Jennifer Kerum is building the intake tool nobody sold her

The first product a luxury yacht charter brokerage wants is not a client-facing chatbot. It is an intake tool that asks for a vibe instead of a boat specification. Jennifer Kerum, co-founder of Anchor Croatia, a charter brokerage on the Adriatic, is building it herself, because around eighty percent of her clients need substantial education before they can say what they want.

She is not shopping for it. She is nine years into the business, has no engineering team, and describes struggling to find tools she can use.

What is vibe-based intake?

Vibe-based intake is a qualification step that asks a client to describe the experience they are imagining in natural language — the occasion, the atmosphere, the feeling — rather than requesting boat types, lengths or specifications they do not have. Kerum's example of the input:

"Someone being like, 'My vibe is Aperol Spritz and drinking with the background of pine trees,' and they'd be like, okay, Croatia is a good option."

Her description of what she is trying to build:

"What we're trying to do is build out something that you're able to interact with and say, 'This is what I want, this is my budget' — or even like a vibe. I'm all about experiences, right?"

Why does the broker's first call run backwards?

Because the client arrives without the vocabulary the form asks for. Galina Fendikevich, who hosts Artificial Reality, the AI buyer-evidence podcast, described her own behaviour as a charter customer: she does not arrive knowing boat types, she arrives knowing she wants a birthday that feels like a certain thing. Kerum's response was that this is exactly the point, and that the first call is spent excavating what the client cannot state.

Where she wants the tool to sit:

"The first point of contact is you come to our website and you do — it's almost like an intake without calling it an intake form. It's like, what's your vibe? So that the first call you have with me, I can really give you some solid information. Versus normally, when the first call you have with me, it's I'm trying to learn anything to get you on the same page."

The commercial case is unpaid expert time. Around eighty percent of clients need substantial education before they can specify anything, a single conversation can run as long as a month and a half, and not all of them convert.

What would the product have to do?

Five requirements, drawn from what Kerum describes wanting:

• Accept a natural-language description of a desired experience, not a specification list
• Establish budget early, because that is where most conversations break
• Translate an expressed vibe into destination, boat type and season
• Hand the broker a qualified starting point instead of a blank first call
• Live on the website as the first point of contact, before any human conversation

Why is she building it rather than buying it?

Because she looked and could not find it. Kerum's assessment of her sector is that it gets overlooked: "charter companies and even sales companies and yachting almost get forgotten in the AI world. There isn't a lot of tools that cater to us." The only AI product she names in daily use at Anchor Croatia is Gemini, translating client email inside the email system her team already works in.

So she is building, and the build itself is the request that gates every other one:

"Right now I am trying to build this platform and this website, and I'm really struggling to find the tools to actually help me get to where I am."

Her benchmark is website builders:

"When you used to build a website twenty years ago, you needed to have a web developer, right? And now you have so many different programs that even if you didn't know anything about websites, you could just plug and play."

"It would be nice to see it more accessible, and to not have to go through like five hundred loops."

She also prices in a second cost vendors rarely quote: after implementation, "we're going to have to go to a training program to actually train our employees."

What should a builder take from this?

Two things. The first is that this demand signal is stronger than a survey response. An operator with a nine-year-old business and no engineering team is attempting the build because nothing exists to buy, and Artificial Reality would read that as a specification rather than a lead.

The second is the shape of the sale. Kerum is not asking for a model. She is asking for something she can assemble without hiring an engineer, integrate with the website and client systems she already runs, and use without learning a new specialist vocabulary first. Every step that fails those three tests is one of the five hundred loops.

She has publicly offered to put builders on a boat to work it out. If your setup takes longer than the first call it is meant to replace, you have not removed the work, you have moved it. How much of your onboarding could a non-developer finish alone?

Where this comes from

S1E2: How a luxury yacht company uses AI without losing the personal touch — the full interview with Jennifer Kerum. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.