CASE STUDY
Cruisebound began as an idea, supported by a team of product-focused engineers, and grew into a thriving business generating millions of dollars in annual revenue. Today, the Cruisebound MVP is still in production and now has 27,000+ cruise itineraries, from 19 of the top cruise lines. In 2024 Cruisebound received an additional round of investment funding valued at $13 million.
CLIENT FEEDBACK
“Chromedia responsiveness to new technology, and growing as engineers when given the opportunity. The group is also so broadly talented, with experience in everything from code, to product ownership, to UI / UX design. The full package, and great people.”
Tyler Barber – CTO & Co-Founder
About Cruisebound
Cruisebound is out to make booking a cruise online simple, while getting you the best deal. As an online travel agency specializing in cruises, Cruisebound offers an online booking experience for the world’s most popular cruise lines.
PROJECT INFO
The Challenge
With Cruisebound being a startup venture, the first obstacle was to identify high level senior engineers that could hit the ground running to meet the project’s tight timeline and costs within their budget.
The CTO also wanted production and staging to have the exact state (code-wise) and to achieve this, all Pull Request (PR) environments would have dedicated AWS resources (EC2 instances, RDS) and automated tests and manual tests are done in these PR environments, and these environments will be automatically be terminated when PR’s are merged.
Once the scope and requirements were finalized, it became clear that addressing the complexity and meeting Cruisebound’s needs would require a dedicated team — one that Cruisebound did not currently have in place.
Do you have similar challenges with this client?
OUR PROCESS
The Solution
Given that this was an enterprise level MVP of large size and scope managed directly by their CTO, it was decided that Chromedia’s Team Software Staff Augmentation service was the best fit for the task. Chromedia began by identifying engineers that best aligned with the project, starting with a seasoned Product Manager who would lead the technical team and interface with Cruisebound on a full-time basis.
SERVICE
- Team Software Staff Augmentation
Technical Aspects
- Implement MVP Web UI
- Implement Web API
- Implement Web infrastructure on AWS
- Localize entire Cruisebound app and CMS
- Tests using trusted A/B testing practices
12
person team
Backend engineers
“When we started, Tyler and I were discussing whether to use Django (Python) or Spring Boot (Kotlin), and it was decided that Kotlin would be used because of the anticipated traffic load and concurrent operations.”
Allejo Chris Velarde – Lead Senior Developer
Frontend engineers
Project Manager
QA automation engineers
The Result
Bringing it to life.
Chromedia shipped a functional MVP from scratch within six months and the first cruise booking shortly followed. Chromedia designed and tested the new Cruisebound MVP, delivering a web UI, web API, and AWS infrastructure. The team also localized the application and CMS, and built a robust internal admin tool that would help manage the growing number of reservations.
The team completed the project on schedule, showcasing excellent communication and responsiveness to the Cruisebound leadership team, which helped build a strong and positive partnership.
Over a 3-year relationship with Cruisebound, Chromedia has had the privilege of working on one of its most challenging and industry breaking projects to date.
