It’s one thing to have an innovative idea, it’s entirely another to make that idea a successful business. Our guest this week on the SHIPSHAPE podcast is somewhat of an expert on the matter; Matt Fradette, the co-founder and Chief Business Officer of Dockwa, one of the premier marina, dock, slip and mooring companies, will be joining us to tell us his story.
With a concept that the industry didn’t have the infrastructure to handle, learn how they had to re-educate an entire market, from the software marinas use to how they interact with their customers, they found themselves essentially having to push for an evolution in the industry and their business simultaneously, which is quite a monumental task.
Hear how they had to bend the rules of conventional business and adapt to ‘ride the waves’, as it were, AND do all this without rocking the proverbial boat enough for them to be flung overboard. From going to boat shows to merging with their biggest competitor, join us and learn what it takes to keep your head above water while starting a business in the maritime industry.
Brought to you by SHIPSHAPE
Transcript —-
Farah [00:00:07] Hello and welcome to the Shipshape Podcast, a series of podcasts where we meet amazing people and talk about their experiences, personal, technical and all related to the maritime world. Come and dive in. Dive in, Dive in.
Merrill [00:00:41] This week on the Shipshape podcast, we speak with Matt Fredette. If you’re into boating, you’ve likely used one of his products, namely Dockwa. And there’s many stories behind how it was started. From sailing journeys to cheating the devil. But today we’re going to find out. Your to host today our Merrill Charette on a liveaboard on a Tashiba 36.
Talha [00:01:05] Hi this is T on my Luhrs power boat in Virginia and it’s such a pleasure to have Matt on the show because his brother has literally saved my life a bunch of times and probably gotten me out on the water way more than I would have had nowhere to go. So welcome to the show, Matt.
Matt [00:01:23] Thanks for having me, guys. Awesome to be here.
Merrill [00:01:25] Where are you recording this from?
Matt [00:01:27] Well, I’m not a boat currently. I am currently in my home office here in Concord, Massachusetts, just right outside of Boston.
Talha [00:01:34] So, Matt, maybe to start with, like, there’s so many myths around, like urban legends around how Darkwa started. How did it start? Like, I’ve heard that the two partners went up and down the coast and just they’d had it. Yeah. And then they made their own app. And what happened?
Matt [00:01:48] I want to hear this urban legend. Well, that’s not too far off. We didn’t necessarily go up and down and out of, but there’s sort of a combination of things that came to fruition. So it did come out of personal experience. We knew just being being on the water, primarily down to the Rhode Island area and Newport, Rhode Island, sort of what the process was for making reservations and how frustrating it was. And, you know, my our of our my co-founder Mike and our CEO and come back from a trip out to BLOCK Island one day and through personal experience, I took the trip out there on a roll of the dice. You know they didn’t book an advanced reservation. We heard back and in the email that they sent couldn’t get anybody on the phone. So they went out to kind of get a slap. And that was sort of the straw that broke the camel’s back where it came back. And is this frustrating everywhere? And him and I always just sort of had this entrepreneurial itch to scratch. We were all at different start ups at the time and we started just digging into the problem, just began being familiar with how frustrating it really was. On the boater side, we said, Man, there’s like, this is the way to do it. There’s this, there’s this level of convenience and experience and every other aspects of our lives, but like, solve it for the marine industry. And and we should solve that for boating because it would make our lives way easier and make it easier. So that’s kind of where the idea stemmed from. And again, being on top of busiest transient marinas any way in the country, in Newport, Rhode Island, we knew that was a really acute pain. It’s particularly for cruisers in New England that we dig into, and that’s really kind of what sparked the idea. But but what happened is like we started digging in on the business side. I was like, Well, why does it exist? And when we started doing that, we’re spending a lot more time at Marina off and we were real. The frustration in that because of the lack of the systems and the lack of the process on on the marina side and, you know, maybe they have software, but if they knew it’s it’s on premise, legacy outdated. There’s no direct connectivity to the customer. The consumer is a really bad experience. And that’s if they’re using software in many cases looking for cash and yeah.
