Key Takeaways:
- How he dropped development costs to $0 after switching from a $70,000 custom platform
- How one OTA integration led to 75x revenue growth with zero additional labor
- Scaled from one location to two without rebuilding systems, solving complex permit compliance and training 2-5 seasonal staff instantly each summer
Christopher Lynch built an adventure tour business from the ground up. Starting in November 2010, he launched Everyday California as a La Jolla-based ocean adventure company offering guided kayak tours through sea caves, surf lessons, and equipment rentals. But Christopher saw bigger potential. By 2012, he’d expanded into surf-inspired apparel, growing that side of the business into 200+ retail locations across California, including every major airport in the state.
Running dual businesses meant Christopher needed serious operational infrastructure. And in those early days, he knew the scrappy method of storing payment details in Google Calendars wasn’t going to work longterm.
“I was like 25, so we had no idea what we were doing,” he admits. But unlike most young entrepreneurs who’d patch together a quick fix, Christopher took bold action. He invested $70,000 and nearly a year of development time to build a custom booking platform integrated with their Magento website and Lightspeed POS system.
It seemed like the right move until it wasn’t.
When a $70,000 solution still isn’t enough
The custom booking platform technically worked. But maintaining it became a full-time job Christopher didn’t have time for. Every new feature request meant hiring developers. Every bug meant troubleshooting code instead of growing the business.
But the real crisis came from something the custom platform couldn’t handle. That’s capacity management that matched regulatory reality.
Everyday California operates under strict city permits from San Diego that limit tours to 10 kayaks on the water at once. Sounds simple, except each kayak can hold one or two people. Most booking systems could only limit by person count, not equipment. This meant constant overbookings, permit violations, and dealing with angry customers who’d reserved spots they couldn’t actually take.
Meanwhile, Christopher watched competitors accept online bookings and integrate with OTAs like Viator and Expedia. His custom solution couldn’t do either without another expensive development cycle.
Something had to change.
The epiphany
By 2015, Christopher had reached a breaking point. His apparel business was thriving, and friends in the ecommerce world kept asking him the same question, “Why aren’t you on Shopify?” They raved about the platform’s ease of use, its app ecosystem, the way you could just plug in what you needed without custom development.
Christopher wanted that same simplicity for his booking operations. He needed a system that could integrate seamlessly with a Shopify site via a simple button and lightbox without frankensteined custom builds. But more importantly, he needed a platform built by experts who understood online booking software, not developers he had to educate from scratch.
“The goal we were looking to solve was to move away from our own solution and let a team of experts and technologists build the software that we needed,” he explains. He was looking to hand over the technical burden so he could focus on what actually mattered: getting people out on the water, improving SEO, driving marketing, and scaling the business.
His research narrowed down to Xola.
In September 2015, Everyday California launched on Xola. Overnight, the custom platform that cost $70,000 to build was gone and all of the maintenance headaches were fading fast.
He adds, “It let me step away from the tech side, and focus immediately on improving the website from an SEO standpoint, improving marketing, and focusing on everything else in the business not related to building software for booking.”
Then, came the real test.
Could Xola solve the capacity problem that had plagued them for years?
Building a backend that scales
But the real breakthrough came when Xola’s team worked directly with Christopher to solve the capacity nightmare that had plagued them for years.
“The first thing was limiting the capacity and the number of guests that were allowed out on the water, and ours is intricate because we’re allowed 10 kayaks on a tour,” says Christopher. “And 10 kayaks could mean 10 people, or it could mean 20 people. And we were constantly having overbookings, because we were getting so busy. But we weren’t allowed to service those customers, so we were always having to move people around, and we weren’t able to, like, limit capacity in that way.”
Most booking platforms could only limit by person count. Xola built custom logic that managed both. This meant the overbookings stopped. The permit violations ended. The lifeguards got off their backs.
The explosive growth that followed
The second biggest win was the OTA integrations.
“And then number 2, I would say, is the OTAs and the integrations,” Christopher explains. Viator, GetYourGuide, and other platforms suddenly became accessible. “Every time I see one pop up, my sales guy sets a meeting, we call him, we figure out if the platform works for us, if it works for us, we integrate it, we build it in, and we move on.”
In fact, the company saw 75x growth on a single OTA, and it required zero additional labor.
“In July of 2018 we did $450 on Viator,” Christopher recalls. “In July of this year we did $34,000 through the Viator integration.”
The integration meant every Viator booking flowed directly into Xola, updated capacity in real-time, and freed Christopher’s team to focus on the experience, not data entry. “Probably the biggest, I would say, is the Viator integration, honestly. That’s been the biggest, as far as a profit mechanism and the ease of use with that.”
The pattern repeated across every OTA they added. “Every time I see one pop up, my sales guy sets a meeting. We figure out if the platform works for us, if it works for us, we integrate it, we build it in, and we move on. And then, you know, you see random bookings come in, and that’s always helping with revenue.”
Xola even solved a problem Christopher didn’t know he’d had at the time. That’s rapid staff training.
For a seasonal business that quintuples summer capacity, training delays cost real money. Every hour spent teaching new hires a complicated system is an hour not spent answering phones and booking tours. Christopher needed staff who could hit the ground running, especially during the critical Memorial Day to Labor Day window when they’re selling out daily.
His head of customer service, Will, reports that “It’s easy to learn and teach the interface, which I know is huge, because we’ll go from 2 people on the phones this time of year to 4 or 5 people on phones in the middle of summer, so they’re constantly teaching people. So he says, it’s easy to learn, easy to teach, and very responsive customer service when he has questions:
This meant new hires could start taking bookings on day one.
Scaling to a second location without rebuilding the wheel
Opening a second location in Huntington Beach was a calculated risk. Christopher purchased the building outright, but the operational question loomed.
Would he need to rebuild systems, retrain staff, and solve capacity management all over again?
The answer was no. The same Xola backend that handled La Jolla’s strict permit requirements and seasonal surges replicated instantly to Huntington Beach.
Christopher could focus entirely on local marketing, hiring guides, and building community relationships, not wrestling with software.
Xola unlocked true scalability and the ability to expand geographically without expanding operational complexity.
This meant Christopher could be more strategic with his marketing spend.
Were Facebook ads converting?
Was Google driving the right traffic?
He needed data. The Xola App Store integrations gave him exactly that.
Now he could see exactly which campaigns drove bookings, optimize spend across channels, and track ROI. Marketing stopped being a cost center and became a growth engine backed by real data.
And as the App Store keeps expanding? Christopher’s business keeps getting more powerful. “Every time the app store expands, that’s… honestly, probably one of the biggest things that would keep me from leaving Xola.” He explains, “the easier it makes it for me to run my company and integrate different things that I want to do.”
Ten years and counting
After a decade of partnership, Christopher’s assessment is simple,
“It’s [Xola] the entire backend of my adventure operations.”
Christopher isn’t slowing down. With Huntington Beach established, he’s eyeing new revenue streams that leverage Xola’s evolving capabilities.
The broader vision? Keep letting Xola handle the technical backend while he focuses on what he does best. That’s getting people out on the water and building a brand that spans adventure tourism and retail.
After ten years, the relationship has evolved from vendor to true partner.
That’s the mark of a real partnership when you stop fixing problems and start building the future together.
