About Frederik

Frederik Schwerdtfeger is head of product and growth at Borrow A Boat, a UK-founded hybrid marketplace and online brokerage listing roughly 21,000 boats worldwide through ~4,000 professional charter partners. Unlike peer-to-peer models, Borrow A Boat compares itself to Booking.com — sitting between charter companies and travelers, handling payments, negotiations, and support from first inquiry through checkout. Frederik has ~15 years at the company and helps run product, growth, and a free fleet-management SaaS that feeds live inventory data.

What we talked about

Marketplace plus brokerage — Borrow A Boat is full-service: ~50% of renters are first-time sailors who need hand-holding; high basket sizes mean people want a human on WhatsApp, not checkout-only self-service.

Seasonality and booking patterns — Post-summer is quiet; December–January planning surges; closer to peak season shifts toward spontaneous day charters booked days or hours ahead.

Labor-intensive sales — Pricing is negotiable, haggling is normal, and every boat sparks unique questions — chart plotters, cabin height, outboard horsepower — that chain back to marina staff.

AI for content at scale — A Claude pipeline rebuilt thousands of multilingual landing pages after Google's algorithm shift tanked SEO; strict human review remains mandatory.

Team downscale with AI — Engineering shrank from 20 to 2; company-wide from ~100 to ~25 post-COVID revenge-travel peak — AI, Intercom's Fin bot (40–50% of support), and MCP tools fill gaps.

Dense competition — Same boats appear on hundreds of agencies; Google keyword bidding and commission wars make profitable growth brutally hard.

Sharpest moments

On the business model:

we are a full service agency.

On German charter clients:

Germans, when they go on a charter holiday, they want to know everything.

On the engineering team:

It's two. It's from a team of 20 engineers. We are two today.

On Google's algorithm hit:

Our content just wasn't relevant anymore, and Google just didn't like us anymore.

On AI support coverage:

this bot today can already cover something like 40 to 50 % of questions.

Key takeaways

• Borrow A Boat lists ~21,000 boats via ~4,000 partners; typical booking is a 40-foot bareboat week in Croatia, with skipper options for first-timers.
• Sales is the most labor-intensive step — price negotiation, endless boat-specific questions, and a 14-day window of back-and-forth per lead.
• Data standardization has a ceiling; AI helps content and FAQ mining but cannot eliminate human agents for high-ticket charter sales.
• AI rebuilt SEO content across English, Polish, French, Italian, and Dutch after Google penalized old paragraph-style pages.
• Post-COVID volume normalization, Ukraine-driven energy costs, and Germany-to-Germany booking shifts forced headcount cuts AI partially offset.
• Agencies earn up to ~20% commission, but customer acquisition and labor eat margins — growing profitably is harder than growing volume.
• Consolidation is real — agencies merging with fleet operators and marinas — while 40–60% repeat booking rates reward relationship-based sales agents.