SailsGoal
Boat buying organizational tools and cost estimators
Every day this week has set a new record for the number of impressions SailsGoal has had on Google, and it's also set several records for clicks! If you ignore a couple outliers, the clear growth trend started a month ago.
This is after about 6 months of very slow growth that looked more like a random walk than a hockey stick. I wish I could point to something specific I did to cause this, but I can't. I've just been steadily building my social media presence and blog content. Maybe it's finally paying off?
I received a DM from a stranger while I was on a boating-related Zoom meetup. He explained that he was in the market to buy a boat and discovered SailsGoal through my Instagram account. He had really great feedback: "My wife and I [...] are trying to get realistic projections on expenses. I found your tool to be user friendly and GREATLY reduced my own Excel work time."
Before now, I'd only received feedback in response to direct requests, mostly from friends and family. It feels really good to know SailsGoal is fulfilling its purpose in real life.
-
1
That's great! There is nothing better than organic user feedback. Does this user fit the persona you were building for? If not, is there any validation you can do to find more people like this user?
-
1
Yes, I think this is exactly the persona I had in mind when I built the service. How to find more people like them is the million dollar question (maybe literally)... I'm still trying to figure out an effective marketing strategy. I suspect most first-time boat buyers are not plugged into the boating community yet, so I don't know how to reach them.
-
I released a public version of the website I've been building! I posted about it on a few social media sites, and got a little bit of interest. A number of people poked around on the site (I designed it so all the key features can be tested out without registering an account), and a few even registered.
It had been a long road to get here, punctuated by several periods where I stopped working on the project -- most notably, right after I bought the boat that inspired the whole thing (boats take up a lot of spare time). But I kept coming back to it because I felt the marine industry needs something like this, and the other innovations I have in mind. The entire boat buying process is stuck in the year 2000 and I aim to fix that.
I was deep into the search for a bigger boat, after having lived aboard my first boat for 7 years. The first time around, I had no idea what I was doing, but this time, I wanted to make a fully informed decision. I created a complex set of spreadsheets to model how much it would cost to own various boats I was interested in, important attributes for comparison, and price reductions. It was unwieldy and inflexible; it was hard to run different cost scenarios.
For my own use, I decided to write some simple scripts that would let me more easily calculate cost estimates. Since I enjoy developing in Node, I thought a simple website would be an expedient way to create a user interface. Then I added the ability to record notes about each boat to further streamline my process.
I thought that if this tool was useful to me, it would probably be useful to other prospective boat buyers as well. It had been a few years since I had tried my hand at starting a business, and this one nicely aligned with my interests, so I decided to give it a go.
Comment