Startup for 10: SailTies

1 – In your own words – what do you do?

SailTies is the best place to capture, relive and share sailing. In other words, we are the long awaited Strava for Sailing, solving the problem all sailors face – keeping all of your sailing experience in one place in a fun and modern way.

2 – What’s the most exciting thing about what you’re doing?

Surprisingly there is still no modern way for sailors to capture all of their sailing in one place! Currently sailors try to keep an old fashioned paper log book up to date, with very uninspiring one sentence summaries of amazing voyages.

So it’s really exciting to finally have a place where we can capture rich memories of our sailing adventures and build up our sailing profiles in a way that’s easy to share.

On top of this we are excited to create an international sailing community full of rich voyages to inspire and encourage sailing around the world.

3 – What are you most proud of so far?

Building a beta app on our evenings and weekends while still working a full time job,  launching it in March and seeing 25,000 nautical miles of sailing logged from voyages in 5 continents!

We love opening the app and seeing voyages coming in each day from a new part of the world we’ve never sailed in. We’re really proud to have created a product that the sailing world is already so excited to use.

We have also been called ‘the must have app for sailors’ in a sailing podcast and featured in a number of magazines, including Yachting Monthly. SailTies was also described by a design evangelist at Apple as clean, fresh and exciting, that was pretty cool!

4 – What have you found most difficult about being a startup?

Tom and I both have 10 years experience designing and building apps and social networks, so we feel very comfortable working on the product. In contrast – raising funds is completely new to us.

The first version of our pitch deck and financial model took us weeks to get our heads round and I shudder to think back to our first, very unprepared, pitch…!

Luckily we’ve got great advisors, Who’s Fabio (startup bootcamp) and Ole Mahrt (formerly Head of Product at Monzo), who have put in countless hours on early morning zoom calls helping us prepare.

Now we both really look forward to pitching. It’s fascinating getting to talk to such experienced angel investors and occasionally a big name in the sailing world.

5 – What would you do differently if you started now?

I would have loved to release the beta app even earlier! The conflict we had was releasing earlier to learn sooner vs thoroughly testing the GPS recording functionality to be confident we wouldn’t lose our beta users sailing records.

In the end worldwide lockdowns helped us decide, as sailors weren’t heading onto the water! During the lockdown I was still doing yacht deliveries, so we were able to keep testing the app.

By the time we did launch we had already completed thousands of miles of testing, so we could be confident we were giving our VIP beta users a safe way to track their voyages!