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Marketplace · Travel

Sealife Connect

Egypt's first marketplace where boat owners, renters, and buyers meet in one app.

Year
2024
Region
Egypt
Platforms
iOS · Android · Web
Stack
Flutter · MongoDB · Node
Context

Where things stood.

Egypt has one of the richest coastal economies in the region, but its boat rental and resale market has lived in WhatsApp groups, phone calls, and informal agents.

Sealife Connect was founded to build the first real marketplace for this economy — listings, bookings, payments, and trust in one place.

Challenge

What we were asked to solve.

Two-sided marketplaces are hard in any market — seeding listings, keeping content fresh, and building trust between strangers.

Doing it in a market with a young digital-payments culture and regulated maritime rules added another layer: the product had to be honest about verification without scaring owners away.

Approach

How we built it.

We started with the owner side — a simple listing flow with photo prompts, pricing guidance, and a progressive verification track.

On the renter side we built a booking flow that felt like modern travel apps: cleared dates, calm pricing, and a single conversation thread per trip. Payments and escrow are staged so the pilot could launch without waiting on a full regulatory build-out.

Key features

What shipped.

  • Listing builder

    Owners create a complete, rich listing in under 10 minutes, with photo prompts and guided pricing.

  • Calendar + booking

    Clean availability calendar, instant and request-to-book flows, and a single thread per trip.

  • Progressive verification

    Owners can list with basic info, unlock features as they add documents, licenses, and photos.

  • Bilingual from the start

    Arabic-first UX with English secondary; both sides of the marketplace work in either language.

Outcomes

What shipping looked like.

First of its kind locally
Egypt-first
To publish a listing
< 10 min
Owner + renter flows
Two-sided
Payments + escrow roadmap
Staged
Tech

What's under the hood.

Mobile
Flutter (iOS + Android)
Backend
Node.js + MongoDB
Media
Cloud storage with on-upload resize
Maps
Mapbox / Google Maps hybrid
Chat
Socket-based trip threads
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