Even After Scores of Yacht Sales, I Still Got Schooled When I Bought My Own Boat
Hey everyone, I'm Dan Ribeiro, better known as @theyachttrader. After years in the yacht brokerage world, I've closed deals on vessels of all sizes, across borders, and through every imaginable structure—brokerage, surveys, refits, flags, compliance, negotiations. You name it, I've navigated it. I thought I knew the playbook inside out.
Then I bought my own boat.
That experience was a wake-up call. Not because I fumbled like a novice, but because it exposed how fragmented, informal, and downright unserious the system is for an industry handling massive capital, risks, and liabilities. Even armed with experience, contacts, and insider knowledge, I hit blind spots that simply shouldn't exist in a mature market.
That realization? It's why I built theyachttrader.app And today, I'm excited to announce its launch in beta.
Yachting Is Still a Cottage Industry
Let's be real: yachting operates like a cottage industry masquerading as something institutional. Critical information is scattered everywhere:
- Email threads
- WhatsApp messages
- PDFs buried on someone's laptop
- A mechanic's hazy memory
- A surveyor's proprietary archive
- A broker's private notes
None of this is standardized. None of it is portable. And none of it builds on itself over time.
A vessel's history—the single most crucial factor in determining its true value and risk profile—is pieced together from scraps every single time it changes hands. That's inefficient, costly, and prone to errors by design. The industry treats this as business as usual. But it's not normal, and it's holding us back.
Buying My Own Boat Exposed the Gaps
Owning a boat turns theory into cold, hard reality. You shift from broker mindset to operator mode, dealing with:
- Component-level failures
- Maintenance decisions without any historical baselines
- Invoices that describe symptoms, not root causes
- Lost context between owners, yards, and technicians
I had receipts. I had records. But I still lacked structure. The issue wasn't access to information—it was that the information had no persistent schema. No consistent way to organize, reference, or build upon it.
What This App Actually Is
Let me be clear: [theyachttrader.app](https://theyachttrader.app) isn't just another marketplace-first product. The marketplace features are secondary.
At its core, this is about vessel history. We're creating a structured, immutable, time-sequenced record of everything that matters:
- Ownership
- Components
- Maintenance
- Repairs
- Surveys
- Events
- Attestations
Think of it like an aircraft's logbook—a vessel should accrue credibility over time, not through slick marketing, but through verifiable operational history. This app is my attempt to impose much-needed structure on an industry that's resisted it out of inertia, not logic.
## Why I Am Launching This as a Beta
I'm rolling this out today for beta testers, and I have a very specific audience in mind: engineers, mechanics, surveyors, builders, and yard managers. The folks who actually get their hands dirty—touching the metal, systems, wiring, and software.
I'm not looking for praise or performative adoption. I want criticism. Real, unfiltered feedback on:
- Schema breaks
- Edge cases
- Workflow friction
- Places where reality violates assumptions
If this doesn't survive contact with the people who live below deck and in engine rooms, it's not worth shipping to the broader market.
What Success Looks Like
For me, success isn't about racking up listings or user numbers overnight. It's about building toward a future where:
- A vessel's value is defensible and transparent
- Risk is legible and quantifiable
- Maintenance history compounds instead of resetting with every sale
- Buyers stop overpaying for uncertainty
- Good operators are rewarded with higher resale confidence
If that shakes up parts of the traditional brokerage model, good—that's a signal we need change, not a problem to avoid. This industry doesn't need more gloss; it needs memory. Reliable, accessible, and enduring.
That's what this beta is all about. If you're in the trenches of yachting and want to help shape something that could truly move the needle, head over to theyachttrader.app and sign up. Let's build this together.
