In this episode, we speak with Craig Battin, the Director of Marketing at Boatbound. 

Based in San Francisco, Boatbound (www.boatbound.co) is the fully insured ‘pier-to-pier’ boat rental marketplace with the goal of making boating more accessible. Boatbound provides over 13 million registered boat owners a way to offset ownership costs and generate incremental income by renting their boats to pre-screened, qualified renters looking to create new experiences on the water.

For more information about Boatbound: https://boatbound.co/

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Transcript:

Kevin:            Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a Podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking about collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

                        So what are we going to talk about today? Well, we’re going to talk about boats. What? Boats? Well, not directly. We’re going to talk about renting boats in the collaborative economy and specifically we’re going to talk about a concept called Boatbound. What is Boatbound? Well, Boatbound is a peer-to-peer marketplace where the consumer can rent a boat from an owner for a fraction of the cost of what it would cost to own a boat. So it’s a great deal for them. In addition, it allows boat owners to offset some of their cost by taking their unused time on their boat and renting it out to end-users. So it’s a really cool concept, very popular, growing rapidly. And I’m excited to share this conversation with you. So let’s dive in.

 

                        How are you doing, Craig?

 

Craig:             I’m doing well, Kevin. Thanks for chatting with me.

 

Kevin:            Of course, it’s our pleasure to have you on here and we look forward to learning more about you and Boatbound. So tell me about Boatbound. In a nutshell, what does Boatbound do?

 

Craig:             Sure. So Boatbound is a peer-to-peer marketplace for boat rentals. So it enables owners of very expensive and difficult to maintain boats to rent them out to prescreened qualified renters and make money to cover their cost of boat ownership.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. When did the business start?

 

Craig:             The business launched just over a year and a half ago, so last summer, about midsummer.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So how did you get involved in the business?

 

Craig:             So I actually came on board Boatbound in March of this year. And actually prior to joining Boatbound, I was at New York City heading up business development and content strategy with the focus on growth at another marketplace for gadgets called Grand St. and that was actually sold to Etsy earlier this year. And then before that, I founded a hardware company in the shaving space. And that’s actually how I found Grand St. and how they found me. And prior to getting into hardware, I was actually an investment banker for about five and a half years. And oddly enough, a lot of those analytical skills and data analysis skills that I picked up in banking have actually come in very handy sitting in a growth role here at Boatbound. So it’s kind of come full circle.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. I also have a financing/accounting background and I agree. When you’re a digital marketer, you need very good analytic skills and very good tracking skills. So I think that is a core skillset.

 

Craig:             Sure. All the Excel key commands are really coming in very handy these days.

 

Kevin:            Definitely. So, on a personal basis, what are some of the marketplaces that you use and like? And tell us why you like them.

 

Craig:             Of course. Well, I mean I’ll say there are so many marketplaces out there now. It’s actually hard to keep track of them. It seems like new marketplaces are popping up every week and it’s really neat to see that and see how these marketplaces are enabling people to turn things they love and their passions into things that can actually make them money and in a lot of cases make ownership of certain assets make a lot more sense. It’s certainly the case with Boatbound. But I love Airbnb. The affordability relative to hotel rooms really, it suits my work travel budget. When we go around launching at different cities, we’re in a very tight budget being a startup. And so Airbnb is huge for us. And obviously living in San Francisco, I’m a huge user of both Uber and Lyft to get around.

 

                        I also love – I used TaskRabbit quite a bit when I lived in the city and lesser now but we use them for a lot of our market launches in other cities because we are such a lean marketing team. Having those extra hands for our on-ground activation campaigns was really, really useful. So TaskRabbit is great. Obviously coming from a hardware background, I used Indiegogo for my product and have backed a number of Kickstarter projects of other friends. I think the funding marketplaces are really crucial to that maker movement. So yeah, those are, I would say, the ones that stick out.

 

Kevin:            So in terms of marketplaces in general, the landscape that we’re all involved in, what are the big trends that you see kind of coming in on the horizon? And what’s kind of right in your face right now?

 

Craig:             You know, that’s a good question. I think obviously – as I said before, it seems like there are marketplaces popping up for everything and they always seem to become more and more focused on a lot of these niche communities which is a great thing to see. I’m really curious to see how it all plays out obviously. Funding is often an issue for some of these marketplaces. So I’m curious to see how that plays out in terms of which marketplaces get traction. I think beyond that we are constantly looking at what other marketplaces, in particular the bigger marketplaces out there, are doing to really activate and then engage and then retain their community of users because there’s – you cannot succeed as a marketplace if you don’t have a strong community behind you.

 

Kevin:            For sure.

 

Craig:             As we really want to scale our community, it’s becoming more and more important. If we do things right, it will become a growth engine kind of on its own. That word of mouth especially in the boating community is crucial to surviving. And I think Lyft is really doing some cool things on the community front and so is Airbnb. So right now, that’s really what we’re keeping an eye on and it’s really interesting.

