Building Riden: our first year
How we went from a Google Sheet in Bangkok to a production platform handling real bookings. Everything we learned — and everything we got wrong.
Riden started as a Google Sheet. In February 2025, I was running ops for a boutique DMC in Bangkok — 80 to 120 bookings a month, 4 operators, and a fifteen-tab spreadsheet that crashed if more than two people opened it. I had two consecutive weekends where bookings got double-dispatched because our WhatsApp coordination broke down. That was the moment.
I asked Sasi — a friend from university who had been writing backend code at a Bangkok fintech — if he'd prototype something over a weekend. What we built that weekend wasn't good. But it was good enough to show three other DMCs what a portal could feel like. All three asked to pilot it.
Our first 'launch' was a LINE chatbot. We used LINE's Messaging API to let operators accept bookings directly from chat. That single decision — meeting operators in LINE instead of asking them to learn a new app — turned out to be the biggest product decision we'd make. It's still the core of Riden today.
We got a lot wrong. We over-indexed on feature breadth in the first three months when we should have been polishing the booking-creation flow. We shipped a driver app in month four that no driver downloaded because they were already happy being dispatched through their operator. We spent six weeks on a PDF invoice generator when what DMCs actually wanted was a CSV export. We learned to ship smaller, faster, and closer to what real pilot users showed us in person.
The thing that surprised us most: the quality of trust in Thai tourism is extraordinary, and it's also the single biggest obstacle to tooling. Operators run on reputation, not contracts. Drivers run on their operator's word. Any tool that doesn't respect those relationships gets rejected — even if it's technically 'better.' Every design decision we make now starts with: does this strengthen the existing trust graph, or does it try to replace it?
A year in, Riden is processing real bookings, dispatching real operators, and — most importantly — the Thai DMCs we work with tell us their ops feel lighter. That's the outcome we measure against. The rest follows from there.