Launch HN: Greywing (YC W21) – Automated ship operations focused on crew

Thanks! Our process has been client-driven from day one: we've got a good amount of technical and maritime expertise on our side, but it pales in comparison to the mountain of operational knowledge that our users have.

What this means is that all of our clients came on for the solution we were offering at the time, but each has had a strong impact on what the tools became, and what modules we've offered since then.

As an example, our first customer came on board for Covid-19 risk reporting (to improve communications with port authorities), fleet tracking and our routing tool. Under their direction, we released our port scanning tools and geofencing-related modules. Our second customer bought this product, and with their help we've been able to release (to name a few) a communications tool for port agents and flight tracking and heuristics.

This has been a good model for us: the benefit to us is an increasing price point for new customers as well as the ability to learn from parts of this process that wouldn't have known about otherwise, and the existing customers aren't charged for new modules and improvements.

This is indeed a great model that works well when the problems one client has can scale to others without a ton of customization.

What has been the most challenging aspects technically and business wise for you so far? What has been the most exciting/rewarding?

Cool ideas! Side note to @dang, it's hard to read text blocks like this in HN's light grey font. I copied and pasted it into a notepad window to increase the contrast.

Congratulation! Looks like a quite an interesting problem and domain to build software for.

How did you get your first customer? Was it easy because of Nick connections or, did the customer require lot of convincing and value demonstration?

Thanks! It's a mixture of all of these things, to be honest. We had visibility into and in the industry due to our work with maritime security, as well as the benefit of being in an uncontested space (vessel operations intelligence) which was in crisis.

However, our first customers were inbound, from the demos we uploaded explaining how CRY4 could help with security and operations. So it's likely all of these things combined - we've worked to understand what drove initial adoption, but as we become more established we're seeing that these drivers shift into different things. What's driving leads today, I think may not be these things exactly.