Talha [00:03:59] Mom and pop shop, right?
Matt [00:04:01] And so we said, well that’s why this is so we could then be could, you know, act out to a network of consumers that are ready for a much more modern and convenient way to make reservations. And that’s where we started is really with the short term trend at reservation side of things. And it grew from there. So we didn’t really have to look to our define other verticals or industries that have parallels, right? Like we looked at restaurant and Open Table was doing as well. We sort of looked at some other spaces and we dropped it off of what had been working in other spaces. And there’s an opportunity here to build out this marketplace that ultimately could be better for boating. And and that was in 2014 when we we launched a product in May of 20. Wow.
Talha [00:04:50] That old normal.
Matt [00:04:52] Oh, yeah. We launched a product in May of 2015 that figured we’d have the gallery rates on Nantucket was sort of our launch party, if you will. We had patients that day, really big day. But the official that dock was the market.
Talha [00:05:06] That’s cool. I didn’t realize I was almost ten years old.
Matt [00:05:09] Yeah, we’re on on. I guess it’s our eighth 18 environmental.
Talha [00:05:12] You know. So was that journey like. Like break that down for us over the last eight years been like.
Matt [00:05:17] A lot of fun. A lot of you know, there are some point like, you know, starting I heard someone at one point today starting a company oftentimes is like chewing on glass, daring it to be a bit.
Talha [00:05:32] You’ve given us lots of hope here.
Matt [00:05:34] I could say we had a lot of fun. We’ve had a lot more ups and downs. We’re incredibly fortunate when you look at the mortality rate of start ups. Mm hmm. And something like 95%. Right. But don’t even lack past the first couple of years. Oh, yes. I feel I feel very fortunate that we are where we are. We still got a long way to go, but it’s been. It’s been a lot of experiments, no doubt. And we’re coming into really an industry that had been antiquated, for lack of a better term, an operational level. People have just been sort of running these businesses the same way for 30 or 40 years. They’re busy. Right. Their cash flows are pretty good. And they’re saying, well, I’m not really motivated to change something modern. And when it comes to to being first to market, like, sometimes it’s not all that fun, right? Because you are simultaneously educating an entire industry why they should. Yes, forever. So, you know, we’ve been successful. You know, we are experiencing now more change than than at any point in time. I think COVID had given the people needed to modernize in some ways that, you know, we can talk about, but we’re just finally starting to engineer the guard. You know, the modernization of this business started to happen. So, like, we broke all the time of going into the Marine state building software arena back in 2014 and like stepping into hotels and selling them software in like 1990, like they were really that far behind the curve when it came to tech.
Merrill [00:07:00] One thing that you hear all the time when it comes to the marine industry is the sheer opportunities that exist. And generally, when I talk to people that aren’t in the industry, I’m like, picture an industry where all these things that you take for granted just don’t exist. So I’m sure in the beginning of DARKWA, when you first realize the problem, we’re like, Oh, we can start a business. I’m sure there was like, Whoa, this could be a real big business, huh?
Matt [00:07:25] Yeah, well, you know, I think if you look at just the number of marinas in the United States, on the surface, people might look at that and say, well, how big do this actually be? But when you factor in the fact that that’s actually kept a lot of people out, and when you layer on the dynamics of actually building a marketplace, right, you’re not just selling B2B software, you’re actually building a two sided marketplace, consumers and businesses, right? In our case, boaters and marinas. We build that marketplace by selling marine software. It will make their lives easier, save that payment headache and allow them to offer a better guest experience. And through that, you know, the more marinas are adding joining the dock network, we attract more boaters. Right. And create more liquidity in the marketplace. So, you know, if you’re only looking at the sheer number of marinas and instead maybe some people say, well, how can it get on you later in the factor that there is a marketplace that can be built? Yes, it can get big. And, you know, we looked at transient reservations that really just our entry into the market. We looked at that to open the experience really sucks for boating. There is a business problem, right, where if you build something elegant that solves a problem, you can say, hey, used that way better than notepad. And then, oh, by the way, you can also plug our tech into your website for the first time ever. Offer web reservations to your website without having to make a huge expense of change. That worked really, really well. You could connect out to the consumer marketplace. The boaters that were, you know, the bar was really low. They were looking for just a respon a way to get in touch and they didn’t want to have to get an email that hear your background and use the phone and just, you know, get a voicemail. And that allowed us to sort of think about it as like a wedge, right? Like focus on one thing, do it really well, and then build from there. And now we’re to the point where we’re laying on different experience products and services on both sides and just adding more value to the marketplace in general and really building the business.
