A for-sale-by-owner marketplace for the water — sailing yachts, motor yachts, superyachts, sportfishers, commercial ships and workboats — that lets owners sell direct and keep the 8–10% a yacht broker would take. Built on the proven WholeVoyage / WholeTech engine, so it runs at near-zero marginal cost.
1. Executive summary
HulloShips is a for-sale-by-owner marketplace built specifically for vessels — every kind, on every water. It lets owners list recreational and commercial craft — sailing yachts, motor yachts, catamarans, trawlers, sportfishers, superyachts, plus cargo ships, tankers, fishing vessels, tugs, ferries, supply boats and barges — and connect directly with buyers, paying a small flat fee instead of an 8–10% yacht-broker commission. The platform is live, functional, and built on the WholeVoyage / WholeTech network engine, so it runs at near-zero marginal cost. Revenue comes from flat listing upgrades, featured placement, partner referral fees (surveyors, insurance, finance, transport, escrow), and dealer/broker subscriptions. The defensible asset is the HulloShips Atlas — a 20-database maritime trust layer and the HulloValue estimator — which no FSBO competitor can match.
2. The problem
Selling a boat the traditional way means handing a yacht broker 8–10% of the sale — $50,000 on a $500,000 sportfisher, and hundreds of thousands on a superyacht. That cost is baked into the asking price, so buyers overpay and sellers under-net. Meanwhile the existing portals are broker-MLS only: YachtWorld, Boat Trader and boats.com are fed by brokerage listing feeds, so an owner often cannot list FSBO and keep the commission — they're funnelled to a broker to even appear. And the whole industry stops at pleasure craft: commercial vessels are badly underserved. An owner trying to sell a tug, a fishing boat, a ferry or a small cargo ship has almost nowhere structured to do it, and falls back to brokers, trade boards or Facebook.
3. The solution
HulloShips removes the broker from the middle and gives owners professional, vessel-native listing tools for free, wrapped in a trust layer built for the water:
- List direct, keep the commission — flat fee from $0, never a percentage of the sale. The 8–10% stays with the seller.
- Recreational and commercial — the FSBO platform that also covers cargo ships, tankers, fishing vessels, tugs, ferries, supply boats and barges, not just yachts.
- Built for the water — native vessel fields: length, beam, draft, year, builder, model, hull (GRP / steel / aluminium / wood / carbon / ferro), engine make & hours, fuel, flag, condition and survey status — not house fields bolted onto a boat.
- The Atlas trust layer — surveyors, marinas, shipyards, finance, transport and the HulloValue estimator built in, so buyers and sellers can do diligence without leaving the platform.
- Private by default — buyers reach owners through HulloShips; contact details stay hidden until the owner chooses to share them.
4. Market
The global recreational boating market is large — measured in the tens of billions of dollars in annual new and used sales, on top of an installed base of tens of millions of registered boats (the US alone counts roughly 12 million registered recreational vessels, an industry-estimate figure). Brokerage is highly fragmented across thousands of independent yacht brokers and dealers, and the used-boat resale flow that runs through them every year is where the 8–10% commission bites hardest. Demand is concentrated in cruising grounds HulloShips covers from day one: Florida & the Gulf, the US Northeast, the West Coast & PNW, the Great Lakes, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, plus Northern Europe, the UK & Ireland, Asia-Pacific, Australia & NZ and the Middle East. Layered on top is the commercial-vessel market — workboats, fishing fleets, ferries and small cargo — which the recreational portals ignore entirely. (Figures above are defensible round industry estimates, not precise internal data.)
5. Product (live today)
- Marketplace — home, browse with live filters (category, subtype, region, price, length, hull, year, sort), rich listing pages with a photo gallery, spec bar, feature list, map and a private inquiry form.
- Self-serve listing wizard — a 3-step flow (vessel → details & photos → you & plan) with drag-and-drop photo upload and live USD formatting. Owners go live the same day after a quick quality review.
- Directory — a sortable worksheet of every listing.
