SetLink — Live Audience Interaction & Transaction Tool
Founded on the back of a decade of live performance across Ireland and the Netherlands, SetLink began as a problem I lived every night on stage: audiences loved the show, but the energy vanished the moment the last note rang out. SetLink, a live web application at setlink.nl, serves as a real-time bridge between musician and audience — a scannable QR opens a shared setlist, requests land on the artist's phone, and the emotional peak of a played request turns audience members into tippers and reviewers. Across three phases each driven by a new skill I was developing — musician's instinct, formal UX research methodology, and full-stack development — the project evolved from a hand-out-cards workaround into a researched prototype and finally into a live product. Key responsibilities included the qualitative research through semi-structured interviews with six musicians alongside hundreds of my own gigs, the design of parallel audience and musician user flows built around the Kama Muta emotional peak, the crafting of the visual identity and the request-tip-review interaction sequence, and the front-end and Convex back-end build with Claude Code that shipped the app live.
Home
The launchpad. A resumable Now Playing card at the top, sets in a horizontal rail underneath, and a chip-filtered song list — Recently played, Favourites, Most played — sitting one thumb from the top.
Play mode
The live view a musician runs on stage. Current song owns the screen, chords big, key stated up front. The queue swipes up when it's needed and stays out of the way when it isn't.
A set
Each set has its own cover art, mood colour, and chord shapes stamped under every song. The colour carries all the way into the playing-now state, so the set a room belongs to is never ambiguous.
Song detail
A song is a hub. Chord chart, lyrics, a video reference and a listen link — the four things a working musician wants when a song is called and they last played it three months ago.
Menu drawer
One place for every set, favourite, and utility. The drawer sorts by recency so the set from last night's gig is at the top of the list on the way to tonight's.
Artist profile
The other half of the platform — what the audience sees when they scan the code on the stand. Next gig, song count, links to reels, all on one card they can share.
Add a song
The choose-a-door sheet. Import from a service, pick up a song someone shared, or create one from a blank card. Everything a musician adds to their library starts here.
Import a playlist
Paste a Spotify or YouTube link and it lands as a set in the playlist's order. Paste an Ultimate Guitar chord sheet and the chords and lyrics fill themselves in — no re-typing what someone else already tabbed.
Create a song
For songs that aren't on any service. Enter artist and title, everything else — poster, chord chart, lyrics — is filled in by the backend so the musician can keep moving.
New set
The first-run flow. Name the set, drop the first song or two, and it's ready to press play. Cover art and mood colour are picked up from what's inside; nothing else needs deciding.
Tuner
A microphone tuner that lives one drawer-tap away, so the phone that already holds the set list can also tune the guitar without pulling out a second app between songs.
