Events did not simply stop. They became something else. Smaller rooms or no rooms. Distance between people who used to stand close. Shared objects that suddenly nobody wanted to share. Queues that could no longer form. An enormous amount of what makes an experience an experience turned out to depend on physical arrangements that were no longer available.
The Cosmic Coaster, which we launched today, is an adaptation to that. Not a product we had been planning that happened to arrive in a strange year. A response to the year.
What actually broke
Kate Swick reads tarot and does astrology, and the traditional version of that work is about as physically dependent as an experience can be.
Two people at a table, close enough to speak quietly. A deck that one person shuffles and the other touches. A queue of people waiting their turn at an event, standing near each other, for an experience that takes as long as it takes. At a party or a venue that means one guest served at a time while everybody else waits.
Every single one of those became a problem. Not a stylistic problem. A practical one.
So the question was not how do we move this online, which is the answer most people reached for and which mostly produced worse versions of the same thing. The question was what is the actual experience here, and which parts of it are the thing itself rather than the way we have always delivered it.
What survives the stripping
The answer, after some honest thinking, was that the reading is the words.
Not the table. Not the deck. Not the queue, which was never a feature. The thing a person gets is a few paragraphs that feel directed at them, arriving at a moment when they are open to it, and leaving them with something to carry.
Everything else is delivery mechanism. And delivery mechanisms can be rebuilt when circumstances demand it, as long as you are honest about which parts are load bearing.
That is the whole insight behind this product. The rest is execution.
The adaptation
A coaster with a QR code on it. A guest is served a drink on it, thinks of a question, scans, and gets a digital tarot card with a few paragraphs of insight and an affirmation. Kate writes the cards. 10 Ton built the thing that delivers them. The tagline is where insight is right under your drink.
Look at what that does to the problems above.
Nobody shares an object. Each guest gets their own, and it is a coaster, which is already a thing venues replace constantly.
No queue, because everybody is served at once. A room of forty people can have the experience simultaneously rather than four of them having it while thirty six wait.
No proximity required. The reading reaches a person at their own table, at whatever distance the room is arranged for.
And it scales to a size that an in person reader never could, which turns out to matter for venues trying to give a diminished room something worth staying for.
The build, and the constraints that shaped it
Everything technical came from imagining one specific situation. A person in a bar, lighting that is bad on purpose, a phone in one hand and a drink in the other, holding a damp piece of card, with about ninety seconds of curiosity.
No app, no signup, no account. Anything that asks a stranger to install something is dead. Anything that asks for an email before it gives them anything is dead. That means giving up the contact capture that most QR code deployments are really built for. We do not know who scanned. We decided that was the right trade rather than a gap to close later, because one friction point is the difference between a guest who scans and a guest who sets the glass back down.
It has to load on bar wifi. Connectivity in venues is genuinely bad, and nothing kills a small moment of delight faster than a spinner. So the delivery is small and static, no heavy framework, nothing that blocks the words from arriving first. This is unglamorous engineering and it is most of the work. Nobody will ever compliment you on it. They will simply not have a bad time.
One screen, read standing up. Three to four paragraphs and an affirmation, and that length is chosen rather than inherited. Shorter reads as a fortune cookie, which undercuts the whole thing. Longer becomes reading, and nobody reads in a bar. The target is something a guest can take in before the drink gets warm and then read out loud to the person across the table, which is the behavior we actually want. The affirmation closes it, so the experience finishes rather than just stopping. You can see the shape on the demo card.
The print is part of the software. A QR code on a coaster is not a QR code on a screen. It gets a ring of condensation on it, sits under a glass, and is read at an angle in a dark room by an unsteady camera. The code needs to be bigger than you think with more quiet space than looks necessary. Things that scanned fine on a monitor failed on an actual wet table, and the only way to learn that is to print them and try.
Why a coaster rather than a table tent. It is already in the guest's hand, because it arrives with the drink. It belongs on the table, so it does not read as advertising. And it stays under the glass for the whole drink instead of being pushed to the edge, which means the guest does not have to decide to engage immediately. The curiosity happens when it happens.
On the QR part specifically
Worth being straight about this. Scanning a code stopped being an unfamiliar gesture this year because menus and ordering went that way, for reasons nobody wanted.
That helped. A year ago the hardest part of this would have been teaching people the motion. But it is not why we built it, and I would be cautious about assuming the habit is permanent. The durable part is not the technology. It is that people enjoy a small unexpected moment with their drink, and venues need something to offer that is not another discount.
What we are not claiming
It is launch day. We have no data on what this does to anybody's revenue, and we would rather find out from venues than guess in public.
What it is for: an upsell attached to a specialty drink, a small gift in a retail space, or something people photograph at an event, which is covered on the events page. The about page covers the idea, the FAQ answers what venues ask first, and partnerships go through contact.
What I took from building it
A lot of businesses spent this year waiting for conditions to return. Some of them are going to be waiting a while.
The more useful move, and the harder one, was to look at what you actually provide and separate it from how you have always provided it. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where an adaptation lives. For a tarot reader the words were the thing and the table was not, which is only obvious once somebody takes the table away.
The constraints did not compromise this product. They designed it. We started with a wet piece of card in a dark room and a stranger with ninety seconds, and what you can scan today is whatever survived that.