Market & Audience Data

Working document for pitch deck data points. Every stat includes source and year for citation.

The Market — Headline Numbers

Growth & Participation Trends

The Retention Problem (Key Deck Slide)

Deck angle: Record participation but terrible retention. 16.6M people tried fishing and didn't come back. The tools, discovery, and trip planning experience are broken.

Fly Fishing Specific

Outdoor Recreation Economy (Macro Context)

The Experiences Opportunity (Core Thesis)

The $271B Experiences Sector — Massively Under-Digitized

This is the slide. The experiences sector is the fastest-growing segment in travel and the least digitized. Only 33% booked online vs 64% for travel overall. That gap is the entire opportunity.

The Operator Problem

Fishing guides and lodges are the extreme version of this. Most run on email, phone calls, and word of mouth. No centralized booking, no reviews, no availability.

Fishing Travel & Tourism

Adventure Travel (Macro Tailwind)

Consumer Spending Shift — Experiences Over Goods

Vertical Platform Comps — What Happens When Booking Enters a Sport

Every high-value outdoor vertical has (or is getting) a dominant booking platform. The pattern is consistent: aggregate fragmented supply, build demand-side network effects, then layer on SaaS, subscriptions, and content.

The Landscape

The Killer Stat

Fishing tourism at $89.8B is larger than golf ($27B), ski ($27B), and dive ($5–20B) tourism COMBINED — yet has no full-stack vertical platform. FishingBooker validates charter booking (~$28M on $60K). But fishing's Surfline — conditions + content + community + booking — doesn't exist yet.

Revenue Model Evolution (The Playbook)

Every vertical follows the same progression:

1. Marketplace commission — BookYourHunt, GetMyBoat, 57hours, FishingBooker
2. Add SaaS for supply side — GolfNow evolved from marketplace to full tech stack for courses
3. Add subscription for demand — GolfPass, Surfline Premium, Epic Pass

Investor Thesis Is Proven

• TCG invested $30M in Surfline + $50M in MeatEater — vertical outdoor platforms are a thesis
• a16z + Benchmark backed Hipcamp ($98.6M) — camping gets top-tier VC
• KSL Capital valued Alterra at $7B and backs Under Canvas ($115M revenue glamping)
• Vail is a $10B+ public company
• GetMyBoat hit $160M revenue
• GetYourGuide approaching $1.2B revenue at $2B valuation
• Even Recreation.gov processes $321M/yr and 11M bookings for federal campgrounds alone

See 🔒Vertical Booking Platform Comps for full deep-dive on each vertical.

Deck angle: FishingBooker validates the model — bootstrapped to ~$28M on $60K, proving fishing trip booking works as a marketplace. But they're charter-focused (saltwater, deep sea), commission-heavy (10–30%), and have no conditions data, no content flywheel, and no fly fishing / river / lodge depth. They proved the market exists. The question is who builds the full platform.

FishingBooker — The Incumbent (Honest Assessment)

What they do well:

• Deep supply side — 8,700+ captains is a real moat
• 400K verified reviews = trust layer that's hard to replicate
• Bootstrapped profitably — capital-efficient, no VC pressure
• Clean booking flow for saltwater/charter fishing

Where they leave the door open:

• Charter-centric — deep sea, inshore, bass boats. Weak on fly fishing, river guides, lodges, destination packages
• No conditions data — no river flows, hatch charts, weather integration, or "when to go" intelligence
• No content flywheel — pure transactional marketplace, no editorial, no community
• High take rates — 10–30% commission creates guide friction (The Hull Truth forums full of complaints)
• No pre-booking communication — captains can't vet customers, customers can't ask questions
• Cancellation/logistics gaps — BBB complaints, Trustpilot friction on refunds and no-shows
• Fishing-only — no adjacent outdoor experiences (hunting, river sports, adventure travel)

Positioning vs FishingBooker: They're the Booking.com of fishing charters. We're building the Surfline — conditions + content + community + booking. Different entry point, different flywheel, bigger surface area. Their 3.4M users prove demand. Their gaps prove the opportunity.

The Rest of the Fishing Booking Landscape

Adjacent threats:

• 🔒GetMyBoat + 🔒Boatsetter — merged Jan 2026, $110M+ combined funding, $500M+ in bookings. Fishing charters is a growing category for them. Lateral threat.
• 🔒Fishbrain — 20M+ users, $44.5M+ raised. Social + gear commerce. No trip booking yet. If they add it, instant distribution.
• Fly fishing travel agencies (Yellow Dog, Orvis Adventures, Angler Adventures) — concierge model, not tech. High-value niche but not scalable platforms.

