CASE STUDY 02OWN PRODUCT · SOLE FOUNDER & DESIGNERWEB · iOS · ANDROID · UK

D'ARK

A two-sided digital business card platform for UK small businesses. The business keeps its own card design and gets a real CRM; the person who receives the card gets an app, not a dead-end web page.

LANDING PAGE — THE CARD KEEPS THE BUSINESS'S OWN DESIGN, NOT A TEMPLATE

ROLE

Sole founder · Designer · Frontend

SCOPE

Research, product design, design system, build

TOOLS

Figma, React, TypeScript, Tailwind, React Native

STATUS

Design complete · Frontend in build

01 — THE BRIEF I SET MYSELF

The problem was never the card. It was the follow-through the card was supposed to enable.

Three years of UK conferences and trade shows, and the same thing every time: cards exchanged freely, no reliable way to remember who gave you what, and no follow-up. It wasn't only professional — during a renovation at home I was handed cards by a plumber and a contractor I genuinely wanted to rehire, and lost both.

Design a two-sided product where the business keeps its own brand and gets a real CRM — and the recipient becomes a user of something, not a data point on a lead form.

02 — RESEARCH

Desk research says the category is broken. It doesn't say who feels it.

So I ran my own primary survey of UK business owners and founders — 21 responses so far, closely matching the target profile: solo operators and 2–10 employee businesses across professional services, property, tech and sales.

88%

OF PAPER CARDS BINNED WITHIN A WEEK

5.5m

UK SMALL BUSINESSES, MOSTLY STILL ON PRINT

PRIMARY SURVEY RESPONSES, OWNERS & FOUNDERS

85.7%

NETWORK WITH NEW CONTACTS EVERY MONTH

RESPONDENTS USING A DIGITAL CARD APP

Survey: how respondents share contact details — HOW PEOPLE ACTUALLY SHARE DETAILS — INFORMAL METHODS DOMINATE

Survey: losing track of contacts — 61.9% SOMETIMES LOSE TRACK OF CONTACTS MET AT EVENTS; 14.3% REGULARLY

The finding that changed the product

85.7% network with new contacts at least occasionally each month, but 66.7% exchange a phone number verbally and 38.1% send a LinkedIn request. Not one respondent named a paper card or a digital card app as their primary method. D'ARK doesn't compete with V1CE or HiHello — it competes with doing nothing structured at all.

The persona I designed around

A solo mortgage broker who networks 15+ times a month at referral events, exchanges numbers verbally or over LinkedIn, loses track of who he promised a follow-up to, and has never used a digital card app. Realistic rather than enthusiastic about paying: 47.4% of respondents would pay £5 per seat outright, 42.1% said maybe.

Competitive positioning matrix — MAPPED STRUCTURALLY, NOT FEATURE BY FEATURE — EVERY COMPETITOR SITS IN THE SINGLE-SIDED HALF

V1CE is the strongest UK player — 500,000+ users, a genuine CRM — but it's priced for individual consultants at £49.99 per user per month and is sender-only. Profyle undercuts on price and stops at event analytics. HiHello has the best free tier but is enterprise-first. Blinq is fastest to set up with almost no follow-up workflow. All of them treat the exchange as the end of the interaction.

03 — THE IDEA

Digitise the relationship, not just the card.

Single-sided vs two-sided model — SINGLE-SIDED (EVERY COMPETITOR) VS THE TWO-SIDED MODEL D'ARK IS BUILT ON

04 — DESIGN DECISIONS

Four calls that define the product.

ARCHITECTURE

Two-sided, not sender-only

BUSINESS CRMRECIPIENT APP

DECISION

The recipient gets a first-class app — a searchable wallet of saved cards and one-tap sharing of their own details back, with no form to fill in.

WHY

Every competitor ends the interaction at the exchange. Making the recipient a user is what turns a card into a relationship, and it is the only defensible position left on the map.

BRAND

Upload your card, don't rebuild it

IMAGE UPLOADYEAR 1 SCOPE

DECISION

Businesses upload their existing card design instead of being pushed into a templated contact page.

WHY

SMEs have already paid a designer for that identity. Preserving it removes the biggest reason to abandon onboarding — and a full dynamic card designer is deferred to Year 2 rather than blocking launch.

CONSENT

One-tap opt-out, in the app

UK GDPRPECR

DECISION

Recipients can opt out of any business's messaging at any time, in one tap, from the card itself.

WHY

It is better UX and it is the consent foundation the advertising model needs to be compliant. Designing it in from the start is cheaper than retrofitting a legal basis later.

GOVERNANCE

Ad rules before ad revenue

NO COMPETITOR ADSOWN SURFACE

DECISION

A business's own cardholders never see a same-category competitor's ad; promotional content lives in its own discovery surface, never on top of another business's card.

WHY

The paying side has to trust the platform with their contacts. Governance rules written into the design are what make the offers engine sellable at all.

05 — THE PRODUCT

High-fidelity across web and mobile, now in build.

CARD WALLET, CARD DETAIL WITH PROMOTIONS, AND ACCOUNT SCREENS

Outcome

Pre-revenue and pre-incorporation, design phase complete and frontend development underway. A working mobile prototype is live in Figma; the landing page, pricing and dashboard screens are ready for the Year 1 build.

My role

Sole founder and designer. I ran the primary research and competitor analysis, designed the full product across web and mobile, and am building the frontend while briefing a small remote team on backend and mobile development.

Reflection

I assumed my competition was the other card apps; the survey said otherwise. That changes how the product sells itself — "stop losing contacts," not "better than V1CE." And 21 LinkedIn-sourced responses point a direction; they don't prove fit. Widening that sample comes before I let early enthusiasm harden into assumptions.

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