Hidden Palms Ranch · Guest Photo Delivery System

The ride ends. The relationship shouldn't.

A guest experience system that turns a photo handoff into a complete post-visit touchpoint: reviews, tips, and return bookings built in.

5
Visit types supported
3
Downstream actions per visit
2
Interfaces built
0
Third-party automation tools
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The Problem

AirDrop delivers the photos.
It doesn't deliver anything else.

Hidden Palms Ranch guides photograph every visit. After the ride, they'd airdrop photos to iPhone guests or email them to Android users. Both methods work. Both end the same way: photos received, relationship over.

There was no branded follow-up. No path to a review. No way for guests to tip their guide after they'd already separated. No prompt to book again before the memory faded. The ranch was delivering a great product and leaving every downstream outcome to chance.

The opportunity wasn't in the photo delivery. It was in everything that should happen after the last photo lands.

The Old Flow
Guide photographs the visit
Works
AirDrop to iPhone / email to Android
Works
Guest receives photos
Works
Guest tips the guide
No path
Guest leaves a review
No prompt
Guest books another visit
No hook
The System

Four touchpoints. One continuous experience.

A guide-facing upload interface and a guest-facing landing page, connected by a QR code and followed by a personalized email.

01
Guide Uploads
Password-protected iOS app. Guide selects the party, uploads photos and video, confirms marketing permission. QR code appears on success.
›
02
Guest Scans
Guide shows the QR code. Guest scans. No app download. No login. The branded landing page loads within seconds of the upload completing.
›
03
Guest Engages
Photos, guide tip links, a review prompt, and a visit-type-aware return booking path, all on one page, personalized to their specific visit.
›
04
Email Follows
Guest emails themselves a link. A personalized MailerSend template arrives with their party name, visit type, a 30-day download link, and a soft return-booking prompt.

The Guest Experience

What a guest sees after a Private Trail Ride.

Minutes after returning from the trail, the guide shows a QR code. The guest scans it. Everything below loads on their phone.

Photo Gallery
Hidden Palms Ranch guest photo page: branded hero and photo grid
Branded header, date stamp, and the full photo grid. Tap any photo to open it in a lightbox and save directly to your camera roll.
Guide Tips
Guest page guide tip card with Venmo and Cash App links
Guide headshots, names, and direct links to their Venmo and Cash App. Tips happen while the moment is still fresh. Shown on mobile only. By the time guests open this on a desktop, that moment has passed.
Save Your Photos
Guest page email-yourself card with photo grid detail
One tap sends a personalized email with a link back to the page and a 30-day download link for all photos, or just the ones the guest hearted as favorites. Also the guest's first entry into the ranch email list. Favorites marked on the guest page surface in the management dashboard for quick review.
Come Back and See Us
Guest page rebook section for a trail ride visit
Trail Ride guests see the NEIGHborhood Riding Club (monthly membership) and a Team Outing waitlist form. The booking button links directly to FareHarbor for their specific visit type.
On Desktop: same page, different experience
Guest photo page desktop layout: four-column photo grid

The email and tip cards are hidden on desktop using CSS :has(), targeting the inner component rather than adding a class. By the time a guest opens this on a laptop, both moments have passed. The desktop version serves the photos and the return path.

The Product Thinking

Each visit type earns a different path.

A guest who just rode a private trail for the first time needs a different next step than a returning member or a corporate group. The rebook section adapts to who's reading it.

Visit Type Immediate Rebook CTA
↗ links go direct to FareHarbor		 Downstream Offers Reasoning
Private Trail Ride Rebook same visit NEIGHborhood Club Team Outing waitlist They came alone or as a small group. They want to come back the same way, but the club and team offering expand the relationship.
Group Trail Ride Rebook same visit NEIGHborhood Club Team Outing waitlist Same logic as private. Direct rebook link personalized to their exact visit type, not a generic booking page.
Horse Experience No direct rebook link Private Trail Ride Group Trail Ride This is the ranch's loss-leader for younger guests. The natural next step is the trail: parents see their child's excitement and want to ride themselves.
NEIGHborhood Club See you next month Team Outing waitlist Returning members already love the ranch. The Team Outing prompt is less a pitch and more a quiet aside to someone who is already on the inside: something they or someone they know might want.
Team Outing No direct rebook link Group Trail Ride Private Trail Ride Corporate groups experienced the ranch as a team. Their individual next step is a personal trail visit. The tip card is hidden for this visit type (not the right context).

The visit type is captured in the guide form, stored in Airtable, pulled at render time, and drives five separate rendering branches. No manual segmentation. The page just knows who it's talking to.

The Guide Experience

Built for a phone, on the trail.

Guide upload app: form and ready state
Guide upload app: mid-upload progress with the horse on the progress bar
Guide upload app: QR complete state
One-tap access

Password protected, remembered by iCloud Keychain

A 30-day HMAC-signed cookie means guides log in once and the app opens every time. No friction at the end of a visit when guests are waiting.

