Fishing Charter Marketplace Hooks Clients and Guides

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hey there, what's up? Thank you for tuning in today. I'm excited to welcome you to another episode of Side Hustle School. This is episode 1781, 1,781. I'm so glad you're out there.

Got a story for you today. Two friends team up to build Airbnb for fishing. What is that? Well, it is a marketplace of fishing trips that connects guides and clients worldwide. I was actually gonna say nationwide, but I was spending some time on their website.

I see that they offer tours in Costa Rica, Mexico, and even Zambia, among other places. So they're going global. When I say Airbnb for fishing, it's kind of like how in some episodes past, we have featured the Airbnb of photography rentals, as well as the Uber of lawnmowers, the Uber of tutoring, and probably some others as well. And all these things together, they're known as the aggregator business model, where you are in essence a network that connects customers and service providers. So here in this one, we have the connection between customers who want to go on a fishing trip and guides who take them on the trip.

The biggest problem for the guides is not enough business. And the biggest problem for the customers is finding the right guide. Thus, the Airbnb of fishing charters that you'll hear about in this story. Fishing charter marketplace hooks, clients, and guides. That's the story coming up after this quick thank you to our sponsor.

[Music]

When Jonathan Neuer was tasked to put together a fishing trip for his work team in Houston, he realized he had a problem. 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 As he recalls, he spent a lot of time searching outdated websites and playing phone tag with guides, all while wondering whether he could trust the limited information that he found.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. And just a quick side note here, there is some debate among grammarians over the feminine form of fishermen.

Is it in fact fisherwoman? Some prefer the gender neutral fisher, but neither of those has really caught on. English is a weird language. All right, back to the story. Jonathan had left his previous job and was taking some time to figure out what came next when he met his co-founder Addison Barnes at a party.

Addison had a keen interest in the outdoors. And when he heard Jonathan's idea for a marketplace of fishing charters, he was hooked. Now any two-sided marketplace needs buyers and sellers. So the new fishing partners knew they had to get guides onboard first. They onboarded their first few guides in Galveston, Texas by meeting them in person at the docks and pitching them on the concept.

I guess you could say they cast their nets upon the waters or maybe they just asked the guides, they talked to them. Okay, there they learned that the number one priority for guides was filling up their calendar and booking more trips, which confirmed Jonathan and Addison's hypothesis that this marketplace was needed. And we could call that the supply side. On the demand side, their vision was for white color 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.

Jonathan could build the site since he had a tech background, but the two had to hustle hard to get their first customer. That first customer came from a trade show whom Jonathan had overheard saying he wanted to do an expensive offshore trip but couldn't find a guide. Hey, what a coincidence. Jonathan had the answer in the form of his new business, which he and Addison were now calling Captain Experiences. That was pretty cool, but randomly stumbling upon clients by eavesdropping at conferences didn't seem like the most sustainable growth strategy.

So they decided to focus on SEO. And in the long term, that's what would help them scale, not just showing up at events or leaving a comment in a forum. Of course, this wasn't the only challenge. Having a business model that just takes a cut of the fee, a percentage, meant that they needed to keep both the customers and the 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, or at least they try. Because as Jonathan and Addison both note, having a good time in the world of fishing is not always inevitable. No one can guarantee good weather and fish can be fickle, even when you pay them. 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. It wasn't easy. Neither one of them took a salary for the first year, and it was only on Memorial Day in year two that they reached an inflection point, booking more trips during that weekend than they had in the month prior.

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. [Music]

Well, there you have it, the Airbnb of fishing charters. As I said, we've had a few different kinds of businesses profiled over the years that are doing some sort of aggregate business model. One of the big challenges is achieving scale, because you're making a relatively small amount of money for each booking or each service.

But hopefully, if you kind of branch out to enough cities, have enough guides, et cetera, then it can really take off, which it seems like is happening here. So good work, Jonathan and Addison. We've also got some quick advice from Jonathan. He says, if you're thinking of starting a side hustle, whether it's one like ours or something different, he says, you won't miss your free time nearly as much as you think, because if you find something you care about, you're gonna dive in headfirst. I like that advice.

I really appreciate work-life balance and alignment and all that, but I think there's also a time to really jump into something. If you're excited about something, why not give it your all and see what happens? Okay, that's it for today. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If you'd like to see the show notes for today's episode, maybe check out the website for caption experiences or anything else I mentioned in this episode, just head on over to sidehustleschool.com/17811781.

Thank you so much for tuning in. That's all for today, but I'll be back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

From the Onward Project.