Built by a broker, in the middle of the job.

Vesli started as a presentation problem.

A client would tell me what he was looking for and I'd go to work. Pull the options, build the brochures, put my information on them. Then I'd send them. Some in an email. Some over WhatsApp. A couple by iMessage because that's where we'd been talking. A few more over the phone a week later.

By the third round nobody knew what had been sent. The client had my boats scattered across four apps, and I had no idea which ones he'd even opened.

Then a client asked me something simple. Could I just send it to him as a link on his phone?

I couldn't. The only link I had was a consumer marketplace. No branding, not me, and every competitor's name a scroll away. So I kept sending files.

That's the gap. Real estate solved it years ago. Our industry, moving assets worth more, never did.

The market analysis was the second half of it.

When you're asking someone with a two million dollar Azimut to list with you, a bare list of comparables doesn't get you the signature. So I'd build real reports by hand. Averages, the closest comparable boats, the reasoning written out, branded properly. An hour of work, sometimes more, for one listing presentation.

Vesli does that in about five minutes. Same report, same quality, same branding. The hour goes back into selling.

What I wasn't expecting was the third thing.

A broker has two ways to reach a client: a phone call and a showing. Both need the client to be free. There was never a third place, somewhere a client could go on their own time to look again at the boats, say what they thought, and have me find out about it.

That turned out to be the most valuable part. Not that it's faster to send. That you finally learn something about what your client actually wants, rather than what he told you in the first conversation.

It's a small group using it right now, and that's deliberate. I'd rather it work properly for a handful of brokers who'll tell me when it doesn't than work badly for a hundred who won't.

If you're a broker, or you run a brokerage, and any of this sounds like your week, I'd like to hear from you.