I’m happy to announce that DockLister has signed up it’s first paying customer! It may only be $79.99/mo, but landing that first customer feels great. It’s invigorating. It’s validating. It’s intoxicating.
I started building DockLister 15 months ago. My goal was to a build better tool for people to sell boats. It’s a niche market but one that is dominated by three web properties, Boats.com, YachtWorld.com, and Boattrader.com, all owned by the same company. But I was confident I could chip away at their market share.
I’m a software engineer by trade; picking up sales and marketing has been awkward to say the least. I started by cold-calling yacht brokers but found the rejection difficult to deal with, and more importantly, I didn’t feel like I was painting a good picture of the product. So, I switched to cold-emailing. This got me pageviews but no signups. So I started reaching out to various boat communities: forums, groups on LinkedIn, reddit.com, and quora.com.
It’s always exciting when you connect with someone who gets it. In this case, a broker was reading my posts on LinkedIn and gave me a call to sign up. He was thrilled someone was working on dethroning the three big incumbents and he signed up after our first phone call. I’m please to announce we now have over 3600 boat listings on the DockLister.
Thanks for the support everyone!