Skipper My Boat
Building and integrating a digital platform system to accommodate a global marketplace.
Client
Skipper My Boat
Purpose
“The airbnb of boats” - Global boat renting platform
Project
Tasked to design, develop, and support a scalable system that enables painless boat rental bookings for hosts, guests, and captains around the world
Skipper My Boat is an online marketplace that connects people who want to rent boats to boat owners, charter operators and captains. Users can browse, compare and book boats. For boat owners, it’s the easiest way to monetise their expensive assets.
We worked with SkipperMyBoat to build a solution that heavily focuses on technology to change the fragmented $51 billion boat charter industry and make rentals easy and online. Users can browse and compare boats based on location, price, number of people, type of activity they want to do and user experiences, with a heavy focus on usability the platform also supports social sign in, multiple payment options, wishlists, multi-user bookings and more tools to bring the guests and hosts together.
Our detailed planning resulted in a polished website, mobile app, admin panel and API for both guests and hosts.
Our Solution
After successfully launching an MVP, we took the time to split up the project into 3 dedicated code bases. After building the multi-purpose API, a great deal of time was spent focusing on UX and SEO to keep users engaged on the platform. Building the main site in React meant we also could quickly release mobile apps in React Native. If you’re interested in us revitalising your website ready for the next generation of web please read more.
Branding
Skipper my boat uses a strikingly pink accent across the brand which revitalises the overall look and feel against a mellow blue which is used as our secondary colour. The logo was formed as a ship’s steering wheel to directly correlate to the usage of the platform is to use these boats from consumer to host.
Business Consultancy
We helped SkipperMyBoat secure £320,000 in funding by helping them build a proof-of-concept for potential investors to complement their pitch deck and our market research. Once the runway was assigned, we established good process management and best practices like organisational, security, and internal communication systems. We also wrote a lot of documentation to help the company scale with future hires and give us a clear strategy for moving forward.
SkipperMyBoat now offers over 35,000 boats across the global in over 100 different countries.
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UX and Web Design
UX (User Experience) and web design for the website involve creating an optimal user interface and experience for the SkipperMyBoat app. This includes designing the visual elements, layout, navigation, and functionality of the website with the user's needs and goals in mind. Our team implemented lots of up-sell opportunities in this stage such as add-ons to a booking like a chef or a diving tour to make each groups tour more appealing. We also built useful features like group splitting of payments where you can invite your friends to share in paying for the booking. Or ability to split payments across three months as many bookings would be around $5,000-$25,000. Lots of money went into multiple rounds of UX refinement as we knew a system of this size needed to be planned out perfectly. The end result was a clear UX strategy for each user type (guest, host, captain, service-provider) and over 150 Adobe XD pages designed for web and mobile.
The specific focus was on initial making it as simple and as friendly as possible for potential customers to visit the platform, get insperation on where they want to go, find a boat they love, and be convinced to book.
Web Development
Our web development team worked closely to the design and UX guides to understand deliver exactly what our client expected. We started by developing a comprehensive web development strategy that included the creation of a custom web platform built on a MERN (Mongo.db, Express, React, Node.js) stack. We designed a user-friendly interface that allowed boat owners to easily list their boats and renters to easily search for and book available boats. We also included a secure payment gateway to facilitate seamless transactions between boat owners and renters. Our team also implemented advanced search filters, rating and review systems, and real-time notifications to ensure that the platform was easy to use for both boat owners and renters. We also performed extensive testing to ensure that the platform was fully functional, secure, and scalable.
API Development
At the same time as building the Skipper frontend, our API development team created a comprehensive RESTful API, with advanced security measures, that seamlessly integrated with both the mobile app and web platform. The API facilitated smooth communication and real-time updates on boat availability, pricing, and other important details, resulting in a successful launch of SkipperMyBoat’s boat rental platform and increased user engagement and bookings. Our team continued to provide ongoing maintenance and updates to ensure the API remains secure and up-to-date. Perhaps the most exciting part was our API within one year stored over 30,000 boats across 6,000 hosts powered from multiple backend agriators. We built a platform called NightSync which nightly updated tens of thousands of records from multiple databases with locations of our boats, daily price and travel options. The hardest part of the system was building a simple search system like Airbnb, except imagine if each airbnb property could get up and move to another location each night. We had to factor different country laws, nightly pricing, fuel, crew costs, cleaning days and may other settings into the summary of each preview card on the search page.
App Development
Following the successful launch of the website, our app developers created a custom mobile app for both iOS and Android platforms using React Native, with a user-friendly interface and a secure payment gateway. The app included a simple oAuth login, great search filters, real-time push-notifications with full ApplePay/GooglePay integration allowing renters to have piece of mind and host to mass manage their fleet across the world.
We first launched to iOS as in the market research phase it identified iOS users had a bigger holiday spend on premium bookings. Later came Android, both features all the same web functionality as we used a borderless webframe with behind the scenes authentication. This essentially allowed people to view the mobile-version of the website without realising, resulting in a much quicker update and roll out time as well as less overall development time needed.
Admin Panel
Finally, we built a private platform for the SkipperMyBoat team to oversee hundreds of thousands of data points. We created a comprehensive admin panel that allowed staff to easily manage the platform, including features such as user management, rental booking management, booking, captain management, and boat listing management. The admin panel also included real-time analytics to track platform performance and user behaviour, allowing SkipperMyBoat to make data-driven decisions to optimise their platform. It also allowed us to preview the public platform from the perspective of our users/hosts so we could easily debug any issues people faced without needing expensive investigation meetings with users.
SkipperMyBoat now offers over 35,000 boats across the global in over 100 different countries.
The end result
We worked with SkipperMyBoat over three year to not only build their technology but be a strategy tech partner to help them grow their business and secure funding. We worked along-side their core team for thousands of hours. The benefits SkipperMyBoat saw in us was the ability to integrate us quickly into their team without expensive overheads and long-terms contracts for one or two employees with fixed or narrow knowledge/skillsets. We worked on a monthly rolling agile sprints and had the advantage of providing the most relevant person from our team to work on each codebase when it suited most. How can we help you? You’re paying for the over of decade business consultancy, SaaS and start up experience we have to quickly propel your business forward like we did for SkipperMyBoat. Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you build a large-scale architecture platform for your company.