Reeling It In: How A Social Network For Anglers Won 7m Users

The fish bites, you reel it in, you hold it in your hands - and then, what do you do?

Take a photo, of course. Or even a video.

“I don't know a single angler who does not take a picture or even a video these days,” says Johan Attby, CEO and co-founder of Fishbrain. “Most anglers like to brag about their catches - most of them are really passionate about it”.

In a little over six years, Fishbrain has become the most popular recreational fishing app and social network worldwide. This alone, over 2m new users signed up, taking the total to over 7m. In the U.S., the world's biggest market for sports fishing with 49m anglers, Fishbrain is the dominant app and network.

Fishbrain's subscription-based app enables users to share photos, chat with other users and share locations, and post details of catches. The app also provides information like air pressure and up-to-date weather forecasts. It can even tell you what fish you have caught.

Fishing is a growing market and it is big business too. Anglers spend a lot of money - according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the American Sportfishing Association, the total global sportfishing retail market is worth $200bn.

Back in 2011, Attby was living near Boston, Mass, having moved there from Silicon Valley with Tific, which had been bought by PlumChoice.  A former competitive cyclist, who studied Engineering Physics, Attby wrote his thesis for his Masters on Artificial Intelligence in 1988-9 when many of us had never heard of it.

Having sold Tific, he wanted to build a company from scratch and go after a big market. Fishing was that big market.

Data provided the opportunity. "There is so much data now that you can use, and an opportunity there if you can use that data efficiently," Attby says.  "We (he and his two co-founders) saw an opportunity for a vertical social network, not replacing general social networks but complementing them.”

Attby decided to launch Fishbrain in Stockholm, although he had thought about moving back to Silicon Valley. He says that as a startup, Fishbrain couldn't have competed on salaries for software developers whereas Stockholm offered plenty of local expertise in deep tech. He felt comfortable too with the startup culture. “It took ten years to get Spotify and Klarna going," he says.“There is a resilience which is important.”

“When you start a vertical social network, growth is very, very slow in the beginning because you have no users," he says. “And you don't have a lot to offer to users, because you don't have the data.

Now that it is big, the converse is true. The more users and the bigger the network, the more data Fishbrain has. The more data it has, the more valuable it is as a network to more users. 

Earlier this year, Fishbrain raised a Series B round of fundraising which took the total it has raised to $28m. Fishbrain's blue-chip investors include B Capital Group, set up by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, SoftBank Ventures Korea, and the Swedish funds Northzone and Industrifonden. 

Fishbrain's expansion means it has yet to make a profit. The aim is to make Fishbrain the most popular angling app not just globally, but in every country as well.

Ultimately, after all, what really matters in angling is the local aspect. Most people go fishing less than 100 kilometers away from where they live. As Attby says, "Anglers in Stockholm care very little about what's happening in Massachusetts or on Lake Tahoe even though Lake Tahoe is beautiful and there's good fishing there. It's super irrelevant if you want to fish for Pike in the Stockholm archipelago."

As winter draws in across the northern hemisphere, it is in the southern hemisphere, where Fishbrain is strong in Brazil and Australia, that anglers are becoming more active again.

Back in Sweden, Attby is focusing on extending the season. "Our users consume a lot of fishing videos and other material when they're not fishing, and that's something we don't do yet. Our biggest competitors today are not the direct competitors but indirect ones like YouTube and fishing videos on other social networks. "

Facebook, Fishbrain is after your anglers.