Jani Gyllenberg - Fixing the expensive friction marine businesses learn to work around

Fixing the expensive friction marine businesses learn to work around.

When marketing, sales, operations, customer experience, and technology stop working as one, momentum leaks out - quietly, and expensively. The answer usually isn't another generic tool. It's a better way of working.

Founder of Untanglead · 20+ years inside marine dealerships, from the wash rack to the sales floor to the systems underneath

The experience decides the technology.

Technology comes last. First, define what the customer should feel, what the team needs to do, and where the business is losing momentum. Then work backwards to what should be built, connected, removed, automated, or redesigned.

→ Where is revenue leaking?

→ Where is the customer experience breaking?

→ Where is the team wasting time?

→ Where have broken systems become normal?

The right answer usually isn't more technology. It's the right technology, in the right place, serving the right experience.

The work happens in the gaps - where systems don't talk, handoffs break, and off-the-shelf can't keep up.

Find the friction

Look for the handoffs, dead zones, duplicate work, broken data, and customer moments the business has learned to tolerate.

Design the better way

Map the simpler path: what should connect, what should disappear, what should be automated, and how the experience should feel.

Build until it works

Strategy only matters if it ships. Build with the team until the better way is in people's hands and the old friction is gone.

Turning marketing chaos into plain-English business intelligence.

Marine businesses invest heavily in marketing, but often can't see what comes back - what a lead really costs, what a sale really costs, and which channels are actually moving revenue.

Untanglead Insights is the current expression of the same pattern: find the friction the business has learned to live with, pull the scattered pieces together, and make the answer clear enough to act on.

See Untanglead Insights →

Three times the business needed something that didn't exist.

So we built it. The industry noticed.

2025 Best Website

The Marine Connection website

Problem: The old experience didn't meet the customer where they were: "call for price," no real answers, and lead forms that felt like "leave your comments on the way out."
Move: We rebuilt it into a guided buying experience: real pricing, instant quotes, sea-trial booking, and deep-linked content that worked the way customers expected - while reducing the manual upkeep behind it.
Result: 45%

more leads

82%

more time on listings

149%

traffic growth YoY

15 → 93

SEO health

90 days

to pay for itself

3

person team

Laravel Livewire Tailwind Alpine Built by 3

2023 Marketing Innovation

Quoter with HubSpot

Problem: Quoting was slow. Pricing was inconsistent. Visibility was limited. Too much of the sales process depended on people remembering to update the CRM after the work had already happened.
Move: Moved quoting inside the CRM and connected the sales process to inventory, pricing, tasks, and customer behavior - so the work created the data instead of asking the team to recreate it later. Clean quotes out the door in under 60 seconds.
Result: 20,000+

quotes

60,000+

revisions

1,000+

boats sold

24 weeks

built by two

"Before Quoter, the accuracy of our data directly correlated with an individual's recollection… Forgetfulness is no longer an excuse."
- Timo Turkki, General Manager, Marine Connection

HubSpot Laravel Vue Stripe Built by 2

2015 Top Product

Interactive displays, taken national

Problem: Showrooms couldn't bridge a customer's online research and the boat right in front of them.
Move: Founded Distinct and built interactive touchscreen displays that closed the gap, right on the floor.
Result: Nationwide

dealer adoption, incl. MarineMax

2015

Boating Industry Top Product

10 years

still on showroom floors

Backbone

data foundation for Quoter

"Distinct is on to something big with their interactive displays."
- Kelley Barry, MarineMax

Product Hardware × Software National Rollout Top Product 2015

This is what connected looks like.

In most dealerships, the moment a customer gets serious is exactly when the experience breaks: the team is browsing inventory on the website, then jumping into another system to log the engagement, another to start the deal, and a slow desktop workflow to build the quote.

This example removes the handoff. The quote starts from the live listing page - the same place the customer is already making the decision.