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Finally, the date has come where we are in soft launch.
It has taken us a lot longer than anticipated but finally, we are finally here. We are ready for the soft launch.
If you are reading this article. You are most likely a friend or a friend of a friend and have a passion for sailing or boating. We will greatly appreciate your feedback and suggestions on how to develop the site more to your needs. This will be a community-driven website and we will always listen to your suggestions and needs. So let’s start with answering a couple of questions.
Why create another sailing or boating website and why Yacht Waypoints was born?
As someone that goes out to quite a few anchoring/moorings spots around Phuket, some new and some I visited before. I always was referring to a cruising guide, then go look at Navionics to see how the area looks around, for the ones that I have not been at before and then go and look at Google Earth. Then I would go look at the weather for the weekend and that followed by the tides. I would also do a search for photos of the waypoint to see if I can see if I actually would like to go there. Now I did this for most of my spots or as I call them my waypoints.
One day in June 2020, after having multiple web tabs open on my browser, I was thinking, there must be an easier way. I searched the web, I could not find something that combines everything into one package. So I decided to create it and share it with the boating community. I am sure that I would not be the only one that would love just to go one site and have all the information at my fingertips.
Why ask money for using the website and why the referral program?
We all know that most of the tools are available for free. Running a website does have some cost. I was trying to get all of the tools together put into one website, and they added on the ongoing cost.
How do I recuperate this cost?
I run adds on the site and or charge membership fees seems to be the obvious answer. Now, if you know me, you will know, I do not want to take something if I don’t deserve it. So in thinking that other people will be creating content, they should have the ability to earn from their content. The Youtube model came to mind. But it did not fit exactly with how I wanted to give back to the community. The next question I asked was who will most be benefited from advertising.
How will most benefit from Advertising?
Thinking about it, I thought there was more than just sailors/boaters that will benefit from advertising here. What if the local business around the way-point advertise at a nominal fee? O wow, that restaurant, the mechanic, the chandelier shop that is close to way-point. They support us and they seldom have running adds on Google and Facebook as their adds gets lost. Now we can get the exposure that is local and it will be most likely to people that would be interested in visiting them. This leads me to the next question.
How will we reach the local business?
Seeing as the people that created the content, way-point, was most likely to use the business, why not give them the opportunity to sell the ads?
Why the referral program?
Seeing as they created the content and now selling the adds, the user must get reimbursed for doing this. This seems to be the fairest way. So to manage that, I had to incorporate that into the platform.
Finally the soft launch.
So having to put all the tools together, then on how to manage it easily, it took a lot longer than what was anticipated. We are on 16 September 2020, and finally, we are ready for a soft launch.
Why soft launch?
As this project became more ambitious than originally planned, there might be some errors that could have crept in. I ask you to let us know of any errors or problems that you find. Also, this will always be a community website and hence the plan is to continue to drive the website to ever more usability and what you want in it.
I hope you will become a frequent user of the site.
Kind regards,
Louis van Wyk
Founder of yachtwaypoint.com
