Why I Built The Yacht Trader App
The Yacht Trader was not built by a technologist chasing yachting.
It was built by a broker who ran out of patience with broken systems.
Before yachting, I spent years as a nightlife promoter in Miami. That environment forces you to understand behavior quickly—how people signal intent long before they speak, how timing creates leverage, and how trust is built or destroyed in minutes. That behavioral education stayed with me long after I left nightlife.
Before that, I studied software development at Polimig Technical School in Brazil, where I learned structured logic and systems thinking. I moved to the United States in 2000, completed high school here, and watched technology advance rapidly while many legacy industries—including yachting—remained structurally unchanged.
Entering the Industry From the Bottom Up
I entered yachting as a charter broker, not a yacht salesperson.
Charter forces reality:
boats are used, not admired
maintenance failures surface immediately
service quality matters more than brochures
From there, I completed an apprenticeship with @TheYachtMentor, learning proper brokerage discipline, buyer representation, and transaction structure. That foundation is not common in this industry, and it shows.
I later worked at OneWater Yacht Group, selling Sunseekers and Rivieras alongside brokerage listings. That experience exposed a stark contrast: manufacturer-backed sales operated with process and accountability, while brokerage relied heavily on fragmented data and narrative trust.
Later, at a different Yacht Group, I saw the problem at full scale.
I was involved in the sale of a new Dutch build and a 50-meter Heesen - complex, seven- and eight-figure transactions where precision matters. At the same time, I watched valuable inventory, build data, and service history managed through Excel spreadsheets with no persistent lifecycle continuity.
High-value assets.
Low-integrity systems.
That disconnect was impossible to ignore. Ownership Closed the Loop
Owning my own boat removed any remaining abstraction.
As an owner, you experience what buyers eventually discover:
scattered service records
unverifiable maintenance claims
value loss caused by poor documentation
Every resale is treated as if the vessel has no memory
At that point, the conclusion becomes unavoidable:
Yachting does not have a system problem—it has a data integrity problem.
Why AI Took Two Years to Get Right
I am a Certified Professional Yacht Broker (CPYB). That matters here because it gave me enough discipline to be skeptical.
For nearly two years, I tested and explored AI systems—including extended work with ChatGPT—that promised automation, insights, and scale. Most came up short. They generated language, not understanding. Abstractions, not decisions.
AI was not useless.
It was just blind without structure.
What finally clicked was this:
AI is only valuable when it interprets real behavioral signals across long, nonlinear decision cycles—and yacht transactions are exactly that.
Once vessel data, service history, and buyer behavior are structured correctly, AI becomes additive. Before that, it’s noise.
Built Out of Necessity, Not Hype
The Yacht Trader exists because:
Charter taught me how boats are actually used
Brokerage taught me where deals break
Corporate sales showed what structure looks like
Manufacturing exposed how casually value is tracked
Ownership revealed the real cost of all of it
AI, used correctly, finally made continuity possible
This is not a listings app.
It is not a CRM with a marine skin.
It is infrastructure for an industry that has been operating on memory, trust, and paper for far longer than it should have.
That is the honest story.
