Incrediblue was the first yachting marketplace globally. We helped thousands of travellers to experience holidays by the sea, with the most amazing way: On a yacht.
Incrediblue started as a social marketplace for sea tourism, where anyone could find a yacht and a skipper and create his own journey.
Booking a yachting holiday is not your average basket value and can cost several thousand of dollars, but it’s still the cheapest way for island hopping and people don’t know that.
In addition, most travellers tend to prefer a common beach holiday in a resort, because it feels more safe and familiar. At the same time, yacht owners had to be convinced that incrediblue offers them a better way to connect with more clients.
As the only designer at first and then head of the design department, I was responsible for the product design as well as the needs of our sales & marketing. My daily routine often included:
When you are living the life of a venture-capital backed startup, you usually run against one very important opponent: Time.
In the beginning, you don’t have the luxury of conducting all the nice UX methodologies and techniques a product designer has in his arsenal, but you still need to deliver.
So with the limited data in my disposal, my main research in order to build my initial hypothesis, was based on my team’s vision, expertise and my experience and gut.
In practice, that meant that we would run weekly product sprints with the goal to publish a feature or an improved version of a page every week and test it, as much as possible.
Luckily enough, our assumptions were spot on and the platform was working nicely, but that’s never enough.
When we raised more money, the design department got a bit bigger. We hired a part-time UX designer and a couple of part-time creatives for marketing and that gave me the chance for a more data driven approach.
We were using Usertesting.com for qualitative feedback and UsabilityHub for fast pre-release validation on smaller things. Google Analytics was monitoring our most important funnels and the overall user behaviour in numbers.
We designed a visual language that makes you feel safe, that you are among friends and that a yachting holiday can be the most amazing experience of your life, while it costs less than a classic beach holiday.
We reduced the cognitive load of our users by simplifying the process of choosing the right yachting experience.
If you were an experienced sailor, the path of custom built holidays was full of options, but if you were a first-time traveler, all you had to do is to tell us your budget and your availability and leave the rest to us.
Our new holidays builder resulted to a 6-fold sales increase!
We did on-site user interviews, online surveys and we spoke on the phone with them, a lot. We identified their needs and their pain points and created a system that worked for them.
They were able to manage their fleet data & availability, add new yachts, manage their bookings and communicate with their customers from one unified web environment that was tailored to them.
Our fleet went from 100 to 3000 yachts in just a year!
Georgios Gatos - COO
Antonios Fiorakis - CEO
Yacht owners embraced incrediblue as we cut off the middle man and provided them with a better way to fully book their fleet. Travelers loved incrediblue because they could fast-travel to summer and day-dream about a bespoke beach holiday.
Incrediblue got acquired by Nautal and I am greateful that I got to be part of such a great team. We worked hard and I consider Incrediblue one of my best experiences.