Talha [00:09:23] So Matt, what makes you’re making it sound like the initial product you develop? Yeah, on its own costs, like millions of dollars. Could you give us an idea of what something like that just putting it together in the beginning as it say you were a new business owner. Like what? How much of a startup sort of thing should they keep in mind?
Matt [00:09:40] Yeah. Oh, certainly. It costs millions of dollars. I can’t give you an exact answer, but, you know, I will tell you one point in time, we paid like $50,000 just for sort of wireframes, just to work with an outside development shop to build the MVP. It is extremely expensive if you don’t have internal developers. We got we were fortunate enough early on where we were able to recruit some internal developers and start doing everything. How can get a product to market without doing that? It would have became too expensive very quickly. Yeah, at this point we didn’t spend $1,000,000 like right out of the gate, but certainly if you’re using outside development, you should be expected to invest significant amount of capital into that if you don’t have an internal team.
Merrill [00:10:23] One of the things that you’ve mentioned was education, right? Because you are a first mover in it, so you had to educate people. And we have all seen many products come into the industry that do fill this need, yet they don’t make it. And I personally believe it’s probably because of the education and really having to communicate what exactly the benefit is to the customer. So do you have any tips on communication in our industry?
Matt [00:10:51] Well, it depends. I mean, I think. Right. The boaters got interactive media. We would.
Talha [00:10:55] Yes.
Matt [00:10:56] We would be on the ground in Boca. Yeah. You know, we and we started we were pretty localized. We knew that if we could win in New England, then we could grow from there. So in the very early days, you know, it was really Merrill about educating the Marines, and we knew we needed them, but they. Okay, yeah, we build this. We will come back at them. Right. And and if you’re building a marketplace, you always have this chicken and egg problem. Right. Both died the reliant upon one another. The supply and demand supply is going to be the marinas for up the boaters, but they don’t want each other on the platform to find value for liquidity. That make you need to decide which way can go first strategically to be able to build that marketplace. And education is the core component. So I’d say we invested and to this day we still continue to invest, although we’re getting much better at investing more heavily on the boater side, we needed to be able to accomplish what we wanted to. We needed to focus on educating the marinas more so our whole sort of go to market strategy, if you will, because again, building these tools that solve the business problem and then selling in to the marina, that if you did it this way, it saves you time, it reduces the amount of operational burden and it creates efficiency. And oh, by the way, the more marinas we get to join, the more voters are joining. So you can actually create incremental revenue. Right. You just said it before we got on this podcast. I love hearing the stories. Right. You are at the marina you are at today because you founded on that, right? Yeah. Right. So you booked a transient reservation. It sounds like you had a good experience. You like that marina A lot And like Virginia Tech, right? Yep. And I love you that it’s not an isolation. You hear those all the time. So sometimes merrily get back to your question about education. Sometimes a marina looks at it and they say, Well, transients are only 5% of my business. So like, I don’t necessarily want their pay to be on that or I don’t need the chain. And we need to say, well, with respect, I’m going to challenger with thinking about. Right? And then we tell a story about TI or we tell a story about, you know, somebody that broke down a friend in trouble going out to Martha’s Vineyard. So they pulled into the more on Cape Cod and then all of a sudden became a seasonal customer for five years. And it’s like the lifetime value of someone that comes to you through doc or can be a lot more than just maybe a $200 reservation. Right? They’re going to come on board and then they’re going to spend at the marina. Maybe they’ll come back next year, maybe they’ll stay at transit, but maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll be like, you know, that had a great experience. They want to become a customer and they want to be resupply. So that’s just one example of like we do have to educate about the overall value of the marketplace and that message and the value can out of these small businesses. And then there’s another component of it that is bigger, deeper. As we build our own marina management software, we really need to educate about operational efficiencies that if they just modernize their the processes and systems and they use something like ours, the benefits that they can have on the business and their employees and ultimately their customers suite.
