Why I Built Marine Schedule — Communication Failures in Ship Repair

An Unusual Domain

Marine Schedule is the most niche app I've built.

Most apps target general consumers. Random Lunch, CoinHaus, Toroners — anyone can use them. Marine Schedule is different: it's built for people working in the ship repair industry. B2B, vertical, specific.

It started with a conversation with someone who worked in the field. "Communication on ship repair projects is a mess. Schedules keep slipping." I asked why.

What Ship Repair Projects Look Like

Ship repair has a structure that's similar to construction projects, but with a few distinctive characteristics.

Multiple stakeholders across multiple locations. Ship owners, shipyards, classification societies (the bodies that certify vessel safety), equipment suppliers, and subcontractors all participate in a single project. They're often in different cities — sometimes different countries.

Time pressure is severe. A ship generates no revenue while it's in port for repairs. Every day of delay costs real money — sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per day. When an issue needs a decision, it needs one fast.

Documentation matters. Repair work has to be photographed, reported, and approved at each stage. Classification societies require it. Shipowners want proof. The paperwork is load-bearing.

The Existing Workflow

I asked how they were actually handling communication. The answer was painful.

"KakaoTalk group chat for photos. Phone calls for urgent things. Excel for schedule tracking. Email for formal documents."

Everything scattered. No way to tell at a glance which issues had been reported, which were waiting for approval, which were blocking the schedule. Information lived in personal chat histories and email inboxes, not in a shared system.

That's what was causing the delays.

The Solution

Build an app where all project stakeholders — shipowner, shipyard, classification society inspector — share one communication layer tied directly to the repair schedule.

Issues get reported in the app, with photos attached. The right people get notified immediately. Approvals happen in the app, with a clear audit trail. Everyone sees the current state of the project in real time.

The concept isn't new — it's what Jira does for software development. The value is in the fit: a tool shaped around how ship repair projects actually work, not a general-purpose tracker adapted for it.

The next post covers how I built the core issue tracking and approval workflow.