Upload flow

State machine, not scattered event handlers

A single appState variable drives everything: list, ready, uploading, complete, error. A horse emoji rides the progress bar. The QR code is hidden until every file succeeds. Partial failures go to a retry state: no starting over, just the failed files retry.

Marketing permission

Required field. No default. No submit without it.

The guide must actively select yes or no. A guest's photos only enter the marketing library if permission was explicitly granted. Both client-side validation and server-side enforcement.

Today's dashboard

All submissions visible at the top of the page

After each upload, a dashboard refreshes above the form. Party name, visit type, submission time, QR code and link, so guides can hand the QR to late arrivals without resubmitting.

Field-tested resilience

It recovers from what actually happens on a ranch

Tested against hard Safari exits mid-upload, the guide switching to another app (a text message, a call), and full network loss from the phone being put in airplane mode. The upload resumes and the state is preserved. A stall indicator fires after 15 seconds of no progress so the guide knows the upload is still running on a slow connection.

Guide management

Headshots, Venmo, and Cash App managed in Airtable

Every guide's photo, name, Venmo handle, and Cash App handle lives in a single Airtable record. Adding a new guide or updating a link is a one-row edit with no code change required. The guest page pulls the current data on every load.

Phase 2
In development

The photos don't stop being useful after the guest downloads them.

Every guest who approves marketing use has photos sitting in Cloudflare R2, tagged to their visit type and guide. Right now that library is unstructured. Phase 2 puts it in front of the right person.

The media dashboard was originally built for the Make.com / Dropbox pipeline. It has to be rebuilt for the current system. The schema, the R2 key structure, and the permission field are already in place. The dashboard itself just needs to be rewired.

In version 1.5, horses and other animals in the photos will be auto-tagged using a vision AI API so the social media team always gets the names right.

Phase 2 media dashboard management view
Late-stage testing, approaching launch
End-to-end pipeline verified on real iPhone. 29-file upload tested including .mov and .png. Guest page and email delivery confirmed.
15+
Build sessions
1
Full rebuild
0
Automation chains
The Builder

A non-engineer who builds like the goal was always the outcome.

"The rehearsals, the arguments, the a/b tests, the last-minute fixes: that's the team's job. By the time the lights go down, none of it should be visible. The work disappears into the moment. That is how you know it was done right."

Nearly 15 years running audio operations at the Orlando Magic meant managing systems under load, coordinating across departments with competing priorities, and delivering for clients who all needed something different and none of them spoke the same language. Before that, 7 years at Northland Church in multi-site broadcast production. Before that, Walt Disney World dinner shows, where a five-piece band, Broadway-caliber performers, and the stage manager could all hear the same show completely differently.

What transferred: the understanding that the audience is there for the experience, not the backstage context. That framing has driven every product decision in this build.

The Rebuild Story

The first version was an automation-stitched prototype: Fillout, Make.com, Dropbox, Twilio chained together. It worked in testing. Field testing revealed it crashed Safari on iPhone when a guide tried to upload a full ride's worth of photos. The automation chain couldn't handle it.

Rather than patch around the failure, the whole approach was rethought. The rebuild became a purpose-built application: more secure, capable of handling video, and no longer dependent on chained third-party automation. The state machine upload flow, the HMAC-signed proxy URLs, the retry logic: all of it came from testing against what actually happens in the field.

The Approach

No traditional engineering background. AI as the development partner from the first line of code. Claude and Claude Code for architecture and implementation. The work is understanding the real problem, choosing the right tools and approach, testing against real conditions, and being willing to start over when the evidence requires it.

Stack
PHP Cloudflare R2 Airtable MailerSend Uppy MailerLite FareHarbor GitHub Claude Code
Also building
Custom Crew Gear Hidden Palms Ranch Website

Custom Crew Gear: bulk apparel platform for production crews; architecture and brand kit complete, launching when AI-assisted print-file generation reaches production quality. Hidden Palms Ranch Website: originally built on Squarespace in 2015; being rebuilt using an AI-native development approach with a long-tail content strategy to capture guests who are not explicitly searching for "horseback riding" but discovering it through broader outdoor experience searches, and optimized for LLM-based discovery alongside traditional search.

Background

Experience

Lead Audio Engineer (A1) 2010 – 2025
Orlando Magic / Kia Center

Technical ownership of audio operations for a 20,000-seat NBA arena: systems, staff, vendors, and cross-departmental coordination across 200+ annual events.

Senior Audio Engineer 2003 – 2010
Northland Church

FOH mix for a 3,330-seat facility; live broadcast to multi-site simulcast venues nationwide.

Technical Director 2000 – 2003
Orangewood Presbyterian Church

$150K systems installation from planning through completion; technical team built from scratch.

Level 2 Audio Technician 1997 – 2000
Walt Disney World

Stack

PHP Cloudflare R2 Airtable API HTML / CSS / JS React GitHub Shopify MailerSend Claude Code Make.com

Education

Full Sail University

Associate Degree, Recording Arts · 1995

Community

PA of the Day

Founder. 350,000+ followers across Facebook and Instagram. Professional audio community, active since 2015.

Full Resume