The bird is the word. Tap turns 3.

Steve Jobs inspired many people, many of them (like me) post-mortem. His own inspiration in turn came from Leonardo Da Vinci, who like Steve Jobs paid great attention to details that would never be seen by the ‘user’. Drawing the muscles and then paint a face over it; it feels a lot like Apple caring about nuts and bolts in the Apple II that no-one would ever get to see.

When an early version of Tap was largely done, I still didn’t have a name for the company. I had a little ‘incident’ two years prior at my previous employer, where we launched a product in the UK. Only to then realize that what sounds cool in Dutch can be quite revolting in English. So this time, I paid great attention to the task and made sure to check in with native English speakers before launching anything. I had just read Walter Isaacson’s biography on Da Vinci and was greatly inspired by the story of the woodpecker.

Da Vinci kept notebooks with him all the time, and scribbled things in there that kept his mind busy. One such note simply read ‘describe the tongue of a woodpecker’. Leonardo was on to something. As scientists discovered only much later, the woodpecker has a unique tongue that rolls up in its skull which dampens any external impacts. If not for that, it would crush its own skull every time it pecks on a tree. To me, that note is the ultimate display of curiosity and curiosity is why I founded Tap.

The woodpecker, a.k.a. tapper, is why Tap Electric is not called Newt, Solgo or Sparkit. (I have a long list with terrible names.) I tap, you tap, we Tap. The bird is the word.

When you’re just starting out and obsessively thinking about your customer, it’s the perfect time to set out some core principles for your product. Three years later, they still stand.

1. Tap provides a uniform driver experience. Much like getting an Uber, charging your car should not make you think about payment, how to plug in or which app to use. One (button) tap to use them all, regardless of charger brand, operator, country or day of the week.

2. Since everyone carries a display in their pocket, all info should be available at any time – before, during and after charging. We only work with chargers that let drivers track pricing, progress and performance. We warn users about bad pricing and inform them about the expected performance.

3. Give every user the best product you have, not a white-labeled or freemium version of it. It is much nicer to work with product evangelists than with pushy SaaS-salesmen, where every desirable feature always seems one price level away.

4. We do everything we can to drive prices down for drivers. Whether it’s through dynamic pricing that follows spot markets or by directing drivers to the cheapest chargers in the neighborhood. Fixed prices are bad prices, because they punish cheap chargers and make it hard to reward flexibility (a key currency in the energy transition), so our retail tariffs always follow the wholesale tariff set by the charger network operator.