Cohort 14 Spotlight: Democratizing Fresh, Sustainable Fish with Reeler
In Blue Startups’ Spotlight series, we highlight the people and stories that make startups possible. In this Spotlight, we interviewed Spencer VanDerKamp and Lauren Pierce, the co-founders of Reeler. Reeler is an app that helps people buy the freshest fish for the best prices, right off the boats of local, sustainable fishers.
How did you guys meet and what inspired your vision?
Lauren and I have known each other since highschool, and were lucky to attend the University of Hawai’i together. While in college, we would go fishing a few times a week and sell our catch to local outlets to earn money and cover expenses. A common complaint among fellow fishers was the low and unpredictable prices for our hard earned catch. — Frustrated with the available market options, we started selling our fish directly to a growing list of friends, neighbors, and the local community. It quickly grew to the point where it got logistically hard to handle. Meanwhile, our fishing friends would reach out asking for help selling their catch too. We saw the need for a better way to connect buyers and sellers, so we created a mobile app marketplace to give people a direct hookup to fresh fish.
What has been your biggest milestone thus far?
While we are still in the early stages, it was very rewarding to see the Reeler app actually work for the first time, helping a local fisherman sell their fresh catch to someone they didn’t know. With little to no marketing, we have had over 500 fishers and 5,000 people sign up on Oahu and have facilitated hundreds of sales throughout Hawai’i.
Receiving valuable advice from other entrepreneurs who are in the same ecosystem as we are, at all different levels of success, has given us incredible insight and direction.
What are some of the biggest hurdles you’ve encountered?
We have definitely encountered some logistical struggles — the most prominent being the matching of buyers and sellers in the same geographic areas. As a marketplace we need to have a specific ratio of buyers to sellers signing up in the same area, but also at relatively the same time, in order to keep both parties happy by supplying them with what they came for in a reasonable amount of time. Luckily, we just received a significant amount of grant funding which will allow us to launch our first marketing campaign, targeting areas where we need more buyers for our most active sellers.
What advantages has Blue Startups given you and what has been most valuable to you from this program?
Blue Startups has given us a lot of confidence in knowing we are on the right track, but also hard skills like customer development, pitching and overall operations. The most valuable part of the program has been learning from and networking with mentors, investors, and other startups. Receiving valuable advice from other entrepreneurs who are in the same ecosystem as we are, at all different levels of success, has given us incredible insight and direction. While the road ahead is sure to be a bumpy one, we are more driven and confident than ever.
To learn more about Reeler, visit their website.
Blue Startups is a Top 20 Accelerator in the US (TechCrunch) focused on helping scalable-technology companies compete globally. Blue Startups aims to stimulate economic growth in Hawaii and create new business opportunities by providing promising entrepreneurs with mentorship, access to business expertise, product testing, peer review, pitch development, introductions to investors, and seed funding.
