As we approach PierShare's second full year in operation, I wanted to share how our company started, the progress we've made so far, and where we see ourselves going. But first, allow me to share a little bit about myself. I am originally from New Jersey and grew up around the New York City Area. Growing up we had cousins that owned boats, but we had personally never owned one. After finishing college at New York University, my parents decided to relocate to the Fort Lauderdale area, and they ended up buying a house on the water with a dock. Obviously the dock remained vacant for quite some time since we were not boat owners.

One day one of our cousins called my parents and asked if his friend from the yacht club could rent our dock for one month. We lived in close proximity to the marina, never realized someone would want to rent our dock, and gladly accepted given the boater's offer was generous. In amazement I watched as the owner of a 70 foot Azimut Motor Yacht docked at our house and handed my father a check.

After the 70 foot Azimut left our dock in late January 2016, I was surprised to learn that not only is it extremely difficult to discover great new places to dock a boat, but that the process is extremely cumbersome. For the past ten years we have witnessed amazing advances in ride-sharing technology, but it is striking that there have been absolutely no innovation in this arena.

The launch of our platform two years ago has allowed Boaters to discover great dock spaces and meet new Dock Owners that otherwise would not be possible without our platform. Our Dock Owners are offering their spaces to help pay for their real estate taxes or mortgages, and Boaters are enjoying the huge discount our spaces offer compared to the local marina. We have built up a good-sized inventory of marina slips, private docks, and a few moorings from Jupiter, FL all the way down to Key Largo, FL. We have developed a streamlined inquiry and verification system that gives Boaters the tools to reach out about great dock spaces in an efficient way and at the same time give Dock Owners confidence that they are going to be great renters. We are ready to scale this technology throughout the state of Florida and then into other states around the country.

Our Future Vision

While we have made great progress so far in connecting Boaters to great dock spaces, we feel that we have a long way to go before we have fully realized our vision of what PierShare was meant to be.

We think there is an incredible amount of innovation that can be made not only in making it easy and efficient to discover great dock spaces, but also giving Boaters the confidence that their vessels will fit at the dock in question. And when we talk about fitting in the space, we are not only talking about whether the boat will fit once at the dock, but whether the boat can safely navigate the route in order to get to the dock.

We also think that our platform can be extended to accommodate tons of new technology so that neither Dock Owners nor Boaters have to wonder about the ambiguities of a docking, such as whether a Boater is still interested in a space, or when they will be arriving or departing. One of our guiding principles is that the platform's technology should do all of the heavy lifting for our users, so you can spend more time boating and less time worrying about managing your boat.

We are incredibly pleased at the support that we have received so far from the 1000+ Dock Owners and Boaters who have used our platform. We are on a mission to open up the world's waterways in a way that's never been done before, and we can't tell you how excited we are to begin the next chapter in the PierShare Story, and we hope that you'll come with us along for the ride!

Jonathan Timianko

Founder, piershare.com