How Scout works — and every question we've been asked

⚓ Who builds Scout?

The Get Underway Syndicate (G.U.S.) — a crew organized around one idea: get buyers back on the water with the facts on their side. Scout is the syndicate's instrument; Gus is the hound who runs it. Every syndicate needs a scout.

🧭 Whose side is Scout on?

Yours. Follow the incentives in a used-boat purchase and you'll find nobody else at the table works for the buyer: the broker is the seller's agent, paid to move their own inventory; the big aggregators are paid by those brokers, so private-owner boats get skipped and every listing gets flattered; the surveyor's next referral depends on easing this sale over the bar; the lender simply earns more when you borrow more. The industry is built to close the sale — not to find you the right boat at an honest price.

Scout is the buyer-side instrument: we carry no inventory, take no commissions, sell no placement, include private-owner listings, and judge every asking price against real market history. When the ask is wrong, we say so — no one pays us to stay quiet.

How does Scout work?

1. 1Ask in a sentence. “Ocean-crossing tri under $100k near the Gulf” — that's the whole search UI. Scout asks a few questions back and narrows it down with you, like a friend who knows the whole market.
2. 2One door, the whole market. Hundreds of broker, builder and owner sources compiled into one search — no tab-hopping.
3. 3Every boat counted once. The same hull listed by three brokers shows as one boat, every listing linked, the price spread visible.
4. 4A short list, not a haystack. The hunt ends at 10–20 boats that actually fit — never 4,000 results to wade through.
5. 5Priced against history. Every ask judged against observed sold prices and past listings — not against other people's wishes. When a listing vanishes, its history stays with us.

🧭 How does the scoring work?

Two ingredients, always shown with their reasons — never a black box:

• Fit — how well the boat matches what you asked for: capability (can it actually cross an ocean? fit on a trailer?), size, layout, location.
• Price sanity — how the ask compares to what sister ships actually sold for, adjusted for the gear aboard (new sails and a watermaker are real value; the estimate line-items them, and you can challenge any line).

Coming next: profile scores — tell Scout what kind of sailor you are (the sea gypsy crossing oceans, the tinkerer who wants a project, the commodore who wants to step aboard and go) and every boat gets scored against your profile, not a generic average. Crew feedback will tune the weights.

Think a score is wrong? That's exactly what the scuttlebutt button is for — a score you correct makes the model better for the whole crew.

🗺 Where does the data come from?

Brokers' own sites, builders' used-boat pages, owner listings and community sources — collected politely (robots respected, human-paced), compiled and de-duplicated into single real hulls. We keep facts and links only: we never republish a broker's photos or prose, and we always link you to the seller.

Why did a boat disappear from my results?

Usually it sold or the listing was withdrawn. Unlike everyone else, Scout keeps the price history — every ask, every drop, the day it vanished — because that memory is what makes the next estimate honest.

How fresh is it?

Sources are re-checked on a rolling cadence — the boats in an active hunt are watched closest, so a price drop reaches you first.

Why does a listing show an AI picture instead of a photo?

Sometimes the listing site itself publishes a machine-generated illustration of the model rather than a photograph of the actual boat. When that is the only picture the source offers, we show it — clearly stamped AI ILLUSTRATION on the image — because an honest render beats an empty frame.

A render only ever wins by default. The same hull is often listed by several brokers, and they don't all publish the same pictures: one has a render, another has twenty photographs of the actual boat. When any source has the real thing, that is the one we show you and the one we send you to — the render is what you get only when nobody photographed her.

It is never a photo of the hull for sale: judge the boat at the broker's page, and read why we show them and how we detect them.

And on the wider question — where a machine helps build this and where it is kept away from the facts — our thoughts about the use of AI for this project.

🚢 What is Scout — and what isn't it?

Scout is listing-level market intelligence: search in plain words, one canonical boat per real hull, price history, and estimates with reasons.

Scout is not a broker. We don't take commissions, we don't carry inventory, and no one can pay to move a boat up your results — the whole product is trustworthy market data, and money never buys weight over facts.

Why only trimarans? The pilot fleet is trimarans — the first fleet aboard, not the identity. Scout covers catamarans and monohulls too; they join as the pilot opens up. Enforced in the data itself, so everything you see today is a tri.

What's in scope: real, used boats priced under $1,000,000. A boat with no asking price counts as new — "price on request" is the oldest trick in the yard for to-order inventory — and new builds, boats described as new, and order/command inventory are out of scope entirely. This is enforced in the data itself, at ingestion and at search: what you see is what Scout sells. Project boats (honest used hulls needing work) stay in, flagged, excluded by default — ask to include them.

💬 What's a “scuttlebutt”?

The scuttlebutt was the water cask on deck that sailors traded news and opinions around — the ship's original feedback channel. On Scout it's the 💬 button you'll find on every boat row, every estimate line, every page: one click opens a chat that already knows what you were looking at, so you never have to explain where you were. Praise, gripes, a duplicate we missed, a price that smells wrong — it all lands in the founder's queue, and useful notes earn sea-shells 🐚.

Crew opinions aren't a support channel here — they're how the product is steered. The crew sets the course.