The best way to build a successful startup is to solve a problem that disturbs you personally. In my industry, yachting, the charter segment has the fastest progress, but private users still wait for an up-to-date navigation product similar to the ones the car market has. The main idea to help them was to make our product free for end users.
I lost my heart to yachting in 1998. Since ever, I covered more than 10 thousand miles in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. The idea of BoatPilot was born literally there. In 2012, I received my new yacht and had to put it in a marina in bad weather at night. The newest navigator showed outdated data (especially for lighthouses), so I was forced to use a paper pilot book.
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I explored all the major pilots and maps workflows and was shocked how archaic they were. Driving a €5,000 car, you can use a €100 navigator close to perfection. With €3 mln yacht, you have to pay 5-20 thousand for a comfortless navigator and several hundred for outdated maps.
Due to the specific character of sea routes, the marine navigation systems work with another type of equipment – chartplotters with hardware navigation programs. 3 popular apps for mobile devices derived from this software. However, it was designed for war and oil-tank ships, so apps inherited their outdated interfaces and most of their features useless for a private fleet.
The chartplotters updates are extremely slow and maps are not accurate because users are not always able to correct and to add new data. However, each navigation season brings new marinas, lighthouses, and many other objects.
In 2012, we started to design BoatPilot – the market’s first mobile platform that combines navigation, booking, advertising, and communication services for the private and charter yachting. It includes the all-in-one navigation service with augmented reality mode, an application for booking and selling yachts, reserving marinas and searching for fellow passengers, and advertising marketplace.
Making a free product was a bold decision for “luxury” industry but allowed to attract the global yachtsmen community to enhance the maps. With a couple of taps, a user can add any content (comments, photos, charts) to the database in a real-time mode, or check the reliability of the other user’s content.
For yachting, the seamark data are extremely important, so the user’s corrections and updates with photos and comments really matter. The bay you choose for a light anchorage can hide many surprises: uncharted rocks, flooded boats, even a disco noise.
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Users made up to 15 thousand corrections per month, so we reached the full coverage of the Mediterranean with the most accurate databases: more than 3500 marinas against 1800 from the closest competitors. Hundreds of our key geotagging are more accurate than in the systems working for decades and have the detailed descriptions. The community also participates vigorously in the features development process.
The monetization is based on the marketplace with the adverts showing to the yacht passengers. The main feature is a targeting based on users’ interests, demands, and geolocation. We know even when an engine needs to change oil and where a crew can find the nearest service for it.
The app test versions appeared in 2015, and in July 2017, the Android app became public. In the next 3 months, without any significant promotion, more than 35,000 users downloaded it. During the record-breaking 2017 season, bringing also the MVP iOS-version, BoatPilot navigated over 4,700 yachts simultaneously.
We plan to capture 2.5% of the charts market by 2019 due to charts licensing and 1.5% of the advertising market through the geo-targeted adverts sales. In the next 3 years, our project is going to expand into the Caribbean, the US, and Asian markets. All the new technologies like ridesharing, IoT, and augmented reality will appear in the yachting industry very soon, and we want to be a part of the industry evolution.
Written by Dmitry Donskoy, co-founder of BoatPilot;
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