Hannah
Porter-Jones

Darcy is the first AI-native wedding planning platform, taking on a $700B industry that hasn't evolved in decades. Couples currently spend 12.5 working weeks planning their wedding and 74% exceed budget. Darcy's conversational AI agent runs the consultation in natural dialogue and automates the planning pipeline: vendor discovery and outreach, budgeting and payments, guest management, and day-of logistics, while keeping couples in control of every final decision.

Free for consumers; vendors fund the platform across five revenue streams.

Coded and shipped the MVP end-to-end. First British national backed by Project Europe (tied to 20VC); currently raising pre-seed from VCs and angels.

heydarcy.co.uk

Won against 20+ Null Fellows cohort 01 participants.

The Taste Test is a benchmarking framework that operationalises problem-selection taste as a measurable prediction function. Distilled 18 senior thinkers (Thiel, Hamming, Graham, etc.) into structured Rule/Test/Source doctrines and back-tested them against history: paired real Show HN posts and arXiv papers within tight cohorts, anonymised every pitch, and forced each persona-as-LLM-agent to pick which problem they'd back, then scored their judgements against the actual outcomes (GitHub stars, paper citations).

Order-flipped runs and tri-state scoring gave consistency-weighted accuracy across 1,000+ pairs, benchmarked against random, LLM, and crowd baselines. The research powers a ‘taste test’ engine for founders to critique their ideas.

github.com/hannahporterjones/tastetest

Talks and Q&A with Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Max Junestrand.

Built the growth function from zero at an early-stage AI startup. Led the GTM team across sales, marketing, advertising, customer success, and events.

Scaled ARR from $500K to $1M in four months.

Selected from 100+ applicants; judged by senior AI and engineering leaders from HG Capital, Goldman Sachs, Man Group, JPMorgan, Atomico, and a £4M pre-seed-funded AI founder.

Built Wedtech end-to-end in 24 hours with n8n, Replit, Perplexity Sonar Pro, and custom JavaScript validation layers, an automated wedding-planning intelligence system delivering personalised timelines and weekly digests, with curated recommendations projected to save couples 15–20% of their total wedding budget.

Junior Events Producer. Coordinated multi-day, international weddings for ultra-high-net-worth clients.

Per-guest experiences £15K–£100K; total event budgets £7M–£50M.

Work featured in Vogue 8 times.

Events Director. Hands-on across operations and growth; converted in-person event engagement into app sign-ups and feature adoption.

tbc.xyz

Reviewed applications from Oxford-affiliated startups; evaluated market potential, business models, and viability.

Led Oxford's largest all-female society. 5000 members, 45-person team.

Delivered the largest-ever termcard (33 events) and secured a record £100K+ in sponsorship. Partnered with Entrepreneur First, ran 3 hackathons, and led a trip to the EF London office for founder ideation sessions with partners and talent scouts.

Events Director. Oversaw production across 7 days for 3000 attendees and 30 events, full sell-out.

Managed a £2M budget, delivered headline concerts to audiences of 1,000+, and secured sponsorship from angel investors including the owner of Boxpark.

Senior editorial team of the oldest student-run publication in the UK. Managed a team of 60 to deliver the termly publication.

Primary point of contact for Lord and Lady Spencer. Supported gala dinners, shoots, and charity events; managed nightly security and maintenance across private quarters.