Merrill [00:14:05] So obviously from the time you started in 2014 to now, there’s been some innovations that have happened in Marine. What are the big things that you’ve noticed over the course of your company’s eight years?
Matt [00:14:18] Well, yeah, there’s obvious one and then there’s some you know, there are some maybe not so obvious ones, people I think the electric innovation right there, they’re super encouraging. Cool. And everything that they did. The marine industry has got a long way to come, particularly with the infrastructure at the marinas to be able to support. Right. Though, you know, we’ve seen some very small innovations on the consumer side. But, you know, again, the infrastructure it needs to come along for it to really take off, though, and exciting about some of the changes that are happening. More on sort of the business side with that to be able to support specific to our business in the marina there has been on a chain really when it comes down to consolidation of the space, like when we first started, 80 to 80% of the industry was sort of mom and pop. And now what you’ve seen is this huge surge of consolidation with equity groups coming in and saying, Hey, man, we’re in is a really interesting real estate investment for a variety of different reasons. And, you know, they started pouring money into that space in 2015. And Safe Harbor Marina, the biggest player in the space, got started. They proved the model out in. There’s been so many others following suit. Right. There’s still only like maybe top three and sort of the big guy. But what’s been the biggest? Well, we’ve noticed that again over the last five years. There was a lot a lot of smaller players coming in, still backed by a lot of money and that want to buy arenas. But they’re just I feel like at the end when every single week coming in from a real estate investment standpoint, trying to kind of build a portfolio, whether they’re trying to flip it for the big guys or build their own, you know, build their own business for the long term, it’s sort of TBD, but that’s been a big change in just the overall landscape that we’ve noticed in our day to day over the past five, six years.
Talha [00:16:11] And then we’d heard during the COVID times that this was like the most boats were being sold ever. That’s what sort of data was coming out. Were you seeing that on the dockside or the most slip ever getting booked? Yeah.
Matt [00:16:24] Yeah. We saw a lot of growth during COVID. It didn’t, you know, like many others, we didn’t know what to expect at first. We were sort of bracing for the worst. You know, February, March 2020 would be like, oh, boy, what’s going to happen? And then, you know, that’s quite a few months. And then in June and 2020, marinas, the Super Bowl boats could you couldn’t even keep them in stock. Right. Many factors were selling out with multiple year wait lists and book sales were at a bargain, as you know. Looking back on it, interesting, People didn’t have their time and interest being competed with, but they used to write like we couldn’t go to a Red Sox game or a concert. And more people were looking for ways that they could, from a socially distant perspective, get outside and boating was was certainly a beneficiary of that. And if more people are buying boats, marinas are going to be busier than ever. So a lot of marinas were looking for ways to streamline efficiencies and offer more active payments and transactions. And we certainly saw a bit of a surge and I think transient took a little bit of a dip just by virtue of of maybe people not traveling as far. But marinas were very busy because more people had boats than they were having from a seasonal or an annual perspective place to put up and still do. Some marinas are still super typical.
Merrill [00:17:44] Yeah, COVID was certainly an interesting time for the industry, living on a boat and being at the marina and so many people boating. It was like COVID really never existed for me in my mind.
