Tap list sync for breweries

The idea

Taprooms rotate beers weekly, and every rotation means retyping the same list into the website, the TV behind the bar, and a printed menu, usually by whoever closes on Sunday. The surfaces drift: the TV says a beer is on, the website says it kicked, a customer orders it, and the bartender apologises. It’s a small daily tax that staff visibly resent.

Untappd for Business solves this at $99/mo bundled with a discovery network most small breweries don’t want to pay for. The wedge is doing only the sync, at a quarter of the price: one editor, three outputs, and a kicked toggle that strikes a beer through everywhere in one second. The realtime TV update is the demo that closes the sale.

Who pays

The buyer is the taproom manager or owner of a small independent brewery, of which there are 9,000+ in the US alone, most too small for Untappd’s pricing. $25/mo is a non-decision against the staff hours saved. Distribution: brewery owner forums and the Brewers Association community, plus walking into taprooms with a tablet, since the product demos in 60 seconds.

MVP scope

• Tap editor with drag-to-reorder, ABV/IBU fields, pour prices, and a kicked toggle
• Website embed via script tag plus a public JSON endpoint
• Fullscreen realtime TV display URL requiring no login
• Print-ready PDF menu via print stylesheet
• Beer library for one-click re-tapping of returning beers
• Skip for v1: Untappd or POS integrations, multi-venue accounts, customer-facing beer pages, keg-level inventory, food menus

Build TapBoard, a single-source tap list manager for small breweries. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, realtime subscriptions, magic-link auth). Take payment with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: the brewery maintains one list of taps in an editor: beer name, style, ABV, IBU, description, pour sizes with prices, and a kicked toggle. Taps are drag-to-reorder. That one list drives three surfaces. First, a website embed (script tag rendering a styled list, plus a JSON endpoint for custom sites). Second, a fullscreen TV URL the taproom opens on any smart TV or Chromecast browser: dark layout, large type, auto-scaling so 8 or 24 taps both fill the screen. Third, a print view generating a clean PDF menu via the browser print dialog with a proper print stylesheet.

Pages: tap editor with inline editing and drag handles, beer library (previously entered beers for one-click re-tapping), display settings (logo, colours, columns), embed and TV URL instructions, billing.

Implementation details: the TV page subscribes to Supabase realtime so toggling kicked strikes the beer through everywhere within a second with no refresh; keep the TV URL a long unguessable token, no login, because taproom TVs can't handle auth.

Pricing: $25/mo flat, 30-day trial. One venue per account in v1.