Interview. George Dragne (Fishpointer): We are planning to engage English speakers in expansion push

Georgiana Bendre 18/09/2017 | 09:57

With fishing becoming more and more a passion or a relaxing activity in Romania and the technology becoming more and more popular, George Dragne came up with the idea of Fishpointer, the application developed to help fishermen. BR talked to Dragne (also the CEO of the business) and found out more about the application and his plans to finance the development of the platform.

How many people have used the application until now?

Fishpointer maps are used by more than 60,000 fishermen, and the application has more than 20,000 installs, which is an amazing result considering we have just started. Fishpointer application is our “proof of concept” model providing our users with constant data updates and notifications. In the background we didn’t stop developing, we’re busy implementing many more features with even more functionality for our next major release to all our users.

 

Will this application lead to an increase in tourism, to fishing places exchanges?

We strongly believe the fishing industry as a whole has a great deal to gain from our Fishpointer application as we provide not only fishing spot locations (with directions) but also everything related to your fishing experience including hotels and restaurants to name a few. Tour operators and fishermen worldwide will be able to use our application to plan their most enjoyable fishing holidays by simply using Fishpointer.

 

How do you plan to monetize the app?

Our Fishpointer application is unique in that it’s a totally FREE application (meaning absolutely no in app purchases necessary to unlock features) which is going against the industry trend for fishing applications. As such, we strongly believe that our application provides and will always provide the best in industry solution when it comes to community services and we’ve just started! Providing a free service is very difficult for any start up, but for us, it means that we can focus entirely on what our fishermen wants from their Fishpointer application experience. Our monetization plan is a B2B model where we provide the industry the unique ability to finely focus their advertising and marketing while severely reducing their of customer acquisition costs.

 

How much did Razvan Capatina-Grosanu invest in Fishpointer?

Razvan is a seasoned entrepreneur and serial investor with a very successful background in new technology investments. We were very fortunate to have him as our early stage investor and believer in what we set out to achieve with our Fishpointer application platform. His input has as a business advisor as well as his initial investment, proved our concept. His investment at the beginning of this year was EUR 30,000 and has helped us to deliver our completed solution launched just in March this year on the web, and after that, in April the iOS and Android versions. After finalizing the Beta version Razvan contributed EUR 18,000 more, so his total investment in Fishpointer is now EUR 48,000.

 

What is the financing environment for start-ups at this moment considering that you plan to raise EUR 200,000? What kind of investors do you target?

We have seen a huge change in the face of initial seed round and VC  investment for all startups here in Bucharest and Romania. We believe strongly that this is the start of a tech revolution providing all Romanian entrepreneurs the ability to gain the needed initial funding, and get up and running with their business ideas without needing to go outside of the country with their businesses. This means a lot to us as it shows Romania can now have its own “start up” industry right here in Romania.

We are targeting investors who can, like us, see the huge B2B potential our Fishpointer application has in this USD 75 billion per year worldwide fishing marketplace. We currently have just under 10 percent of Romanian fishermen as our active users and strongly believe our application will deliver cost effective customer acquisition results for the fishing industry here and soon to the English speaking fishermen worldwide. To provide all of this comes at a cost in terms of constant product development and technology, so that our ever growing Fishpointer community will always benefit with up to date solutions, services and technology support.

We search investors in Romania (angels or VCs), but also outside the country. Both options are available for us.

What are the expansion plans for Fishpointer?

We are busy planning to roll out and execute on a plan to engage English speakers (USA, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand) with our Fishpointer application and provide them our fast and effective “best in class” fishing experience and solution. They will collectively be our plan to unite the English speaking world of fishermen and later other counties and languages, so that Fishpointer can help all fishermen fish better and enjoy their fishing as a united world community.

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