Cruise Quack
A rubber duck tracking app for cruise ship passengers — register, hide, find, and follow ducks across the world.
The Problem
Cruise duck hunting is a popular onboard pastime, but there's no dedicated platform for registering ducks, tracking their journeys across ships and ports, or building a community around findings. People post sightings on Facebook groups with no persistent record or discovery mechanism.
The Solution
Cruise Quack lets anyone register a rubber duck with a unique QR code, print a sticker, hide it on a cruise ship, and watch it get found and re-hidden by other passengers around the world. Every sighting is logged with location, ship, photos, and notes — building a live travel history for each duck. A leaderboard, gamification system (points, badges, levels), and public profiles make it social and competitive.
Current Status
MVP built
Tech Stack
Key Features
- Duck registration with name, photo, size, and auto-generated unique code
- QR code label generation with printable templates for multiple duck sizes
- Sighting submission with ship name, cruise line, port/city, photo, and GPS or manual location
- Interactive global sighting map using Leaflet with duck emoji markers
- Full duck profile pages showing travel history timeline
- Gamification: points, badges (First Find, Globetrotter, etc.), and explorer levels
- Leaderboard with sortable columns and animated top-3 podium
- Public explorer profiles with personal sighting maps
- Activity feed on homepage showing latest community sightings
- Affiliate/cruise booking section and sponsor inquiry system
- Blog post management via admin dashboard
- Email subscriber collection
- Admin dashboard with full CRUD for ducks, users, ads, blog, and sponsor inquiries
- Automated duck retirement for lost/inactive ducks via scheduled backend function
- Google Search Console integration for search insights
Key Learnings
Built end-to-end on Base44 with React and no custom backend infrastructure. Key learnings include designing a fun gamification loop that rewards both duck owners and finders, integrating Leaflet maps with geocoding fallbacks for port cities, handling QR code generation and print templates for physical labels, and building a responsive mobile-first UI for users who are actively on vacation.
Invest in Cruise Quack
If you're interested in exploring investment in Cruise Quack, I'm open to thoughtful conversations.
This is not a public raise or pitch — just an open door for the right conversations.
See something interesting?
Some of the projects here are ideas in motion — others are experiments, and a few may turn into something more. If something caught your eye and you'd like to compare notes, explore possibilities, or simply have a thoughtful conversation, I'm always open to connecting with the right people.