Nordic Startup News Early Stage Startup News From The Nordics
The Stockholm-based startup FishBrain is the leading social sport fishing app with more than 650,000 users. The team is founded in 2012 by the two Swedish guys, Jens Person and Marcus Fransson. Johan Attby the current CEO came into the picture a year later after selling his previous company, which was located in Silicon Valley.
After selling my company I knew that I wanted to build a niche social app for something people love to do. Because if you have a hobby that you are passionate about you don’t want to share the experience with your friends and family, you want to share it with like-minded. I was looking into different niches and then I found an article in a magazine that listed sport fishing as the world’s biggest hobby and I know how much anglers brag about their catches so I immediately knew this was the perfect niche to go after. I teamed up with two guys that had already started building a social network for sport fishing and after launching the FishBrain app in 2013 it has taken off very quickly. – Johan Attby, CEO of FishBrain
In 2014 FishBrain received 2.5 million dollars in a round led by Northzone and Active Venture Partners and have in total received around 3.5 million dollars in venture funding. The market for social sport fishing consists of more than 500 million users worldwide. FishBrain addressable market are right now partly the USA where they have more than 450,000 registered users out of 40 millions active sport fishermen, which make the market bigger than golf and tennis combined.
Right now we are building a huge user base and are pre-revenue. Our users love our app (4.7 in rating) so we want to grab as many users as we possibly can and as fast a possible. When we decide to monetise we have multiple ways of doing that. There are around 10 competitors in the US and there is no doubt that this is a winner takes it all market. In 2014 we became the largest and the fastest growing so we are on the right track to become that winner. We’ll continue building an amazing product that fishermen love to use. – Johan Attby, CEO of FishBrain
We asked Johan about what makes it unique to build a social sport fishing app versus making a running or food app and what the main challenges are.
Every day there are new challenges and new ideas that could be cool to implement in the app, but the main challenge if you want to be the world-leading app is to stay laser focused and execute on the vision one step at a time. Winning today is all about building something people love to use, not just like to use. – Johan Attby, CEO in FishBrain
Next article in this series will be about the Danish app Vivino, they currently have 8 millions users worldwide.
