How Rightboat fulfilled its CEO’s market aspirations: being a safe second

MIN sits down with Ian Atkins to find out why not being radical is exciting in its own way as online buying-and-selling platform, Rightboat, secures its ultimate market position.

It’s not the average dream, to be second place, but it’s one which Ian Atkins CEO Rightboat is fulfilling. Well-known across the industry for being a key founder member involved in Boats Group – he will always be proud of the part he played in its creation – Atkins is now realising his dream of the silver medal.

“I was always looking out for the big competitor,” Atkins says of his time at YachtWorld (which subsequently became part of Boats Group and was sold to Private Equity in 2021), which he got involved with in the late 1990s, before leaving, retiring and then latterly joining Rightboat, “and I was always dreaming ‘wouldn’t it be nice to be a safe number two?’ and just provide a good alternative to the market leader.”

Recently released stats from the company point to a wave of brokers switching their online advertising to the platform in 2024, and thus placing Rightboat in the place Atkins wanted since its ‘official’ relaunch in 2023. The company’s global online audience has increased five-fold in 12 months, and continues to increase at a steady pace while its trade customer base has grown by over 1,000 per cent – from 30 to 375 – across 14 countries in the same period.

Read about Rightboat’s data pointing to increasing interest from female boat buyers.

It markets itself on its cost-effective advertising solutions and says it has highly targeted strategies to deliver leads. It works with brokers and dealers looking to sell new and used boats spanning power and sailing, with catamarans, sailing cruisers, yachts and inflatable boats all in the mix.

“I can’t say it’s been easy so far,” Atkins says of the last 12 months, “but as things settle down, we don’t have to be radical or extreme.”

Not being extreme is part of the beauty of being number two. Rightboat just needs to be the business partner that provides small and medium size businesses with a solution they can afford.

“Most importantly,” says Atkins, “we’re the partner that answers the phone in the tech support room when there’s a problem and a customer can’t fix it. A lot of our customers use our software to manage their boat inventory online. They’re accessing our database effectively so they rely on us to help them immediately if they press the wrong buttons.”

Challenging the market leader with no technical debt

Atkins posits that the leads Rightboat generates for its customers are just ten per cent of the leads-cost the market leader delivers. He notes that’s partly because he’s dealing with small and medium sized boats, which are obviously more popular than the superyacht market, but he’s also delighted with his tech, which he calls ‘bang up-to-date’ and points out that the company isn’t carrying any technical debt. “We don’t have stuff that was built 15 years ago that needs maintaining. That enables us to move more quickly with a modern solution.”

Without tech-debt, Rightboat has been able to readily adapt to AI functionality, for example, automatic downloading of boat listings.

“We’ve just built out our tech-stack and can take advantage of tech which was just not available before,” whereas other companies may not be so agile trying to incorporate AI into existing systems.

AI is expected to play a significant part in future developments. Specifically providing more market intelligence to the customers rather than sending them just leads. “We’ll be giving them price comparison – nothing radical if you’re at Auto Trader or Right Move – but pretty radical for the boat business,” says Atkins.

But even before that happens, data distribution has become a hot topic.

When he joined Rightboat in 2022 (the company was founded in 2006 – Atkins describes its early years as ‘a minnow trying to keep up with a whale’), the basics were there – database, content management and so on.

“We added more devices to make it easier to advertise online and to help brokers distribute their data around the internet,” Atkins says. This means the data systems allow brokers and dealers to move their listings so they can advertise on other portals as well as Righboat.

“We want to be their connection to the internet.

“All the datasets are different and if you want to distribute your data, the process for distribution needs to be quite flexible. No two systems have the same data structure and although there are protocols that exist, they’re old fashioned. One area where we are really successful is that we can say ‘we will do everything technically and distribute the data wherever you want it to go’.”

Financing expansion of online boat marketplace

That strategy has been in place for circa 12 months. The company was ‘officially’ launched at SIBS 2023 after raising money from private investors to finance the expansion from primarily UK-based to international.

“The justification for supporting us – in every case – was that we’d done it before,” explains Atkins who bought sales and tech people onboard – almost all ex-Boats Group team members. “We’ve been able to move fast because of the relationships we’ve had with people before, and we’re light on our feet. There’s less than 20 people in total.”

Now the company has about 375 customers which are split between the US And Europe 50/50. Rightboat claims its price point is approx 10 per cent of that charged by market leader (depending on product). Most of the current customers are family-owned businesses.

“There are very few major corporate players so the typical broker and dealer is a small or medium sized enterprise with a limited budget and 80 per cent of their marketing spend goes online. If the cost of advertising goes up significantly it causes them a headache. People were looking for an alternative.”

Understanding yacht broker and dealer communities

Boats Group is a strong value proposition to big brokers but as Atkins points out, more than 60 per cent of the yacht broker and dealer community is small to medium sized businesses and they have different economics to the big corporations.

“As the market leader has increased prices at different times of year, and in different areas, there has been small waves of people who can’t afford that solution any longer. If advertising online works, there is no need to think about changing it. If that becomes expensive, you know it’s hard to find an alternative to that supply. We find brokers and dealers like having us around as at the very least it gives them a negotiating position and a choice to jump across to us fairly seamlessly.

“The waves come every three months and now we’re also into organic customer growth. When we first launched a year ago, we had 100 brokers in two months that got onboard. Because of boat shows we were able to speak to them face to face and reassure them of who we are. Now it’s a steady hum, rather than wave after wave.

“We’re providing a simple service to people who need it. That’s exciting in its own way.”

All images courtesy of Rightboat.