Growing a travel brand from $2M to $20M+ ARR

Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash

The Challenge 

When new ownership took over Harvest Hosts in 2017, they inherited a mature but technically limited membership product that had been operating for approximately five years. The acquisition caught Quarry’s attention – our team members were actually users of the product when we saw the new owner’s introductory email outlining their vision for growth. Recognizing the technical challenges ahead, we reached out to offer our services.

The organization needed comprehensive technical expertise but wasn’t ready for the overhead of building out multiple internal departments. They required a partner who could provide high-level technical leadership while executing product design, engineering, data, and growth initiatives. 

Most critically, they needed a scalable solution – one that could grow with them through planned acquisitions and ambitious expansion goals. They needed more than just a development team; they needed a true technical partner who could help shape their digital future.

The Solution 

Quarry stepped in as Harvest Hosts’ fractional technology department, essentially becoming their bolt-on product and technology team. While they maintained an in-house product engineering team, we began by redesigning their entire product UIX and provided crucial frontend development support on Laravel. This support continued until their internal team capacity was established enough to handle frontend development independently.

In the role of fractional CTO, we provided crucial system architecture leadership and strategic guidance. 

The marketing ecosystem became our primary focus – we maintained all aspects from backend to frontend, including data engineering and product design, with the marketing department as our key stakeholder. We established robust DevOps processes that accelerated deployment cycles and lowered total cost of ownership through CI/CD pipeline improvements and optimized deployment processes.

Our data engineering team built sophisticated infrastructure that powered marketing and advertising efforts with high-accuracy data. This enabled their advertising teams to optimize spending based on detailed customer journey data – from signups to checkouts, upgrades, and membership conversions. The high volume and accuracy of this data significantly improved their marketing outcomes across all vendor platforms.

Major tests of our partnership came during two significant acquisitions – one in 2021 and another in 2022. The first acquisition required merging both tenants of the acquired product’s user base (members and hosts) into Harvest Hosts’ main product while maintaining the acquired brand as a separate acquisition channel for customers.

The second acquisition in 2023 took a different approach, keeping the brand separate as part of a new portfolio strategy while covertly unifying the backend platform. Both integrations were completed ahead of schedule with no disruption to users.

Our disaster recovery capabilities were proven during two critical incidents. 

During one weekend event, we responded to an attack on vulnerable legacy infrastructure by spawning a new server instance and deploying a fresh marketing architecture within 12 hours. 

In a separate incident involving accidental data loss, we completed a full recovery within just 4 hours, demonstrating the value of our refined DevOps processes and technical expertise.

The Results 

The partnership yielded remarkable results. Harvest Hosts scaled from $2M to over $26M in annual recurring revenue, successfully integrated multiple acquisitions, and established a robust testing culture driving continuous improvement. 

This culture of continuous testing, particularly in marketing, ensured that new optimizations were constantly being implemented and validated. Our DevOps improvements reduced total cost of ownership while maintaining maximum system availability, even during critical incidents.

Beyond the numbers, we succeeded in becoming a truly embedded team within Harvest Hosts. By integrating with their internal tools like Asana, Jira, and Slack, we enabled efficient collaboration across all departments. This deep integration meant that any team member could create tickets or reach out directly for support through their normal workflows – no formal request process needed. 

This highly efficient working relationship continues to drive value today, with Quarry operating as an extension of their organization rather than an external vendor.