Why I Started HTCI

Back in 2015, I was tech lead on a migration project at Royal Caribbean. We were moving their Adobe Experience Manager platform from version 6.2 to 6.4, which sounds like a minor version bump. It was not. Their regular development team could not stop shipping. So we ran parallel. We kept pulling their 6.2 changes into our 6.4 codebase, week after week, until we reached a code freeze and could finally cut over. It was one of the more technically demanding things I had worked on to that point. I did not know it then, but I was learning something that would shape everything I built later. Big systems, under constant pressure, with real consequences for getting it wrong. That is a specific kind of experience. And it turns out, it is exactly what founders need.

What a decade at the enterprise level teaches you After Royal Caribbean I kept going deeper. Adobe Consulting Services. Viacom. I was part of the team that built the headless content system that hydrated BET, MTV, and Paramount Plus. Contextual content fragments, a full headless AEM layer, serving content across multiple platforms simultaneously. Then came create.adobe.com. I was working with Wrecking Ball, B2B through my own company, and we built 12 AEM components in three months. Gave the Adobe Create team a WordPress-like authoring experience inside AEM, so they could spin up creative pages that matched their audience without touching a developer. That content became so valuable that it was ingested by creativecloud.adobe.com. The Discover panel inside Photoshop, inside every Creative Cloud app, for the past five years? That content came from our implementation. I spent over a decade solving problems that had real consequences. That experience does not disappear when you go independent. It is the whole point.

The Royal Caribbean work, specifically Two projects from that time stand out, because they are exactly the kind of problems I still solve today. The first was the dynamic pricing carousel on the homepage. Millions of weekly impressions, all showing the same offer to every visitor. The team had no way to personalize in real time. Any change required a development cycle that took weeks. We architected a solution using Adobe Target that pulled in loyalty tier data from Salesforce, behavioral signals from the current session, and historical booking patterns, then surfaced the right offer for each visitor in real time. Crown and Anchor loyalty members saw one thing. First-time visitors saw another. Price-sensitive searchers saw something else entirely.

The second project was globalization. Royal Caribbean had 40 regional sites, each on its own country-code domain, each managed separately. The SEO authority was fragmented. Content took four to six weeks to propagate from US headquarters to international markets. Brand consistency was running at about 60%. We consolidated everything onto royalcaribbean.com with a content inheritance model in AEM. Global content lived at the root and flowed down. Regional teams could override where it mattered, pricing, legal copy, market-specific offers, without forking the entire template. Translation went from weeks to 48 hours.

GLOBAL LOCALIZATION RESULTS

164% increase in organic search traffic within 12 months. Top 3 rankings for 47 competitive cruise keywords that Royal Caribbean had not ranked for previously. Content propagation time reduced from 4 to 6 weeks down to 48 hours. $1.2M annual reduction in infrastructure costs from consolidating 40 regional sites to one.

These were not small problems. They were complex, expensive, and highly consequential. Getting them right mattered, and getting them wrong would have been visible to millions of people.

Why I started HTCI For a long time, HTCI was a pass-through corporation. I needed it for C2C billing, and that was basically all it was. Then something shifted. AI tools got good enough that non-technical founders could actually build things. Lovable, Replit, Vercel, all of these platforms made it genuinely possible to vibe-code your way to a working prototype. And a lot of people did. The problem is what comes next. I started seeing a pattern. Founders with real ideas, real ambition, real products that people wanted. And codebases that would not survive actual usage. Security gaps nobody had checked. Architectures that worked fine at 50 users and would fall apart at 500. Business logic that had never been stress-tested by someone who understood what stress-testing meant. There are a lot of great creative people trying to get products out there. They just need someone who can read the code and tell them the truth. That is the gap. Over a decade of enterprise work, I had seen what holds up and what does not. I had been on the teams that built things that scaled to millions of users. And I knew exactly what the founders building on AI tools were missing. So HTCI became something real. A consultancy focused on helping founders, solo entrepreneurs, non-technical people who have gotten further than most, turn what they have into something they can actually ship, scale, and stand behind.

What I bring to every engagement I can read code. I can help with strategy and product development. I can sit with a founder, understand their business, and tell them which parts of what they have built are solid and which parts will cost them later. That is not a common combination. Most consultants are either deep on the technical side or deep on the product side. I have been doing both, at the enterprise level, for a long time. The founders I work with are usually not far from something good. They just need someone who has seen enough to know the difference between a small fix and a structural problem, and to help them get to the other side of it. That is what HTCI is for. That is why I built it.

This is what HTCI is built on. Over a decade of enterprise-level experience, now focused entirely on helping founders build products that hold up.

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