Matt [00:17:54] You’re fortunate. Yeah. Yeah. No, it was very interesting to experience. And we’re still we’re still going through it, right? Like the waitlist for boats, like the things have started to normalize a little bit. I think, you know, with the economic outlook for the next couple of years, there’s going to be a correction. But, you know, even if the if from a boat purchasing standpoint, you know, it goes down or doesn’t match the velocity the last couple of years, look at what I think the the influx of people into the lifestyle is going to stay. Right. So I think, you know, marinas will continue to be full. You’ll see more people out on the water. Now. We’ll see what happens with used boat sales in the next few years. You’re going to see, you know, like on the other end of people sort of getting out of it. But I think enough people were introduced and they were younger as well. I think that’s that would like for the first time in 20 years, the average boat ownership went to like the low forties, Right. Where that was a huge turn is that there is this aging population that is diverse and a problem for everybody. And you saw Cogan really dramatically shift that. And just because the economy is going into a different cycle, I don’t think you’re going to see all of that just evaporate. I think a lot of it’s here to stay, which is a perfect thing.
Merrill [00:19:13] One of the I you know, I’ve dwelled on that question for a while. It’s like what happens a few years down the line after this whole like, you know, COVID buy up of boats and, you know, sure, there’s certainly going to be a dip. But I think what COVID did is create awareness of all the different opportunities that exist for outdoor recreation and with how these boat manufacturers are so backlogged, it’s like, oh, there’s way more people that want to get into boating than there are boats. So it’ll be interesting to see. One of the things that I’ve heard along the way is the concern about spaces at marinas, and you hear it all the time where people are like, I can’t dock my boat anywhere because there’s no space for me. Do you have any comments on that?
Matt [00:19:56] Well, it kind of goes back to one of the things I mentioned about why Marina and there’s such an interesting associated investment. That’s one of the dynamics of the space that people look at and say the laws of supply and demand is so high and supply is so low and you can’t just go build a new marina. Right. From a regulatory standpoint, it’s extremely, extremely hard. It’s hard enough to expand the marina if you own one. Sometimes it’s impossible, you know, other times you have limited options. So you’re exactly right. And it’s going to continue to be at a premium to, you know, find space for your boat. I think there’s going to be. And often I think people will expand dry storage, which is a really good opportunity, right, Especially for people that are buying center console or smaller lake boat and things like that. I think you’ll start to see some alternative options for storage than wet work in more seasonal market like New England, for example, where dry storage hasn’t been a huge business. I think you’ll start to see people get a little bit more creative. Merrell So you have more options going forward? Yeah, but you’re exactly right. I don’t really foresee that problem going away. And it’s good to be a marina worker right now and have to have the laws of supply and demand right here.
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Farah [00:22:08] Welcome back to the SHIPSHAPE podcast.
Merrill [00:22:13] Well, I think we answered it where essentially it’s like, how exactly are marinas going to handle, how few slips they have and how many boat owners there really are. Luckily, I’m almost grandfathered in to the marina I’ve been at for the past five years. One of the things, right is not only are you guys working on DARKWA, but you’re also doing what is it, camp out? Is that what it’s called?
Matt [00:22:36] Yeah. Yep.
Merrill [00:22:37] So can you talk a little bit about all the other things that you guys have been working on?
Matt [00:22:42] Well, I will say the primary focus continues to be on the marine industry. We know that we still got a ways to go, both on the marina software side as well as the boater side. Now, we’re to the point I’m super excited because we’ve been building primarily for the marina for the past seven years. Call it where we have them building for the boater as well, but not as heavily as we did in the marina, because we know how to build up the marketplace and create a value product, make it easier for voting. And we needed the marina. Gone back to my old take on that. Right. So that’s been our strategy. But now we’re to the point where we’re really going to be innovating the boater side, which I want to talk a little bit about, because it’s super exciting. And then with camp out, you know, we are working on it a little bit in stealth mode. We decided to push out the launch a little bit just because we understood the opportunity in the marine industry that we had ahead of us and that we needed to really focus and execute and build some of these these core features. So that’s where most of the focus is on Aqua and go into 2023 towards the likely towards the end of 2023, you’ll start to see us things in the market and in other verticals like outdoor recreation.
