About Hulls.io

I'm Mike, and I built Hulls.io on my own.

I grew up in Birmingham — about as land-locked as England gets — boats were part of my life as a child: starting with my dad's narrow-beam 23ft Viking canal cruiser. The boats got bigger over the years, and many lock gates later he'd moved from canals to rivers; but the sea has always been where my own passion lies.

Now I'm on the south coast and looking for a boat of my own, I've found it to be a long and calculated process, which was soon filled with frustration as I trawled through the various boat marketplaces. A boat is a serious thing — often a piece of real engineering and craftsmanship that someone has paid a great deal for. Yet when it comes time to sell, you're expected to present it on a website that's drab, dated and clunky, and to pay handsomely for the privilege. Photographs that deserve to be admired end up in galleries the size of a postage stamp, half the images cropped away because the layout won't adapt to anything but one rigid shape. It always struck me as backwards: the more remarkable the boat, the worse it tended to look online.

So my first aim for Hulls.io was easy to say and hard to do — make the presentation as meticulous as the boat itself. A listing here should look and feel as considered as the vessel it's selling: imagery shown properly and in full, a premium interface, the kind of presence a high-value boat actually deserves.

The second aim was to take away the cost and the labour. Building a good listing the old way is slow and time is money. I wanted the opposite — so Hulls.io can generate the same advert, or a better one, in under forty seconds, drawing on detailed knowledge of boat manufacturers and models and one of the most comprehensive boat directories online. You bring the boat; the platform does the rest.

I run every part of this myself, which means the standard never gets diluted — if something isn't accurate, or isn't good enough, it's on me to fix it. And the part I'm quietly proud of: from the first line of design to what you're looking at now, Hulls.io is barely six months old. This is the marketplace I wanted but couldn't find — built properly, built honestly, and built to last. I'm happy to put my name to it.