 

Kevin:            For sure. One of the things that I always gravitate towards as a marketer is that there’s a lot of emphasis on underlying technology right now. People can spend a fortune building out their underlying core technology. But at the end of the day, converting leads in terms of users and both marketplace participants really needs to be emphasized. And the really good marketing companies are doing this well. But I see a lot of brands that kind of have the thought process of if we build it, they will come. And that just doesn’t work.

 

Craig:             Sure, sure. That’s a really good point. One of the – we obviously – I think probably most marketplaces out there learn this the hard way and have since really figured it out. The underlying technology can really be a huge burden if it’s not built for both sides of your marketplace and that is not an easy thing to do. In our case, a lot of our supply, in this case owners of boats, they tend to be older and in some cases are not as tech savvy as the younger side of our marketplace which is really the renter base and building a product that could be used by both sides was a big challenge and I think we figured that out. We’re constantly refining it but building something –

 

                        Like you said building something and assuming that people will just come, I think, is a big mistake. The other thing too is even when your technology is really good, in a lot of cases, you do have to educate one or both sides of the market in ways to use it and leverage that technology. And that does involve a lot of handholding and is very customer service intensive. And I think that’s something that maybe a lot of the newer marketplaces probably are blindsided by and so it’s always – I would say that’s one of the biggest things that I would pay attention to if I were building a marketplace from scratch right now.

 

Kevin:            For sure. If you will get traffic analytics tools, you’ll actually see that the big marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb spend as much on advertising to acquire marketplace vendors as they do actual end-user customers. So it’s fascinating to see that kind of unfold.

 

Craig:             Sure, sure.

 

Kevin:            In terms of Boatbound, what are some of the wins that are going on right now? What are the big things that are kind of you guys are proud of in terms of your early wins that you have?

 

Craig:             Yeah. I think a lot is going very well here. I would say that we are easily by many, many multiples the largest peer-to-peer boat rental marketplace in existence now and certainly in the US relative to our competitors. Year over year, we’ve grown many times over and I’ve seen the emergence of a lot of really awesome, what we call super owners which have really started to kind of fuel us as we kind of kick in to the next gear. And I think that those people are going to be really, really valuable and important to us as we continue to grow. So that’s really amazing to see.

 

                        I think we’ve achieved awareness in a big way in a lot of our key markets. We launched five new markets this summer and got amazing traction in almost all of them and learned a lot of really interesting things then learned a number of ways in which each of those markets differs from one another. Obviously, there’s always room for growth. And managing explosive growth, it’s a great problem to have. But when you have to manage that on both sides of a marketplace, it has been a huge challenge for us and continues to be. And I’m sure if you ask some of the other companies in the P-to-P space they would say the same thing. So we’re always trying to manage that and not let one side or the other get too far out ahead. It’s something that we deal with all the time.

 

Kevin:            What are some of the challenges or hurdles you’ve had to deal with in the last 12 months?

 

Craig:             That’s a good question. Obviously, ironing out some kinks in our technology, we had to do that. We’ve had to navigate some really powerful but really tricky partnerships with our biggest partners. The Brunswick Corporation, they’re the largest manufacturer of recreational watercrafts and engines in the space as well as the American Sailing Association and Boat U.S. which provides our on the water and towing support. They’re really, really fantastic companies. They have a combined presence in the marine space that I think outweighs anything else. They are big companies and the boating industry historically has been a very sleepy one. And so figuring out how to work well with those partners to really get the most value from them and in turn provide value to them has taken a lot of work and a lot of effort. And we’ve accomplished a lot but we’re always learning and thinking of ways that we can do that better.

 

Kevin:            And I think you really have solved the fundamental problem in the marketplace where a lot of people want the experience of being on a boat, having a boating experience without the capital expenditure of having one.

 

Craig:             Sure.

 

Kevin:            You’ve eliminated the big thing of your happiest day as a boat owner is the day you buy it and the day you sell it.

 

Craig:             That’s right. That’s right. And I think the other effect that we weren’t sure how this will play out. But now that we’ve got about a year and a half of data, it’s really amazing to see the kind of new – I won’t call them new communities but new cohorts of boaters that we’ve managed to surface. I would say we’ve succeeded in getting younger people to go boating more often and that is something that the industry as a whole has been trying to crack for years and years. If you dig back through trade journals 5 even 10 years ago, they were still talking about ways to activate younger boaters because the population of boat owners was aging and getting older. And that was obviously a huge, huge red flag for the manufacturing piece of the industry. And it’s still an issue but looking at our data, we’re really hopeful that we’re going to add value to the broader industry by bringing those younger people back into a sport that had started to feel kind of out of reach. That’s really, really exciting.

 

Kevin:            So what was biggest kind of aha or big learning that you guys had in the last 12 months? Anything that sticks out?