Merrill [00:23:50] So what are some of the things you plan on doing on the boat owner and.
Matt [00:23:54] Well, so on the boater side of which we we feel like we had our transition reservations. That’s what our CEO Mike likes to say. And I totally agree. That’s where we that’s where we started. That’s probably well understood. It’s a product market or product that a great product market fit on both the Marine and the boater side. And it’s working really, really well. But what we’ve learned is twofold. One, marinas were coming to us that, hey, like I love dock opportunity, but have all these other aspects of my business and I’m not happy with the systems or the tools or my processes. Like when you build that line in on the boat or side, we started to figured out as well is that a lot of using dock were fraternities, but I’m using it for a lot more, using it as a platform to do research and sort of all these various phases of travel, you know, researching location service within amenities and looking at rate. Of course I’m booking branding reservations the the of what we do. But I guess the point where they were saying I want to use it for to contact Marine is about other things that I’m looking for as well that might be and might be here there might be long term slip or dry storage that might be service. Right. So we’ve evolved the marketplace to have a little bit more utility than just transient reservations. And we’re allowing boaters to contact these businesses that are using our software or other things. Right. And at the same time, we’re increasing the overall value that that marketplace brings to the brand is that using software and we’re building the tools out for those marinas to operate more of their business. So, you know, the analogy that I can maybe give you, I said we were more like broken table or restaurant reservations when we first started, right? Are you familiar with with a company called Coast, more like restaurant or Point of Sale? So we’ve evolved or evolving more into being a host for the business. So we’ll have a port point of sale or or the marina. We have the ability for them to allow their nice, you know, entourage and really bring them or store it for their customers or it’s a new thing. Instead of just booking transient reservation, you can get your slip renewal from your marina on your phone, sign it, enroll in automatic billing and manage that whole process through document. And you can also, you know, chat to Marina and say, hey, I need four back and I want you to bring that over. And why not just be charged automatically without you ever having to go on the golf course? All right. So that’s really the experience that we want to provide. We want to continue to build out the the boater platform to accommodate experiences in all of these phases of travel, whether they’re researching, planning, whether they’re navigating, whether they’re booking, whether they’re reflecting about an experience and figuring out where to go through next, We have a lot to do on the overall boater experience to make it more enjoyable to get out on the water. That’s really what our mission is, is to connect, you know, more people with nature in the outdoor when it comes to dock. All right. That’s getting out on the water. But we really feel like we can better execute on that mission. If you are the operating system that’s providing a better experience for those boaters. So, Merrill, you’re familiar with Harbor, right? But if you’re you’re on your marina in Boston Harbor, you know, for the season, we want the experience. So I pay my Marine. The stock was sold for meet ups to Lisa Sweat. And to pay for that clip, it’s super easy. I can look at DARKWA and know when my next bill comes in or what’s on my next invoice and I want to go across the harbor and get fuel. I don’t have to take my wallet out because that marina also needs to dock with point of sale on super capitals, automatic transacting. And then I’m going to go over to Martha’s Vineyard for a few night and I can book my reservation on DARKWA. We really want that us to be sort of that connective tissue that just makes that experience enjoyable for the boater. And then on the other end, on the marina, right, operationally, it streamlines things.
Merrill [00:27:42] Well, it looks like I’m not going to be able to get away with not paying because it’s all going to be tracked now.
Matt [00:27:47] Yeah. You make a habit of that.
Talha [00:27:52] Right? Do funny was a mac. I mean, this dude mentioned that camping software. Were you able to just sort of pick up everything that had happened for DARKWA and just like, change the branding and change the categories in blue, blue bloop and now you have a brand new vertical? Or is it like how much work and time and effort and money sort of went into that?
