How did Tony Stout, founder of YACHTNEEDS build a marketplace and achieve major investment? SuperYacht Times found out more.How did the YACHTNEEDS journey begin?

After eight years of working onboard various yachts, the idea to launch YACHTNEEDS came to fruition in 2015 from my personal experience. One of the common problems we used to face while working onboard, was the tight time schedule to reprovision the yacht and finding trusted superyacht suppliers. 

The difficulties of sourcing products and services locally was becoming more evident each day as we were often coming into unfamiliar ports, and the owner or guests would turn up unexpectedly, or you would get a wild last-minute request from your guests. I thought to myself, there must be an app that can geo-position your location and that would bring up local, yachting specific sellers in, or near your location. 

I started researching for months only to find that there was nothing ‘digital’ in the industry with ‘location’ capabilities. As a side project while still working onboard, I started working on expanding the idea, and what the end result would look like. I spoke with my crew at the time, friends within the industry and sellers which I had been using during my season. Everyone loved the idea and I instantly had sellers wanting to…