Mae de Agua turns the ocean community into a membership network — A Rosvelt story

Mae de Agua turns the ocean community into a membership network — A Rosvelt story

How Mae de Agua, the water-lifestyle community founded by a PADI Master Instructor in Costa Rica, shipped a digital membership platform — wallet passes, referral engine, and an Airbnb-style experience marketplace — with Rosvelt.

May 18, 2026·Case Study

Mae de Agua ships a digital membership platform with Rosvelt

The Costa Rica–based water-lifestyle community turned to Rosvelt to replace scattered sign-up sheets and WhatsApp groups with a purpose-built membership network — wallet-based digital carnets, a referral growth engine, and an experience marketplace — built in days, owned forever.

Products used: Tickets · Agents · Deploy

Tags: Community · MVP · Membership · Marketplace

PM: Catalina Cobaleda


< 1 week — backlog to live

1 — PM hired

Complex features:

  • Apple Wallet & Google Wallet pass generation
  • Unique QR per member with referral codes
  • Airbnb-style experience marketplace with map search
  • Admin dashboard with tiered membership control

  • Challenge

    Carlos Eduardo Oller a PADI Master Scuba Diver Trainer based in Tres Ríos, Costa Rica, Carlos has spent over two decades in and around the water — teaching diving, leading expeditions, and building relationships across a sprawling, informal community of divers, freedivers, instructors, and ocean enthusiasts throughout Latin America.

    For years, that community lived in the usual places: Facebook groups, WhatsApp threads, Instagram DMs. Carlos would post a call — "Necesito buzos, freedivers e instructores" — and watch the same pattern repeat. People would respond, conversations would scatter, and there was no way to know who was in the community, what they offered, or how to reach them when it mattered.

    The off-the-shelf options didn't fit. Membership platforms like MemberPress or Wild Apricot were built for gyms and associations — rigid, overpriced, and utterly disconnected from the fluid, experience-driven world Carlos was building. What he needed was something that felt less like enterprise software and more like a surf pass you tap at the dock.

    Carlos wanted four things:

  • A digital carnet — a membership card that lives in Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, always in your pocket, with a unique QR code for instant identification.
  • A frictionless registration flow — name, email, captcha, done. No apps to download, no passwords to remember.
  • A referral engine — every member gets a personal QR-based referral code, turning the community into its own growth loop.
  • An experience marketplace — a separate destination where anyone can browse and book water experiences on a map, Airbnb-style, using their MaeCard as the key.
  • He arrived with a clear vision and a defined backlog — but no engineering team to ship it.

    Solution

    Carlos came to Rosvelt with the work already structured: a tight feature scope, a clear product hierarchy, and a single non-negotiable — ship fast, keep it simple, own the code.

    Rosvelt's autonomous agents picked up the backlog and started building immediately:

  • A clean landing page designed to be shared everywhere — social media, WhatsApp, dive shop counters, event flyers — with a single call to action: join.
  • Registration with anti-bot protection — name, email, CAPTCHA. Email uniqueness validation to prevent duplicates. No unnecessary fields, no friction.
  • Automatic wallet pass generation — on registration, the system generates a personalized Apple Wallet and Google Wallet pass with the member's name, unique QR code, and membership tier. Delivered instantly — the carnet is in your pocket before you close the browser.
  • Tiered membership management — an admin dashboard where Carlos controls two membership levels: .net (the base community) and .pro (verified instructors and operators). Bulk member management, status toggles, and tier upgrades — all from one view.
  • Referral codes with QR — every member gets a unique referral link and QR code. Share it at a dive site, print it on a sticker, drop it in a group chat. When someone signs up through your code, both sides are tracked. The community grows itself.
  • Mae de Agua .red — the experience marketplace — a standalone page built as an Airbnb-style search interface. A map with pins showing water experiences — dive trips, freediving courses, boat excursions, coastal retreats — filterable by location, type, and availability. Members book using their MaeCard, turning the wallet pass into a universal key for the ecosystem.
  • Carlos stayed in his lane — curating experiences, onboarding the first wave of instructors, and spreading the word — while Rosvelt's agents built, tested, and deployed. No standups. No Jira boards. No engineering hires.

    Results

    A scattered ocean community got the infrastructure to become a real network.

    By replacing informal group chats and manual sign-ups with a Rosvelt-built platform that Mae de Agua owns outright, the project gave Carlos something no off-the-shelf tool could: a membership system designed for his community, not adapted from someone else's.

    The wallet-based carnet changed the dynamic immediately. Members don't need to remember a login or download an app — they tap their phone. The QR code is the identity layer. The referral engine means every member is a distribution channel. And the .red marketplace turns passive community membership into active participation — browse a map, find an experience, book it with your MaeCard.

    The admin dashboard gave Carlos visibility he never had: who's in the community, what tier they're on, who referred whom, and which experiences are getting traction. For the first time, the community has structure without losing its soul.

    Just as importantly, the codebase was built to grow. The tiered membership system generalizes beyond .net and .pro. The marketplace accepts new experience types without code changes. The referral engine scales with the community. What started as a digital carnet for divers in Costa Rica is now a foundation for a water-lifestyle network across Latin America.

    *"Un crack!! Impresionante."* — Carlos Eduardo Oller, Founder, Mae de Agua*

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