Disrupting fishing tourism in Finland

The situation

The founder works in logistics and is a serious angler. He loved fishing holidays in Finland and could never plan one properly. There was no good way to find accommodation and guides in the same place, let alone book them.

He was bootstrapping. There was no round of funding coming to cover a two-year build.

The real problem was not the software

Every two-sided marketplace dies on the supply side. Without listings there is nothing for a visitor to book, and without visitors there is no reason for an operator to list.

This one had a harder version of that problem. The supply was small rural operators, lodges in Lapland and guides on the Saimaa lakes, in a country nobody on the team lived in, in a language the founder does not speak.

How I made the operators reachable

Three things, none of them technical.

A Finnish-speaking partner of the founder's did the first conversations in the operators' own language. Institutional backing came through partnerships with VisitFinland and the Finnish embassy, which gave a brand-new platform the credibility a cold email does not have.

The third was the part I built: a partner CMS simple enough that a lodge owner in Lapland can manage their own listings after basic training. If onboarding a supplier costs us a day of manual work, the marketplace does not scale. It had to be self-serve or it would not happen at all.

The decision to go MVP-first

The agency answer to a marketplace is a large quote for a large build. For a bootstrapped founder that is the end of the conversation.

I proposed the opposite: ship something small that could start earning, then extend it over two years while it paid for itself. That is why a self-funded founder was able to fund a platform of this size. The platform funded most of it.

What got built

A marketplace of accommodations, standalone guided activities and fully guided multi-day packages, with filtering by region, fish species and season. An interactive map of Finland for exploring where to find pike, perch, salmon, trout, grayling, arctic char and zander.

Named partners run their own listings, including Harriniva Hotels & Safaris, Aurora Holidays, Travel Utsjoki and LappeanLohi.

Four languages throughout: English, German, Finnish and Swedish. A blog covers fishing regulations and the practicalities of flying with rods.

I chose Next.js App Router with Supabase and Vercel, because a bootstrapped project cannot carry infrastructure it needs a specialist to operate.

Where the platform stands today

Around 200 accommodations, 100 guided activities, 8 full-service multi-stop packages and 3 resorts. Four languages. It is the largest fishing tourism platform in Finland and is expanding into Sweden and Norway.