- Buyer / seller guide — the trust layer that walks an owner through pricing, survey and closing, and a buyer through diligence.
- Moderation + email backend — every submission and inquiry is reviewed and emailed to the operator.
- The Atlas — 20 maritime databases — marinas, harbours, lighthouses, shipyards, tide stations, yacht builders, brokers, charter fleets, famous ships and more, all free.
- HulloValue estimator — a value tool that gives any vessel a defensible market range, the foundation of a paid market-data product later.
6. How we get listings (supply)
A marketplace lives or dies on inventory. HulloShips fills the supply side five ways, cheapest-first:
- Seed inventory (done). The site launches with realistic, photographed listings across sail, power, super and commercial so it never looks empty — buyers and sellers both arrive to a working market.
- Free listings as the wedge. Listing is free, so there is zero friction for an owner to try HulloShips. We actively invite owners already advertising in Facebook boat groups, sailing forums and classifieds — "list it here too, free, keep your commission."
- Dealers & brokers (bulk, Pro tier). We let dealers and brokers bulk-list under a paid Pro tier. They have inventory today and want more exposure — a fast way to go from dozens to thousands of listings, including commercial fleets the portals won't carry.
- Network cross-promotion. HulloShips is the flagship of the WholeVoyage maritime network and is surfaced across the ~190-site WholeTech network; we promote "list your vessel" across relevant sites at no media cost.
- Programmatic region×type SEO that recruits sellers. Pages like "sell your sailboat in Florida" and "sell your trawler in the PNW" rank for owner-intent searches and funnel them straight into the free listing wizard.
Target: from seed inventory to 200+ real listings in 90 days, primarily via free owner sign-ups plus one or two dealer/broker partners seeding bulk inventory.
7. How we get customers (demand)
Buyers and sellers are reached through owned, earned and network channels — keeping paid acquisition near zero:
- SEO is the engine. Programmatic region×type landing pages + the buyer/seller guide + Schema.org markup + IndexNow give HulloShips hundreds of ranking entry points for "[type] for sale in [region]" and "how to sell a boat without a broker" searches.
- AI discoverability (Agents-First). llms.txt, AGENTS.md and a clean public API so AI assistants cite and link HulloShips when asked where to buy or sell a boat or ship — a channel the legacy portals ignore.
- Where boat buyers already are. Auto-posting new listings to social — Facebook Pages, boating and commercial-marine groups — the places that actually drive vessel demand.
- Network traffic. Warm travel, charter and relocation audiences from the WholeVoyage / WholeTech sites flow straight into HulloShips.
- Owned audience. Email capture + a weekly "new & reduced vessels" digest brings buyers back, and saved-search alerts re-engage them automatically.
- The Atlas as a moat. 20 maritime databases plus HulloValue pull in diligence and reference searches no competitor ranks for, then convert that traffic into the marketplace.
8. How we make sure listing entry works
The listing-entry path is the heart of the product, so it's engineered to be reliable and verified end-to-end:
- Simple wizard. Three short steps (vessel → details & photos → you & plan) with validation, drag-and-drop photo upload, and live USD formatting.
- Real backend. The form posts (multipart) to an API that saves the listing, stores the photos, and creates a pending record — owner contact kept private, stored outside the web root.
- Instant operator alert. Every submission emails the operator over HTTPS (DigitalOcean blocks SMTP, so a transactional HTTPS sender is used) with all details and a one-click review link.
- Moderation → live. The admin tool approves (optionally featured) or rejects; approved vessels appear immediately in search, the directory and the API.
- Verified. The full path — submit a vessel with a photo → it lands in the pending queue with the image saved → approve → it goes live → buyer inquiry emails the owner — is tested end-to-end and works.
Nothing is lost even if email ever fails: every listing and inquiry is also written to durable storage and visible in the admin dashboard.
9. Business model & revenue
HulloShips never takes a percentage of a sale. Revenue is flat, transparent, and stacks:
- Listing plans — Free ($0), Plus ($79), Premium ($199, featured). Flat fees, not a cut of the sale.
