Taking a SaaS product from zero to market: Rota
A cruising guide for the Aegean, the Mediterranean, the Marmara and the Greek islands: dataset, geospatial analysis, subscription infrastructure and legal framework.
Client: Rota (a Skytek product) · rotamarin.com
Rota is an anchorage and marina guide for boats cruising the Aegean, Mediterranean and Marmara coasts and the Greek islands. We ran every stage from idea to market-ready product: the dataset, the geospatial analysis, the subscription infrastructure, the interface and the legal framework.
We chose this case because a single project put four of our eight services to work at once: SaaS, web software, e-commerce/payments and legal consultancy.
The problem
A skipper cruising these waters had two options: global cruising guides, or scattered forum knowledge. There were three concrete gaps:
- Turkish coasts and Greek islands were not on the same map. A boat crossing from Bodrum to Kos had to switch applications — even though the two coastlines form a single cruising region.
- There was no Turkish. Both interface and support arrived through translation.
- Payment had friction. Card fees and failed payments are a common problem with foreign subscriptions.
But the real gap was in the information itself: before dropping anchor, what a skipper needs to know is the seabed, the depth, and which direction the wind enters from. In existing sources this was either missing or buried in prose.
What we did
We built the dataset. Close to 700 marinas and anchorages, over 300 restaurants and points of interest — Turkish coasts and Greek islands together, in a single data model. The current counts live on the rotamarin.com homepage and grow with the data. We are not writing fixed numbers on this page, because we learned first-hand in this project that hand-written counters go stale silently — which is exactly why the homepage counter is queried live from the database.
We made shelter analysis computable. This is where most of the work went. For every bay we cast rays in 16 directions and measure where they intersect the coastline; that yields, numerically, which directions the bay is sheltered from and how many miles of unobstructed water the wind crosses from each.
Why this matters: a phrase like "open to the north" does not give a skipper enough. Whether the wind arrives across 2 miles or 40 miles of open water means two very different sea states from the same direction. We turned prose into measurement.
We made the product distributable without an app store. It installs on a phone like an app and opens full screen; no store approval, no waiting for updates. For a product that must work where connectivity is weak, that was a deliberate architectural choice.
We built subscription and payment infrastructure. Monthly and annual plans, payment in Turkish lira, renewal and cancellation flows.
We built the legal framework as part of the product. Privacy policy, terms of use, distance selling agreement and a data licensing notice. These were not texts appended at the end; they were decisions that determined how the subscription flow, data retention and cancellation behaviour would work.
Two decisions worth highlighting
Where we drew the line between free and paid. Live wind and wave data is open to everyone; exploring bays, keeping a logbook and reading community notes are free. What we put behind Premium is the part that is genuinely expensive to produce: the 16-direction shelter analysis, depth and seabed information, marina details.
We drew that line not by asking "how much can we lock away" but by asking "which part is the value we actually create." The free tier is enough to evaluate the product properly.
We turned data licensing into a product decision. Rota's place data comes largely from OpenStreetMap, which is distributed under the ODbL licence. That licence carries a share-alike condition: if you make a derived database publicly available, you must make that derived database available under the same licence.
At first glance this conflicts with a subscription model — "if we have to open the data, what is left to sell?"
We drew the line here: a derived place database and an analysis we compute ourselves are not the same thing.
- The place records we derive from OSM — name, type, location, country — are downloadable under ODbL. The obligation is met, and not grudgingly: we also share the conversion script on request.
- The 16-direction shelter analysis is not a database derived from OSM but a separate computation we perform on coastline geometry. It sits outside that file and forms the substance of Premium.
The result: the licence is followed to the letter while the product's sellable value is preserved. The distinction is set out publicly on the data and licensing page.
Making that call before launch rather than after matters. Left until later, it would have meant either carrying the risk of a licence breach or redesigning the pricing model from scratch.
Our own service page says the legal framework is set upfront. Rota is the concrete example of what that means.
Status
The product is live and the free tier is usable; the Premium subscription is in preparation for sale. ₺99 monthly, ₺990 annually.
Once sales begin, real usage and conversion data will be added to this page. We are not writing numbers here that we do not yet have.
Services used in this project
SaaS · Web Design & Software · E-Commerce · Legal Consultancy