously, but the core product vision hasn't really shifted. What's constantly changing is how we position it to brands and the market, and exactly how we talk about the value.

I made pretty much every mistake a first-time founder makes, even though I went to business school and probably shouldn't have. You fall into this trap of thinking, "I'm solving twenty problems you don't even know you have, and if I solve all of them, it's going to completely crush it for you." What I've learned is that's too much — brands have so much going on already, and it's a tough market right now. It's fairly basic advice that every entrepreneur hears, but I've genuinely learned that focus is everything. Entrepreneurship, to me now, is more about what you say no to than what you say yes to. Figuring out what to say no to is really the big question.

Manav: There's so much shiny object syndrome these days, especially when you're selling a product — you really have to communicate the value clearly. You'll hear a lot of people say "I get it, I get it," and then they still don't buy. How do you actually convert that understanding into someone buying the product?

I'm personally really excited, because e-commerce is changing so much right now — people are buying a ton on TikTok, TikTok Shop has exploded, and we're seeing the rise of apps like Whatnot, which is going crazy right now — people selling Labubus, reselling sneakers, and it's fun just to watch. They'll sell a $5 or $10 item for $40 or $70 within a minute, with 200 people watching the stream. Live shopping was huge in China for a while, and it took forever for us to catch up, but I think it's finally catching on here.

Ishita: And screen time is climbing overall — even older people are averaging nine to ten hours a day now. But some things stay the same — do you remember Neopets, back in the early 2000s? I feel like Labubu is basically the new Neopets — that same vibe of wanting to collect all the different versions that do different things. I remember as a kid just wanting to collect all the Neopets and build out that little world — it was really fun. It's evolving, but it's fun watching these trends come back in different forms.

Manav: Every decade a toy goes viral like that. The '80s had Cabbage Patch Kids, the '90s had Beanie Babies, the 2000s had Pokémon, the 2010s had Bearbricks, and now it's Labubu. I guess every ten years people rediscover that they love collecting and hoarding things.

Ishita: And there's this thing where, during a financial downturn, people love acquiring products that calm them down — and Labubu, being basically a plush toy, fits right into that.

Manav: That's true. I'm excited to see how e-commerce changes over the next three to five years. I remember hearing Amazon was going to acquire TikTok — I was hoping for that, but it hasn't happened. What other trends have you noticed serving the e-commerce industry?

Ishita: I think the biggest trend brands need to prepare for is AI commerce — conversational commerce showing up in ChatGPT, Perplexity, whichever models people use. Brands are already starting to see traffic or volume coming through these new channels. I think the name of the game over the next three to five years is going to be, first, which brands can even show up in these results, and second, retention — that's where it'll really matter.

AI commerce is dismantling the current marketing funnel. Right now, marketers try to stay top of mind — put out ads and hope that after fourteen or fifteen impressions, someone finally buys. That's very different from a consumer going to ChatGPT and asking, "I'm having trouble sleeping, what should I use to solve that?" and getting back the first five suggestions. If you're not in those first five, you're invisible to that customer — you don't get the option of running ads repeatedly until someone notices you.

So the question becomes: how do you rank in an LLM's answer? And a lot of that comes down to post-purchase retention, reviews, who's talking about you, and zero- and first-party data — data that most brands don't have real access to today, because it hasn't historically been the thing driving growth. I think in the next version of e-commerce, that zero- and first-party data isn't going to be a nice-to-have — it's going to be the difference between the good brands and the best ones, honestly the difference between whether a brand lives or dies. That's a fundamental shift brands are going to have to make. I'm already seeing new companies pop up around this — we used to have SEO agencies, now we have GEO agencies. I think that's only going to become more central to where brands spend their energy.

Manav: That's so true — I've been keeping tabs on a lot of companies in the GEO space. But the issue right now is there are so many LLMs — ChatGPT, Grok, Claude — and none of them are sharing their numbers publicly. There's no "Google Trends for ChatGPT" equivalent yet, so it's still hard to measure whether GEO efforts are actually working. Right now, the only way to check is to manually search for a product in your niche and hope it shows up. But you're absolutely right — brands are going to need to rank in these LLMs just to get noticed.

