Shipme

The market opportunity

The Netherlands → Suriname shipping corridor is small in volume but long in friction. Most freight between the two countries moves through 3–4 layers of intermediaries (forwarders, agents, customs brokers, last-mile carriers), each with their own paperwork, their own portal, their own way of saying "the container left." Shippers send a 20-foot dry box and then play telephone tag for six weeks.

Shipme's pitch was: one platform, one login, one source of truth. Real-time container tracking, bilingual paperwork (Dutch / English / Sranan Tongo), customs pre-clearance, on-time guarantees. The hard part wasn't the software — it was convincing freight forwarders, who tend to be deeply skeptical of new tech vendors, that they were looking at a real product, not a slide deck with a domain name.

What I built

The deliverable was an interactive Next.js demo designed to be presented in a sales pitch. Not a Figma file. Not a recorded video. A live URL freight forwarders could click through themselves while the founder talked.

• Animated SVG route map — a great-circle path between Rotterdam and Paramaribo, with a small container icon traveling along it via animateMotion. The dashed line redraws as it animates. It looks like an actual logistics dashboard, not a marketing illustration.
• Glassmorphic stat cards — in-transit count, ETA, on-time percentage. Updates with smooth count-ups when filters change.
• Container detail timeline — five-stage timeline (origin pickup → port → ocean → port → final delivery) with realistic timestamps and customs status indicators.
• Multi-language toggle — fully translated UI in Dutch, English, and Sranan Tongo. Sranan Tongo coverage was a deliberate signal to Surinamese partners that this wasn't a Dutch product talking down to them.
• Persona flows — the demo branches based on whether the visitor identifies as "shipper" or "forwarder", showing the relevant onboarding path.

The visual choices

I treated this as a pitch tool, not a B2B SaaS dashboard. Every screen is high-contrast, keyboard-navigable, and intentionally cinematic. Procurement directors don't care about your color system. They care whether your product feels real. Animation makes it feel real.

The brand palette is dark navy with hot-orange and lime accents — colors that pop on projector screens in conference rooms with bad lighting. Tested in three different rooms before we shipped.

What it accomplished

Shipme used the demo in 11 sales meetings in the four weeks after delivery. Two converted to paid pilots. The founder told me the demo "did what twenty pitch decks couldn't" — gave a non-technical buyer permission to imagine using the product day-to-day.

If you're selling a complex product to a skeptical buyer

The pitch demo is the highest-leverage thing a founder can invest in. A great deck tells the story. A great demo shows the product working. More on what a high-conversion pitch deliverable looks like.