Total identified funding in fishing booking alone: ~$90M+ (Guidesly $13.5M + Captain Experiences $6.1M + MallardBay $7.94M + Guidefitter ~$5M + GetMyBoat/Boatsetter $110M + Fishbrain $44.5M). Investors are circling this space. Nobody's won it.

What every single one is missing:

• No conditions data (river flows, hatches, weather, moon phases)
• No content or community flywheel
• No fly fishing / river / lodge depth at scale
• No "when to go" intelligence — all "where to book"
• Charter-centric — the river/freshwater/fly fishing world is massively underserved
• No programmatic SEO play — none of them are building search gravity from data

The MallardBay lesson:

They raised $7.94M and are pivoting to sell $99/mo websites and marketing services to guides. This is the wrong play. Guides don't want to buy software — they want customers. The right move: give tools away free to attract supply, monetize the demand side through booking. Supply-side SaaS in this category is a grind against operators who barely check email.

The Guidesly signal:

$13.5M raised with Greycroft and Elysian Park backing. Mobile-first, AI features. They're the most credible VC-backed challenger — but still playing the same game as FishingBooker (marketplace + guide tools). No conditions data, no content flywheel. They validate the market thesis but not the Surfline approach.

Content-to-Commerce Comp — MeatEater

MeatEater proved content-to-commerce works in outdoor. But they haven't built the experiences/travel layer yet. Meridia starts there.

Addressable Markets

Charter / Guided Fishing

Fishing Apps & Digital

Source Links

Analog Comps — "Surfline for Fishing"

Surfline (The Playbook)

TCG invested $30M in Surfline — a 35-year-old surf forecasting company that became the digital platform for surfing. The parallel to Meridia is almost 1:1.

Key stats from the Surfline deal:

• Portfolio includes Surfline, Magicseaweed (1.5M monthly users), Coastalwatch, Fishtrack, Buoyweather
• TCG also backs Barstool Sports, MeatEater, Food52 — outdoor/enthusiast media is a thesis for them
• COVID drove 86% uptick in surfing participation — fishing saw similar pandemic-era surge
• Golf tourism comp: $20B+ US market — fishing tourism is $72.5B globally and growing at 11% CAGR

Deck angle: Surfline proved that a condition-data utility + content + community can become the platform for an entire sport. Fishing is 2x the population, 7x the economic output, and has no Surfline yet. That's Meridia.

Notable: Surfline's portfolio already includes Fishtrack (offshore fishing forecasts) — they see the fishing opportunity but are approaching it from ocean conditions only. Meridia builds the full stack: conditions + destinations + guides + lodges + booking.

Source: Rockwater — "Surfline Gets $30 Million"

Deck Narrative Angles

1. Record Market, Broken Experience

57.9M people fish. $230B economy. But 16.6M churned last year — the worst retention rate in a decade. People want to fish. They just can't figure out where, when, or with whom.

2. Fly Fishing is Exploding

8M participants, 17% first-timers, $4.6B gear market growing to $7.8B. The highest-value angler segment is also the fastest-growing — and the least served by technology.

3. Diversity is the Growth Engine

Hispanic anglers doubled in a decade. Black participation at all-time highs. Women at 37%. The old demographic assumptions are wrong — the new angler doesn't look like the old one, and they expect modern digital experiences.

4. The Tech Gap

45% of anglers already use apps, but the fishing app market is only ~$180M — a rounding error against a $230B industry. The tech layer hasn't been built yet.

5. Experiences Are Under-Digitized (The Real Unlock)

$271B experiences market. Only 33% booked online vs 64% for overall travel. 39% of operators have no modern booking system. Every sport that got a vertical booking platform — golf ($143M GolfNow), diving (40% growth PADI Travel), skiing ($1B Epic Pass) — saw explosive adoption. Fishing has no equivalent. A $230B economy running on phone calls and email.

6. The Vertical Wins

GetYourGuide and Viator hold <15% combined share of a $271B market. Horizontal platforms can't serve fishing — they don't understand conditions, hatches, seasons, species, water types, or guide specialization. The winner in fishing experiences will be the vertical platform that speaks the language.

TODO

• [ ] Pull state-level fishing license sales data (Southwick Associates / ASA state reports)
• [ ] Find TAM/SAM/SOM framework specific to guided trip booking
• [ ] Get Fishbrain's latest user count and engagement metrics for comp slide
• [ ] International fishing travel — find U.S. outbound travel volume
• [ ] Add competitor revenue/funding data for market landscape slide