On the flip side, content is also changing a lot with tools like Sora — AI-generated video. You can make what used to be a $500,000 commercial for around $2,000 now. I personally learn about new brands through Instagram Reels — I used to think Reels was just brain rot and going nowhere, but now I actually enjoy it, because I favorite a lot of educational content and the algorithm just keeps giving me more of it. I'm genuinely learning about interesting products through Reels. What that taught me is young people get their news from Instagram and TikTok now, and there's also this huge "build in public" trend, people sharing authentic behind-the-scenes content of building their company. So yeah, I agree — as a brand owner, it can get overwhelming thinking about everything you need to do.

Ishita: So much going on.

Manav: Right — but I also think people shouldn't lose sight of just making a great product. You can create the best content in the world, but ultimately your product has to market itself too. And I want people to tap the sticker and actually get a great experience.

Ishita: No, I totally agree. On the Reels and TikTok point, none of that is going away — the marketing funnel is just shifting. It's going to be less about the ads that feel like normal ads — on Instagram right now I get an ad every two clicks, and it's kind of annoying. But when I see a real person, familiar or not, actually talking about a product, that lands differently.

What's also shifting is that we're moving from influencer or even micro-influencer-driven marketing to everyday-person marketing. I see people with under a thousand followers — brown girls like me, living in New York — just talking about their day, mentioning something random, and then, "oh, I used this beauty product" or "I take this supplement" or "I'm wearing this outfit today." That authenticity really matters.

But it still comes back to a retention question — how do you get people who've already bought your product to engage with your brand meaningfully, for them and for you? Today, there really isn't a great channel beyond email, SMS, and your website to build that kind of community, or to reward people for talking about your brand. None of that infrastructure really exists yet. So I agree those channels aren't going away — I just think where the value materializes is shifting a lot, and this isn't ten years away, it's happening this year. A lot of brands are actively thinking about how to keep up.

Manav: Let's do something fictional — say this is a can of Coke Zero, and there's a tap tag on it. I tap it and get some kind of experience. What would you pitch Coca-Cola for that experience?

Ishita: Coke Zero and Coca-Cola are such cool brands — they have so much existing content. The beautiful thing is we're not creating anything new with most of these experiences — in fact, our apps are usually up and running within a day or two for a new brand, because we've built internal AI tools that go out and pull content from their website, social channels, YouTube, internal email campaigns, and assemble the experience from what already exists.

So the real question isn't "what's the one experience you'd pitch," it's: with Coca-Cola, you have millions of pieces of content out there, probably millions of possible modules. If you can only show ten to fifteen modules a month without overwhelming your customer, what do you show me versus what do you show you? Because your Instagram feed and mine probably look completely different, our TikTok algorithms feel totally different — so why would our engagement with the brands we care about be identical? It doesn't make sense. The reason you drink Coca-Cola might be completely different from my reason. You might enjoy gamified experiences, and I might be more into community-driven content, wanting to see what other people are doing with it.

So it's a bit of a non-answer to your question, but it's my real answer: there shouldn't be one experience. I wouldn't pitch Coca-Cola a single experience — I'd pitch them on the millions of pieces of content they already have, and an algorithm, which is where we're heading, that learns what each person actually likes to engage with about the brand. We'd build out personas of consumers and show each person what's most relevant and interesting to them, to keep them engaged. That's where this gets really interesting — not one membership experience for everyone, but a personalized experience each consumer has with the brand they're buying from.

Manav: Two things — I really like that you can build an app overnight, that speed is incredible. And I do agree, if a brand asks me to follow their Instagram, I'll just do it, I don't mind — and that might subconsciously show me content a few days later that nudges me to buy again. So I think there's a subconscious effect at play with these kinds of experiences too.

I want to know your daily AI tech stack — you seem like you use a lot of the latest tools.

