Building Tapko in the Open

I've been building Tapko mostly in silence. Shipping when things felt ready, fixing what broke quietly, keeping the rough edges to myself. That ends today. From here, I'm building Tapko in the open — posting real updates, sharing what's working, and being honest about what isn't.

Where this came from

Before Tapko, I ran a web agency. Projects, clients, deadlines. The work was good. The feedback loop was not.

Every project had the same second half. You'd build something, hand it to the client for review, and wait. Then the emails would start. Screenshots attached to replies with subject lines like “Re: Re: Re: homepage.” Notes that said “this button looks off” with no mention of which page, which device, which state. Half the time the issue described was already fixed in a build the client hadn't refreshed. The other half was three different stakeholders replying to the same thread with contradictory opinions — and no clear path to resolution.

Bug reports lived in email inboxes. Context lived in someone's memory. Fixes got shipped without ever being tied back to the original report. Then the client would ask if the button thing was resolved and nobody could find the thread.

Everything we tried

We tried everything. Loom recordings shared in Slack with a “please watch before we hop on a call.” Notion docs with structured feedback tables that clients never opened. Asana with client guest accounts that confused everyone. Figma comments for things that had nothing to do with Figma.

None of it stuck. Clients don't have bandwidth to learn a new tool for one project. And most tools built for feedback are designed for internal teams talking to each other — not for the agency-client handoff, where one side is technical and the other just wants the website to work.

“The problem wasn't that clients didn't have feedback. It was that there was no frictionless path for that feedback to reach the developer who could act on it.”

The decision to build it

I kept coming back to the same idea: what if clients could just click directly on their live site and leave a note right there? No new tab. No screenshot tool. No “can you describe what you're seeing.” Just click and type.

So I built it. A single script tag. Clients see a subtle widget, click wherever the issue is, leave a comment. The report arrives in your dashboard with the URL, a screenshot of the exact state they saw, the browser, the OS — everything you'd need to reproduce it without a follow-up message.

The first version was just for my own agency. I showed it to a few others. They started using it the same week. So I kept going.

Where things stand today

I'd rather give you a real picture than a polished one, so here it is:

On deck: better annotation tools in the widget, a Jira integration, and a proper API for developers who want to pull feedback programmatically. Those are the three things I hear about most from agencies using it now.

Why I'm telling you this

Because I've been on the receiving end of tools that looked finished and polished and then quietly stopped moving. I'd rather you know exactly where Tapko is, what's coming, and who's behind it — someone who built it to solve a problem they had, not a feature spec they inherited.

If you run a web agency and you have a feedback problem, I want to hear how you're currently handling it. What's broken about the process, what you've tried, what's almost worked. Email me at claudin@tapko.app — I read every message and usually reply the same day.

More updates coming. This is just week one of building out loud.