TourHub

TourHub

TourHub was founded by touring audio veterans who were tired of the industry running on group chats, handshake deals and unpaid invoices. Hiring a touring crew used to mean Facebook groups, personal networks and reputation by hearsay; payment was a bank transfer with no protection; and excellent crew were invisible outside their own circle.

TourHub replaces that with one platform for crew and the teams that hire them, across Australia. It is preparing to launch at tourhub.io, with more than 2,400 professionals already on the waitlist.

What the platform does

• Find exactly who a show needs. Crew are searchable by discipline — tour and road management, production, stage management, audio, lighting, video, rigging, backline, wardrobe, logistics, merchandising and more — by gear proficiency, and by verified tier.
• Reputation that is earned. Crew climb from Road Rookie to Road Legend as they complete verified contracts, and every profile is reviewed by the TourHub team before it appears in search.
• Paid before the show. A hire becomes a contract, and the crew member’s payment is secured through Stripe before they pack their kit. If something goes wrong, disputes are resolved by TourHub’s team, not left to whoever chases hardest.
• Built for the road. It installs like an app and sends push notifications, because the people using it are rarely at a desk.

The engagement

The work spans both halves of what I do. On the engineering side, that means building the product in Ruby on Rails with Inertia: the marketplace, profiles and verification, contracts and Stripe payments. On the operations side, it means the environments those features travel through: a staging environment that mirrors production closely enough to be trusted, and a production platform people will rely on while they’re on tour.

• Staging that tells the truth. A staging environment is only useful if it behaves like production — same configuration shape, same kind of data, same deploy process. Every change is reviewed there before it ships.
• Money handled carefully. Payments are the part of a marketplace that can’t be approximately right. They get the most testing, the clearest records and the most conservative changes.
• Small, frequent releases. Small changes are easy to reason about, easy to verify and easy to roll back.

The specifics of client work stay with the client. If you’re building a platform that needs both careful engineering and a steady hand on its infrastructure, let’s talk.