Ishita: We do — I'll say my CTO is great at that, so I couldn't tell you exactly every model we use, but I know it changes weekly. One week we're using Claude models for a lot of our coding, Cursor, all that. For content categorization — we're never generating new content, that's something we've deliberately taken a stand on, because it's hard for brands to monitor generated content, and the content already exists, so we want to work with what you've already approved. But honestly, every couple of weeks we're testing different models, and given the pace these tools move at, we're constantly switching — we'll get good with one model and then something new comes out from Anthropic, or OpenAI, or Grok, whoever, and we adjust. I genuinely can't give you a fixed answer, because it changes every couple weeks.

Manav: Are you public about The Tap's business model, or is it more of a custom enterprise solution?

Ishita: No, we're very open — I'm a big believer in pricing transparency. It's subscription-based, and depending on how many members you have in your experience, it ranges from around $500 a month up to $8,000 a month. It depends on your member count and whether you want custom modules — if we're building you a fully branded game, that's on the higher end; if you just want the basic app we can generate overnight, that's the $500 tier.

Manav: I love that — this idea can go in so many different directions, it's really boundless, and I think it's genuinely innovative. I've even noticed older people getting tech-savvy with this kind of thing — my mom didn't grow up with a computer, but she knows how to scan and tap and everything now.

Ishita: That's great to hear — yeah, older folks are taking advantage of this stuff too.

Manav: Last question, more of a personal one — I really want to do the Executive MBA program at Stanford. What was the Stanford MBA like for you? What did you enjoy most?

Ishita: Oh man, I think if you ask anyone who's gone through the program, most of us would tell you it's probably the two best years of your life — it truly is. Stanford is a magical place where dreams can come true, and I know that sounds cheesy, but it's genuinely true. Here's how I usually describe it: before Stanford, I hadn't gone to any super fancy schools or had super fancy jobs — good jobs, but not the crazy kind. I'd always wanted to do something important in the world, whatever that ended up being, but when I used to say "I want to change the world," I don't know that I fully believed I could. People around me would be kind but a little dismissive — "oh, that's so nice, what a good aspiration."

At Stanford, when I said I wanted to change the world, everyone around me would look at me and go, "same, me too." I can't fully describe how empowering it is to be surrounded by people who genuinely want to go crush the world. The GSB's motto is "change lives, change organizations, change the world," and that ethos is built into everyone in the program. That's where the magic really comes from — you get access to amazing people, amazing classes, amazing opportunities, but ultimately the magic comes from the people. When you're in a space full of people who make things feel possible that felt impossible before, there's no better place to be. If I could do it again, I absolutely would.

Manav: I actually used to live near the Stanford campus, even though I never went there — I was living in Redwood City, and I'd just hang out at Stanford every day.

Ishita: What was your favorite spot on campus?

Manav: I love to work out, so it was the track and the gym.

Ishita: Which one — they have so many!

Manav: People really need to visit Stanford in person. When I went to Harvard, I was underwhelmed after having already seen Stanford — Stanford is basically its own city.

Ishita: It has its own zip code.

Manav: Exactly — I think it's something like 5,000 or 50,000 acres, I don't even know the exact number, but it's massive.

Ishita: It really is.

Manav: Before we wrap — if there's a brand watching this who wants to learn more about The Tap, how can they reach you?

Ishita: You can always check out our website to learn more — it's thetapp.io, T-A-P-P dot I-O. Or just email me directly, ishita@thetapp.io. Those are probably the two easiest ways to get in touch. For any brands watching — the world is changing, but it's a genuinely exciting time. The more you can lean into the beautifully curated brand you've built, and help your customers feel authentically part of it, the more you're going to win across every channel and platform. We'd love to talk.

Manav: And if you're watching this episode — remember, don't just do what everyone else is doing. You have to innovate and stand out from the herd. I still think this is a genuinely underserved, new form of marketing that brands are going to catch up to, and right now there's still a real novelty factor to it, especially for older audiences — I've personally never tapped a product before, so this feels very new and innovative. NFC technology is really taking off, and thanks to Ishita, more and more brands are going to adopt this and see higher ROI and better results from their marketing. Thank you, Ishita, for building this company, and thank you all for watching — I'll see you in the next episode.

Ishita: Thanks, I'm so glad we got to do this.