Boatsetter: Sailing towards Global Success

We all wish to be a sailor or at least desire to have a worth cherishing a water-ful experience, cruising, active water sports, fishing, blue water sailing, and more. However, pertaining to lack of information, resources and training our simple wish remains a daydream.
Meet Boatsetter, a Fort Lauderdale, FL headquartered platform that connects boat owners and licensed captains with renters, enabling anyone to enjoy almost any type of on the water experience they desire – cruising, active water sports, fishing, blue water sailing, and more – regardless of their boating experience. It is the world’s leading boat rental platform with boats throughout the United States, Mexico, the Bahamas, the Caribbean, South America, and the Mediterranean. Founded by seasoned industry veterans in 2013, Boatsetter offers the most convenient and safest possible boat rental opportunity for both owners and renters, with 24/7 customer support on and off the water, America’s most comprehensive insurance for peer-to-peer boat rentals, covering owners, renters, and captains; and best-in-class insurance coverage internationally.
Creating a Horizon of Opportunities 
Boatsetter is first of its kind peer to peer boat rentals platform with world first peer-to-peer marine insurance policy. To ensure the Boatsetter a realistic possibility, its Co-founder and CEO, Jaclyn Baumgarten extensively worked with the world’s leading insurance platforms. She came to the conclusion that the traditional recreational boat insurance policies preclude owners from renting their boats, and traditional commercial policies are cost-prohibitive for occasional peer-to-peer renters.
On the contrary, she set Boatsetter to offer “Airbnb of Boating Experiences”, allowing private boat owners, for the first time, to easily, safely, and legally rent their boats directly to other people. It allows renters to easily rent high-quality, personally-owned boats all over the world straight from their computer or smartphone. Boatsetter also makes it possible for renters to easily find and hire a captain to take them out on the boats, making boating available to everyone, regardless of their boating experience.
Jaclyn not only built her company but the entire P2P boat rental sector. With Boatsetter, she is making the boating experience accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Boatsetter has succeeded in introducing entirely new demographics to boating. Today, in the US, the average age of boaters is 59 and aging, and 87% of boaters are male. On the Boatsetter platform, 39% of users are women, 79% of users are under 45, and 55% of users are under 35.
Jaclyn has created an entirely new industry – peer-to-peer boat rentals – that is turning around a three-decade aging trend in the boating sector, and bringing three new generations – Gen Xers, Millennials, and Gen Z, as well as women of all ages into boating.
Addressing the Root Cause 
According to Jaclyn, for optimizing the best performance of your company, it is essential to address root cause instead of wasting important resources on temporary solutions. She recalls a pivotal experience that helped Boatsetter to mark its global success.
During its initial period Boatsetter launched a push to increase the number of successful rentals on Boatsetter. The company had various options to pursuit this goal – increasing marketing, improving UI/UX, growing the sales team. However, within few weeks the company realized it was harder than expected to get renters placed with a boat given the large number and great fit of the boats that were listed on Boatsetter. After researching, the team of experts found that a significant number of owners were rarely accepting renters’ requests to rent their boats. Taking it further, Jaclyn and her team spoke directly with those boat owners and discovered that many of them didn’t have the time or didn’t live close enough to manage their boats themselves. Hence, they decided to build a boat management program to allow third party professionals to manage boat owners’ boats and rentals for them. Jaclyn mentions, “If we wouldn’t have analyzed or discovered the root issue and just focused on solving the more superficial symptoms of the core issue, we would have never succeed in optimizing at the most efficient point, at the base of the issue.”
Success Mantra 
Boatsetter believes it must continue to invest in development of its product and build it to scale well, which will further fortify the exponential growth coming at the company. Because with marketplaces like Boatsetter, Airbnb, etc., growth tends to increase exponentially, while it’s hard to grow highly skilled human resources faster than logarithmically, companies like Boatsetter evidently have to build great technology that will ensure its success.
Jaclyn at the helm of the company affairs asserts that as an entrepreneur and the CEO my area of expertise is in identifying a market need, and then pulling together and leading the team, funders, partners and etc. which are necessary to conceptualize and build the solution to cater the growing market needs. She visions to continue the same and desires leading the company growth with her expertise.
Testimonials of Excellence 
“Used Boatsetter for my 30th birthday and it was amazing! My group of 6 sailed around San Francisco Bay and I could not be happier with the service they provided.”

– Scott W. Thornburg

“I had an unbelievable experience using Boatsetter! I was completely new to renting boats and had only been on the water a few times, and the true simplicity of reserving a boat online with someone showing me the ropes at the marina right before launching out was awesome! I can just imagine how difficult this whole process would be without Boatsetter! Just like the iPhone, once you use Boatsetter once, you can never imagine renting a boat in the old way again! Thanks Boatsetter for an awesome day, I’ll definitely be seeing you again soon!”

– Jonathan Timianko

“Easiest way we’ve found to go out on the water! Great site, the boats are beautiful. The captains were super professional and friendly. I recommend looking here first if you’re looking to rent a boat in the US, the Med, or the Caribbean”.

– Angela Armenakis