Matt [00:28:13] Yeah, well, I mean, it’s still work, still time, it’s money, it’s engineering resources, it’s prioritization. It takes focus away from other things. Right? So there’s a there’s a balancing act that needs to happen. We built DARKWA the way there with the platform, so I’m not going to cut into it. But the problem is very, very similar and I’ll go recreation. So we’re looking at urban parks, campgrounds and what’s really, really interesting about it, like you need to change certain things, right? They’re talking about campsites are, are RVs are not boats. They need to change certain nomenclature in the product plans and experiences. But for the most part, it’s a very similar problem. And from an operational standpoint, on the business side, it’s very, very similar. Yeah, the cool thing about it are we like is like you might look at a marina and their average business in the United States anyway, somewhere to five 10% of their business is transient or short term gas. It’s almost interest on the campground and recreation site. Not quite, but it’s somewhere around 70% of their overall revenue comes from the short term stays. So we feel like we’re really, really well-positioned to immediately have big, big impact or a little bit bigger. And the barriers to entry are, you know, a little less from a consumer standpoint. So, you know, for most people, it’s easier to, you know, get in the car with their family and head to a campground or rent an RV and drive it themselves than it is to figure out how to drive a boat for the first time.
Talha [00:29:32] All right. You know, and you’d mentioned that you were the first mover on the border side. Were you the first mover on the RV side of it?
Matt [00:29:39] You know, that’s a that’s a really good question. It’s a bit more crowded. The market is is a little bit bigger on that side. But I think, you know, by nature, there has been some insurance that of sort of like the dock equivalents that have done pretty well. We think there’s space to play right where we can go in and we can actually compete. And we have a lot of growth issues that we’ve learned over the last seven plus years that are going to help us scale a little bit more quickly on that side. Yeah, but there is more competition there than there was in the marine industry. But do the necessarily a bad thing right off the bat? Could it be really tough to be a first mover? You know, sometimes, you know, some of that education is done for you and you come come with a product that’s at least at parity or has some value. And it can really be effective.
Merrill [00:30:20] Right now as we kind of come to a conclusion, a lot of our listeners range from the beginning of business to the middle of business to far into it. And I’m wondering if you have a bit of advice for each phase that you’ve learned along the way. Beginning, middle and you know, I’m not going to say end, but where you’re at now.
Talha [00:30:40] Yeah, I know you guys are the giant. Yeah, that’s, yeah but yeah.
Matt [00:30:44] You know I’m not, I’m not dumb enough that they were at the end. I still think you know we’re in the early innings We have learned a lot luckily. But we’ve got a ways to go to execute on what we’re trying to do. I do get this question asked, you know, fairly regularly, not necessarily in the later stages, but more in the early in. My answer is very, very profound. But I had someone that I respect very early on that told me not most entrepreneurs or people that have a business idea, they think that they need to protect it and they shouldn’t tell everybody because that idea is going to get stolen. And they said ideas are a dime a dozen. You should talk to every single person about your idea that you can, even if it’s a competitor that you think could steal it because it’s going to inform your strategy or it is going to make you more bullish on the idea or it will introduce you to other people. So talk with many people about not only that, always just stuck with me in the early days where the super place we weren’t great and you know a good output that I think of that as an example is very early on we found out that another company called Dcop was starting. And so, you know, who is this company? It’s starting. And they can’t believe they actually turned out to be just like right in our own back. It was doing a very similar thing and they were launching in the Boston area. This was in 2015 that, well, we could easily just shy away from that and, you know, just. Say, okay, we’re going to go head to head and compete. But we reached out and the Tyler kind of the dark cop found her and we ended up being really good friends and we hit it off immediately. So much so that we ended up merging both of our companies early on, saying, Hey, like working with each other, we think we can be more successful from the get go than trying to fight it out in our own backyard. Like, what do you say? And Smart merged company Tyler joined us as the co-founder is with us still. We’ve been building a business world for the past eight years, but I think that just an example of sort of an opportunity that if you sort of abide by that methodology of, you know, not being afraid to hear or talk, that many people as know the doors, that it can actually open up. So I think that my 50,000 foot you advice.
Talha [00:32:52] And that’s pretty profound, by the way.
