Living in Hong Kong, my friend Benjamin Hadfield and I identified a market opportunity for renting junk boats—traditional red-sailed ships now motorized and made from teak. Renting these boats for beach and harbor excursions was popular but cumbersome due to the complicated process involving negotiations with local operators, some of whom had ties to the triads and varied prices based on discriminatory factors.

We aimed to simplify this process by creating an Airbnb-like platform from scratch, granting users the convenience of instant booking, payment, and availability confirmation online at any time. This service allowed direct booking of boats and additional services like food, beverages, and jet ski rentals.

One significant challenge was convincing vendors—especially boat providers—to adapt to this new system of instant booking. It required educating them on the benefits beyond traditional phone bookings. Ben, with help from myself, handled vendor management and business expansion, negotiating bulk pricing for packages since each voyage catered to about 30 people.

Our platform also offered the advantage of exploring unseen parts of Hong Kong's stunning natural scenery. Users could personalize their trips, combining aquatic adventures with multiple destinations around the islands.

I architeched and engineered Junks.hk, utilizing React, Node, PostgreSQL, and AWS, with Redis for session storage and Redux for state management. Ben handled the aesthetics of the site with modern HTML and CSS. While the site is no longer active, it's archived and viewable via the web archive.

Regrettably, the pandemic severely impacted social gatherings in Hong Kong, leading to the decline of the junk boat industry. Although our business remained profitable, the decrease in bookings didn't justify continued operations, leading to our decision to close the company as we pursued other ventures.

Despite the end of Junks.hk, the Startup was an invaluable learning experience in starting and running a bootstrapped business, marketing, operations, and maintaining a robust digital infrastructure on AWS. The platform was profitable from inception, thanks to our in-house development and staying lean, and was designed for high user traffic and interaction, mainly client-side to ensure performance efficiency.