Notes from Chris

Episode 1781

When Jonathan Newar was tasked to put together a fishing trip for his work team in Houston, he realized that he had a problem on his hands. Finding high quality fishing charters was tough, and he hated how tedious the process could be. As he recalls, he spent a lot of time searching outdated websites and playing phone tag with guides while wondering whether he could trust the limited information that he found.

Fast forward a year to 2019, and Jonathan was wondering if he could build a business around connecting would-be fishermen with guides.

He’d left his previous job and was taking some time to figure out what came next when he met his eventual co-founder, Attison Barnes, at a party. Attison had a keen interest in the outdoors, and when he heard Jonathan’s idea for a marketplace of fishing charters, he was hooked.

Any two-sided marketplace requires buyers and sellers, so the new fishing partners knew that they had to get guides on board first. They onboarded the first few guides in Galveston, Texas by meeting them in person at the docks and pitching them on the concept. (You could say they cast their nets upon the waters…)

There they learned that the number one priority for guides was filling up their calendar and booking more trips, which confirmed Jonathan and Attison’s hypothesis that this marketplace was needed. We could call that the supply side. On the demand side, their vision was for white collar workers such as themselves to have an easy way to leave the office and spend more time outdoors.

But as any founder of a marketplace can attest, getting initial traction is the hardest obstacle to overcome. Jonathan could build the site since he had a tech background, but the two had to hustle hard to get their first customer.

Having a business model that takes a cut of the fee paid by customers to fishing guides meant that they needed to keep both the customers and fishing guides happy. This, they accomplished by building trust into the system.

They take deposits from customers, who pay the balance of the trip directly to guides. They also go out of their way to make sure that customers who use their platform have a good time.

They also needed to get to scale quickly with a lot of volume, since they were only getting a percentage. Having said that, the two have come a long way—their boat is far from the shoreline. Captain Experiences now sees upwards of 300 bookings a month which adds up to more than $220,000 in revenue.

These days, they’re looking to hire more team members and expand their operations. By delivering a solid experience and working both the supply and demand side of fishing charters, they’ve managed to fill their nets and reel in the customers.

 

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  MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

• Hook your own fishing experience from Jonathan and Attison’s website, CaptainExperiences.com.

SEE ALSO:

• “Uber for Lawn Care” Mows Down the Competition: Four friends take a whack at the lawn care industry’s weeds and find ways to better connect vendors and customers.
• Father of 9 Starts “Uber for Tutoring” Hustle: After being frustrated in his search for the right tutors for his many children, a busy father creates a directory that has generated more than 100,000 user profiles.
• London Photographer Rents Camera Gear 1,100 Times: A London receptionist rents out his photography equipment on a peer-to-peer sharing site… over and over and over.

Inspiration is good; inspiration combined with action is better. Now get back to work!

Yours in the revolution,

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