 

Craig:             I’m not entirely sure. I would say marketplaces are really hard and potentially scary things to build. But if you build them right and put people first, good things really can happen, I think. We really realized a while ago that we needed to figure out ways to achieve liquidity and really make things as fluid as possible and kind of always keep users moving on both sides of the marketplace. And that’s really hard to do when you’re a one-sided business and it’s even harder to do when you have two sides that rely on each other. And getting to a point where that is sort of the steady state case is something that we’ve been building towards for a long time. And I think we’re not all the way there but getting very close. And so I would say that has been really the number one priority.

 

Kevin:            So we’re rounding out the end of 2014 and probably you’ve started planning for 2015. What does the horizon look like for Boatbound?

 

Craig:             Sure. So I think we’ll continue to – now that we’re out of what is traditional boating season in most of our markets, although we still continue to have quite a bit of activity here in San Francisco as the weather permits, we are really focusing very heavily on Florida that has a year round market for us and is really starting to build momentum now. I think we will focus quite a bit on Florida for the rest of this year and into the early part of next year. Next year is going to be a year where we’re really trying to go deep, even deeper in the community as I mentioned before. People in the boating world love meeting other boaters on the water. They love sharing the sport and the pastime with other people even newcomers. And so figuring out more ways to really turn this community that we’ve built into something that contributes value back to the broader industry is going to be a big focus for us.

 

Geographically, I think we’ve got seven major markets fully active now. I think we will selectively choose some of our secondary markets to open up and go after a lot of – one of the coolest things we’ve seen is that a lot of smaller markets have actually grown organically and really just come out of the woodwork on their own which I think speaks to the quality of our platform. We’re obviously doing something right when that happens but we’ll continue to keep an eye on the data and figure out other smaller markets. There are so many different boating communities across the country that we have yet to tap into. So we’ll look for unique opportunities there. That I think is what 2015 holds for us.

 

Kevin:            In terms of marketing, what are some of your more viral campaigns that you guys have done that really where you saw an increase in subscriber growth? Or what were some of the more successful campaigns that you guys did this last year?

 

Craig:             Well, the most recent was we actually pulled a PR stunt during the World Series which was received with mixed reviews depending on who you ask but that was –actually for us, it was great from a metric standpoint. I think we never want to go off brand and be cast in a negative light. I think that elevating a body of water, that’s one of our favorites in our home market and we have a huge priority for that. And beyond that, we’ve seen a lot of success both on search and a number of other paid channels. In terms of achieving I guess viral status, not much has gone viral. We did see a lot of growth from the promotion that we did with Uber when there was the Bart strike, I think the summer that we launched. We see – I think going forward we’re going to focus even more on content because I think that fits really nicely with what we’re trying to achieve on the community front. The boating community loves sharing stories from their outings. When they can’t be on boats, they love reading about being on boats and seeing pictures of people on boats. And so I think we’ll really focus our efforts there. And I think that in some cases hopefully we’ll get a few breaks and things will be really shareable and maybe go viral.

 

Kevin:            Are they typically images or are they videos when they share it? What kind of content are they sharing? And when they do share the content, is it through Instagram, is it through Facebook? What are you guys seeing in terms of the sharing of that content?

 

Craig:             That’s a good question. It totally depends on whether it’s a renter or an owner sharing. Obviously, if they are renters, our big share is on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter. Our owners love sharing content as well. That mainly occurs on Facebook. We get a lot of inbound content submissions from our owners via email and in some cases even some physical photos that had been mailed to us which we promptly digitize.

 

Kevin:            Very cool.

 

Craig:             Yeah, it’s great. It’s amazing having that community who wants to share things with us. I think as we improve operationally we’ll get better and better at really turning that into something that is really consumable and accessible and that appeals to this wide audience that we have. There are so many different types of boating and so many different types of boaters within the different geographies that we operate in. And figuring out ways to communicate with all of them and speak to all them is a big priority.

 

Kevin:            It sounds like user-generated content is a critical component of your marketing plan.

 

Craig:             It is. It absolutely is.

 

Kevin:            Well, Craig, I really appreciate your time. We’ve learned a lot about you and also about Boatbound. Hey, everybody who’s listening to this, go check out Boatbound. Get some wind in your sails and get out there. Thanks, Craig. I really appreciate your time and I look forward to connecting in person with you sometime.

 

Craig:             Great. Thanks so much, Kevin.

 

Kevin:            All right. Take care.

 

Craig:             Take care.

 

Kevin:            So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I want to thank Craig Battin for taking the time to chat with us. He’s doing a great job at Boatbound. If you want to learn more about him and Boatbound, we’ve got all the show notes at www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and then click on podcast. And if you like today’s show, we would really appreciate it if you go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review and leave us a comment. We really appreciate that and we learn from your comments. Also, make sure to subscribe to the Podcast while you’re there. Get it downloaded directly to your device. Anyway, have a great day and keep on keeping on.