People are sometimes surprised to learn that we still run tours.
The assumption is that once you start building technology for tourism operators, the natural next step is to leave the field behind. Trade the early starts and the sand in your gear for a desk, a roadmap, and a clean view of the industry from above. It would certainly be simpler. We chose not to, and the longer we do this, the more certain I am that it was the right call.
We still guide. We still get up before the light, check the forecast one more time than we need to, and watch the same stretch of coast change colour while a group of strangers slowly turns into a group of people having one of the best days of their year. We do it because we love it. But we also do it because it keeps us honest in a way nothing else can.
Two worlds, and we did not want to give up either
Software is where we started. Both of us came from it, and in many ways building Proudback is a return home as much as a new venture. Chris holds a PhD in artificial intelligence and has built and sold a software business before, so the technical side is not a detour for us. It is the language we grew up speaking professionally.
But there is another language we never wanted to lose, and it is the one you only learn out on country. There is a particular kind of grounding that comes from being back in nature with no screen between you and the place, the sort of reset that no amount of good work at a desk can replicate. We have always felt it, and the more time we spent building software, the more clearly we understood that we did not want a life that asked us to choose between the two.
So we stopped choosing. Proudback is our attempt to hold both worlds at once: the rigour and possibility of technology, and the honesty of actually being out there. We get to bring what we know about software to an industry we love, and we get to share the places that ground us with the people who come looking for exactly that feeling. It turns out the two worlds were never really in conflict. They make each other better.
You cannot understand a business you have never run
It is easy to have opinions about tourism from the outside. The industry looks photogenic and straightforward: beautiful places, happy guests, a steady stream of bookings. Anyone who has actually run a tour knows the truth is messier and far more human.
You know what it feels like to watch the weather turn the morning of a fully booked departure. You know the quiet maths of a shoulder season, the cost of a no-show, the particular stress of a group that booked the wrong experience for their fitness or their expectations. You know that the photo everyone loves was the easy part, and that the real work happened in the dozen small decisions nobody sees.
That knowledge is not something you can pick up from a case study. You earn it by carrying it. And it changes completely how you treat the people you are trying to help.
It keeps our feet in the same sand
When we sit down with another operator, we are not arriving as consultants with a framework and a slide deck. We are arriving as people who were out on the water, or up the range, or deep in the bush that same week, dealing with the same season, the same guests, the same uncertainty.
That shared ground matters more than any credential. It means we are not guessing at the pressures a tourism business feels. We are feeling them too. When an operator describes a problem, we recognise it, because we have almost certainly lived our own version of it. And when we suggest a way through, it is grounded in the reality of actually having to make it work on a Tuesday in the off-season, not just on a whiteboard.
Staying in the field is the difference between marketing a place and knowing it. You cannot fake the second one, and guests can always tell.
The places deserve more than a stranger's version
Western Australia is not a backdrop. The people who come here are chasing something specific and often hard to put into words: the scale of it, the silence, the particular way the light behaves at the edges of the day. If you have stood in those places, you understand what is actually being sold. If you have only seen them in someone else's photos, you are working from a copy.
We help operators share their experiences, and we take that responsibility seriously precisely because we know these experiences from the inside. We are not translating a brochure. We are helping someone communicate a thing we ourselves find genuinely worth communicating. That changes the tone of everything, from the words we choose to the images we put front and centre.
Honesty is a competitive advantage
There is a quieter, more practical reason we stay close to the work. Running tours keeps us connected to what is real, and real is increasingly rare.
Every season puts fresh, true imagery in our hands, captured on actual departures rather than staged or borrowed. It keeps our instincts current about what guests respond to and what falls flat. And it means that every tool we build, every decision we make about how an operator should present themselves, is pressure-tested against our own business first. We do not ask anyone to run a workflow we would not run ourselves, because in most cases we already are.
That is the whole point. We are not standing outside the industry offering advice. We are inside it, on the same side of the table, with the same things to lose and the same days worth getting right.
So we still run tours. We intend to keep running them for as long as we are doing this work. It is how we stay close to the places, the guests, and the businesses we care about, and it is the reason the help we offer actually fits. If that sounds like the kind of partner you would rather work with, we would love to hear from you.