Matt [00:32:54] Thank you. I’ll just very simply, you know, never lose touch with the customer like I’m still on call the weekly recurring operators. I’m still in marine offices. And so as our CEO Mike, when you can never truly minister to that particular industry like they’re right which a bit resistant to change is using sort of outdated rules that are very seasonal as well. Right? The ebbs and flows of the industry make it difficult where you know, right after the season they’re trying to hold up, you know, and service them. And many of them are saying, okay, I’m going to take a little bit of a break and I’ll come back in April, just in time to splash both the craziness of the seasonal sort of swing can actually make it very difficult to get a to more. You can actually stay close to your customer base and with in the better. And an example of that for us, we started with transient on the marina at but grown into a more company because we incremental and just saying great if we if we had a marketplace of arenas we know that trade the entire of a bigger piece of the pie like with and them let’s say you know what else the challenging about your operation what other tools are you looking to improve and then we can build from there. And hopefully if you do that, to be able to add unique value to the boater side and execute on our mission of making it easier to get out on the water. So never grow out of listening to the customer or spending time with the customer.
Talha [00:34:16] And that’s interesting because you almost described it, they become an idea bank for your business.
Matt [00:34:21] With a 100%. Yep. And when you have a certain amount of customers, like you need systems in place to be able to prioritize and weed out some of the noise. Right. Like regardless of where your customer base is, they’re always going to sometimes throw like the backer order and you need to be there. How many people are asking for this and exactly actually this the best solution. Now, I don’t think you’re all that we have partners, team and product managers that are very, very good at listening to what people are saying, distilling down through to the root cause of the problem and then coming up with the ideas for the solution. I think the trick and a lot of people say, okay in customer feedback are asking for this thing and they jump to the conclusion that that’s the mission. The magic is when you can really just then step it up and then come up with the optimal solution that maybe they’re not right. But you understand the problem enough to be able to come up with it on your own.
Merrill [00:35:11] And with that, where can people find you and use your app and all that you’re Yeah.
Matt [00:35:18] So the app is darkwa D.O.C. way you can use us on the web Doc Whatcom or Android or in the Apple store as well so voters feel free to take a look and download it. Me personally, I’m not hard to find. And it’s Matthew Fredette on LinkedIn. My email is Matt at Doc. Welcome. So feel free to shoot me an up.
Talha [00:35:40] Awesome. Nice. Okay. And can we just bug you because we know you’ve been on the water? What’s like your best or your worst boating adventure?
Matt [00:35:48] Oh man. So this is a long time ago. But this was actually in New Zealand when I was out taking a small may I forget even what kind of boat it was, more like a water taxi type of boat. But I would go on Alex and Stuart Islands for a camping trip for like five or six days with a couple of buddies and the seas are just really, really high. And we didn’t necessarily know if we were going to make it out to that camping trip. It was pretty frightening. And this is back in, I want to say, 2005. I remember because on the way back, the person in the water, water taxi and I did water taxi. But we were you know, we were out on the water for like several hours trying to get to these islands. And it was right around the time that Katrina happened. So was oh, boy, because that told us that that had happened in the United States. And we had done sort of in the woods on an island for five or six days. So we had no idea. And that’s how we found out. But it was a it was a sketchy time trying to get out there. And in the time that I’ll never forget fun times.
Talha [00:36:46] Okay. Thank you so much, Matt.
Matt [00:36:48] And navigating so well with someone else and always do your homework first.
Talha [00:36:53] Maybe that’s where the seed for was sort of started that I wish we had somewhere to go. Yeah.
Matt [00:36:58] Yeah, yeah. I thank think. I appreciate you inviting the honest one to chat and look forward to doing more of it in the future.
Talha [00:37:05] Absolutely. Keep us of. Of all your crazy adventures and good luck. You’ll do an industry.
Matt [00:37:10] That’s lucky you guys as well.
Talha [00:37:12] Thank you.
Matt [00:37:13] Take care.
Farah [00:37:24] Check back every Tuesday for our latest episode and be sure to like, share and subscribe to ship shaped up for.
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