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Hitchbird

A destination-wedding marketplace for Asia—venues, vendors, and inspiration across 19 countries at launch. Built from scratch as founding engineer during Hitchbird’s first year.

Role Founding Engineer / Initial Lead Developer
Domain Wedding Marketplace / Travel / Asia
Focus Platform architecture, AWS infrastructure, vendor marketplace, search and filtering
Hitchbird homepage hero with destination wedding banner, twelve wedding theme inspiration icons, and the start of the country grid
Homepage: destination-wedding hero, themed inspiration, and the country grid couples used to start planning

The Problem

A Fragmented Market

Planning a wedding overseas meant stitching research across blogs, magazines, agencies, and word of mouth—often across languages and currencies. In 2015 there was no central destination-wedding marketplace for Asia. Couples looking at Bali, Phuket, Kyoto, or the Maldives had no single place to discover venues and vendors.

Discovery Without Structure

Couples needed more than a directory. They needed destinations, themed inspiration, searchable vendors by city and category, reviews, and a path for vendors to join and manage their own profiles—across many countries from day one.

Nothing to Build On

The product idea was clear—“TripAdvisor for weddings”—but the platform did not exist. The brief was to ship the first version of that marketplace: public discovery on one side, vendor onboarding and tooling on the other.

Constraints & Considerations

  • Founding Stage — No existing team, codebase, or conventions. Architecture and coding standards had to be defined while shipping.
  • Solo Engineering, Tight Timeline — Effectively one engineer. Choices had to balance speed of shipping against a platform that could scale as the company grew after handoff.
  • Geographic Spread — Vendors, venues, and couples across 19 countries at launch, with multiple languages, currencies, and wedding conventions. The data model had to be country-aware from day one.
  • Content-Heavy, Image-Heavy — Wedding content is overwhelmingly visual. The system needed large image volumes per vendor, consistent sizes across layouts, and pre-resized assets for performance.
  • Hybrid Stack — Marketing and blog content lived on WordPress; the marketplace needed a structured, transactional framework. The two systems had to share a domain cleanly.

Role & Leadership

As founding engineer, I built Hitchbird from an empty repository through MVP launch and into the vendor-facing phase—technical foundation, AWS infrastructure, public site, vendor flows, and the data import pipeline that bootstrapped the pre-launch catalog.

Architecture & Stack

Chose CodeIgniter on PHP with MySQL—familiar, fast to ship, and easy to hand off. Layered Apache Solr for search, a custom theming / layout engine for the public site, and versioned migrations so the schema stayed reproducible across environments.

AWS Infrastructure

Stood up the production stack from scratch: EC2, RDS, S3 for vendor images, CloudFront for delivery, SES for transactional email, and Elastic Beanstalk for staging and production deployments.

Data Model & Vendor Onboarding

Designed the schema for countries, cities, themes, categories, vendors, images, users, and reviews. Built multi-step vendor signup, the vendor dashboard, and public profile pages—so vendors could manage their own presence while couples searched a consistent catalog.

Search & Browse

Wired Solr-backed search with AJAX filtering so couples could refine by theme, location, capacity, and more without full page reloads—plus compare, favorites, and related-vendor recommendations.

Approach & Execution

The build ran in two phases that shared one data model: a public marketplace for couples, then vendor-facing tools and catalog pipelines so the team could grow listings without rewriting the core.

Public Marketplace

Homepage discovery via destination hero, twelve wedding-theme entry points, and a country grid. Country and city pages combined travel context with filtered vendor listings—grid, list, and compare views—so couples could move from inspiration to shortlist without leaving the site.

Vendor Side

Vendor signup, profile management, image uploads with standardized sizes, and review responses. Auth and form protection kept the vendor surface separate from the public site while feeding the same catalog couples browsed.

Catalog Bootstrap

Pre-launch vendors arrived as spreadsheets across categories—venues, photography, planners, and more. CLI import pipelines loaded country data, vendor records, and pre-sized images into S3 so the founding team could reload the catalog cleanly after schema changes.

WordPress Alongside the App

Blog and content pages ran on WordPress under the same domain. Homepage and city pages pulled the blog feed via the WordPress API so editorial content stayed editable without touching the marketplace codebase.

Hitchbird homepage with the wedding-theme selector expanded, showing all 12 wedding theme icons
Theme selector—each icon filtered the catalog into a themed view
Kyoto, Japan city page with sidebar filters, vendor listing, and recommended vendors rail
Kyoto city page: filters, listing views, and recommended vendors

Outcome & Impact

Foundation That Scaled

The MVP launched across 19 countries with a country-aware catalog, vendor onboarding, and search. After my tenure, Hitchbird grew to 5,000+ vendors across dozens of cities and became one of Asia’s largest premium wedding marketplaces in the category.

Funding & Longevity

In 2018 Hitchbird raised a seed round led by Catcha Group. The original CodeIgniter platform ran for years after handoff; the data model survived a later rewrite to Laravel + Nuxt. hitchbird.com is still live.

Clean Handoff

Built over nine months in 2015 (March–November), then handed off before moving on to other ventures—including Jou Sun. Migrations, import pipelines, and documentation made the platform transferable rather than founder-locked.

Japan country page with hero, things-to-do tiles, and vendor listing with sidebar filters
Japan country page—travel context paired with the same vendor listing engine used on city pages
Key Takeaway

Founding-stage platforms are won or lost on the data model. Search, theming, and infrastructure mattered—but Hitchbird could grow across countries because country, city, theme, vendor, and image all went through the same migrations and import path from day one. Keep the abstractions honest, and the company can outgrow your stack.

Skills & Tools

CSS Mobile Responsiveness Performance Optimization Code Review CodeIgniter / PHP Architecture MySQL Database Design AWS Infrastructure (EC2, RDS, S3, SES, Elastic Beanstalk) Apache Solr Search jQuery Frontend WordPress Integration LESS / CSS Preprocessing Responsive Design Database Migrations CLI Data Import Pipelines AJAX-driven Search Vendor Onboarding UX Multi-step Signup Flows Theming / Layout Engine PHPUnit Setup Git / Bitbucket Bootstrap a Startup Platform
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