Building a sailing community platform

Grand Large Yachting is a French shipbuilder with an active community of sailboat owners cruising across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and beyond. Many of them regularly look for crew members to join them on upcoming trips — and many sailors are looking for boats to step aboard. Until now, that exchange happened informally, through word of mouth and scattered conversations.

The team wanted a dedicated platform to bring this community together, built on Lovable so they could maintain and grow it themselves after launch.

A crew exchange platform where sailboat owners describe their sailing plans and the crew they're looking for, and where crew members showcase their experience, availability, and preferred destinations. The MVP needed to let both sides:

• create and update a profile;
• share intended sailing plans or availability windows;
• browse listings with detailed filters — departure dates, sailing zones, languages spoken, experience level, boat type;
• reach out to each other by email — no built-in messaging for this first version.

I started with workshops with the Grand Large Yachting team to understand the community before touching any interface. A few questions shaped the rest of the project:

• Who are the two main user profiles, and in what real-life situations will they reach for the platform?
• What information do they need to share for upcoming trips or availabilities?
• Which filters does each user type rely on most to find what they're looking for?
• How should the data model handle edge cases — like a single account being both a boat owner and a crew member?

Before designing screens, I mapped every journey end to end — sign-up paths for both personas, listing creation, browsing with filters, contact flows for signed-in and signed-out visitors, and the dual sign-up/sign-in branches triggered by contacting someone without an account.