- Visibility upsells — feature a vessel, bump it to the top of search and category pages.
- Partner referrals — marine surveyors, insurance, finance, transport/shipping and escrow: a fee per qualified introduction on a deal.
- Dealer / broker subscriptions — monthly recurring for bulk listings + branded storefronts (the durable MRR line, and the path to commercial-fleet inventory).
- Affiliate + data — tasteful affiliate links on guide and Atlas pages, plus HulloValue Pro: a paid valuation / market-data product built on the estimator and listing flow.
10. Illustrative financial projection (Year 1)
Conservative working assumptions in USD — the network's near-zero marginal cost means most revenue drops to contribution.
| Line | Assumption | Year 1 |
|---|
| Paid listings (Plus / Premium) | ~22/mo blended $120 | $31,680 |
| Featured / bump upsells | ~18/mo × $40 | $8,640 |
| Partner referral fees | ~16 closed intros × $750 | $12,000 |
| Dealer / broker subscriptions | 6 accounts × ~$150/mo (ramp) | $8,000 |
| Affiliate, HulloValue Pro & misc | traffic-driven | $6,000 |
| Total Year-1 revenue | conservative | ~$66,000 |
A deliberately conservative ramp landing in the low six figures by run-rate. Costs are minimal: domain, server share, and the transactional email sender — all already covered by the existing network. Upside comes from the dealer/broker line, commercial-fleet inventory, and partner referrals scaling with listing volume. A single avoided $500K-boat commission ($50,000) is itself most of this table — the value to sellers dwarfs what HulloShips charges.
11. Competition & our edge
- YachtWorld / Boat Trader / boats.com — the dominant portals, but broker-MLS fed; an owner generally can't list FSBO and keep the commission, and they stop at pleasure craft. HulloShips is owner-first and carries commercial vessels.
- Facebook Marketplace & boat groups — where many owners list today, but chaotic, no vessel-native search, no specs, no trust layer. HulloShips is the structured home for that supply.
- TheYachtMarket / Apollo Duck — broader and more owner-tolerant, but thin on trust, diligence and commercial coverage. HulloShips wraps every listing in the Atlas and HulloValue.
Our moat: owner-first FSBO + a true commercial-vessel vertical + the 20-database Atlas and HulloValue trust layer + an AI-built content/SEO engine that produces ranking inventory at a scale a staffed competitor can't match — all on a network that runs it at near-zero marginal cost.
12. Roadmap
- Now (live): marketplace, 3-step listing wizard, moderation, email, directory, buyer/seller guide, seed inventory, the 20-database Atlas and HulloValue estimator.
- 0–90 days: payments (Stripe), seller accounts, programmatic region×type pages + sitemap/IndexNow, social auto-posting, email capture. Goal: 200+ listings.
- 3–6 months: map search, saved searches + alerts, the dealer/broker Pro tier, the partner referral layer (surveyors, finance, transport, escrow), and multilingual coverage for Mediterranean and Asia-Pacific buyers.
- 6–12 months: HulloValue Pro market-data product, a verified-listing badge + escrow referral, sea-trial / survey scheduling, and featured-fleet deals with dealers and commercial sellers.
The full prioritized prompt library lives at /prompts/; the dated near-term to-do at /act/.
13. Risks & mitigations
- Cold-start / thin inventory → seed listings + free tier + dealer/broker partners to reach critical mass fast.
- Broker-feed dominance (the portals) → compete on the one thing they can't offer an owner — keeping the commission — plus commercial vessels and the Atlas trust layer.
- Trust / fraud → moderation on every listing, private contact routing, surveyor referrals, and a future verified-listing badge with escrow.
- Channel dependence (Google) → diversify into AI citation (Agents-First), social, network traffic and an owned email audience.
- High-value transaction risk → we inform, never advise; every vessel is steered to a qualified marine surveyor and proper escrow before close.