Captain Experiences, an Austin-based online business, got started when Jonathan Newar had so much difficulty booking a fishing trip that he drove to Galveston to meet fishing guides personally.

Captain connects fishing guides with adventurers looking to book a trip. Launched early in the pandemic, it has grown from 5 to 11 employees and brought in $2 million in seed investment funding, said Newar.

More than 750 fishing guides are affiliated with Captain, which has helped book thousands of trips, he said. The company takes a small commission for every booking.

Investors were drawn to Captain by its success and the untapped potential they saw in it, Newar said. He said guides lose a tremendous amount of business due to the fragmented nature of the trip-booking process as it currently exists. 

“But if they were aware of Captain and how easy we make getting out there, we think a lot more people will jump at the opportunity to do that,” he said.

On the supply side, the online booking service makes it easier for guides to offer more fishing trips. That could lead to a part-time guide job turning into a full-time career, he said.

Captain makes taking on more fishing trips easier for guides. They won’t be taking calls to book other groups, which could make them miss helping someone net the biggest catch of their life, he said. That group wouldn’t book another trip after that negative experience.

Captain sends an email and text about fishing trip offers. The guide taps into the system to confirm or decline the trip in two clicks, he said, with confirmation immediately sent to both parties. Guides aren’t penalized for declining trips.

In an interview with Kinute, Newar — who is CEO and co-founder of the company — explained how Captain Experiences got its start, and why it's thriving.

Jonathan Newar of Captain Experiences waits for the fishing boat to reach a good spot while on a fishing trip to Africa. Photo by Austin Stapleton

Q: What is the origin story of Captain Experiences?

A: I was working in oil and gas in my hometown of Houston when the company I was working for sold. And I said, “Hey guys, we always talk about it, let’s finally book that fishing trip.” They said, “Great job, Jonathan. You just nominated yourself to book us all a trip.”

From there, I said, “OK, you're on how hard can it be?”... I Googled Galveston fishing charters. And yeah, it was just like a slap in the face. I said, “Hey, if you can book an Airbnb or call an Uber, why am I playing phone tag with fishing guides all day?”

So I drove down to the docks in Galveston and met with these guides and to my amazement, they said, “We'd love to design a site that made it quick and easy for us to earn more trips, manage our calendars, all that good stuff.”

I then teamed up with my co-founder, Attison Barnes, on the technology side. And he's a big hunter and fisherman himself. We launched CaptainExperiences.com in March 2020. And that was a pretty tricky time to launch much of anything really, but we stuck with it.

During the pandemic, a lot of guides couldn't really afford to be spending time marketing their services. So, they really gravitated towards our model, which is, we only get paid when we bring a trip.

Tell me about the trip to Africa.

I was fortunate enough to go on a family safari a few years back before starting Captain Experiences with this amazing guide Dom. And Dom has been a professional safari guide for upwards of 20 years in Tanzania, Botswana, Gabon and various other countries in Africa. And it turns out that he's an avid fisherman as well. We became very close friends on our safari.

And after I launched Captain, Dom followed it up and said, “Hey, I’m over my career as a safari guide, I've been looking to test out all these different locales across Africa as major sport fishing destinations. And I'd love to partner with you guys to do that. You have to come over and fish with me.”

... This past November we dove in and spent a week fishing the Great Ruaha River for tiger fish. Then we went offshore and caught swordfish, dogtooth tuna, which is a pretty unique species. Wahoo mahi mahi, blackfin tuna, these crazy, unique species of snapper that they have over there. You name it. It was an amazing trip. And then we bookended things by fly fishing for rainbow trout in the foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro that had been introduced over 100 years prior by European expeditions.

Jonathan Newar poses with his "catch of the day" on the African fishing trip. Photo by Austin Stapleton

How are the notions to expand it beyond fishing going?

Not just yet because within fishing, there's so much that we want to conquer. There's freshwater, saltwater, fly fishing, and conventional. And so, in our first year, it was really just focusing on conventional saltwater fishing in Texas. And then our second year was really about expanding across the Gulf of Mexico, Texas to Florida. And then our big push this year is to expand coast to coast across the U.S. within freshwater and saltwater fishing, fly and conventional.

And then we also hope to expand into hunting in Texas this year ahead of the fall season, but we'll see if we can accomplish that this year.

What was that transition like? You were in oil and gas finance, now you're in the adventure/travel/hospitality industry.

I think there are a lot of similarities between oil and gas and what we're doing with Captain. But in terms of dissimilarities, I think the biggest thing is just marketing. With oil and gas, there's no such thing as marketing. You really take whatever price is dictated by the market, it's a commodity.

But with Captain it's consumer travel and consumer experiences. You really need to think about who your customer is, and what pain point you're solving for them and how you can really make a 10x experience for them, that's 10x better than the current status quo.

And then to even add a wrinkle to that we run a two-sided marketplace: you have what we call adventures on the demand side and then guides on the supply side.

The intention was with growth to also increase the number of employees. Have you gotten to that stage yet?

Prior to our recent fundraising, we had a small but mighty team of five and we've now grown to a team of 11. We've more than doubled just in the last few months. That's been the most rewarding part of it is just building the team.

The idea was good enough that you picked up investment. How did that go?

We've now partnered with really some of the best investors in the world. Andrew Chen at a16z is one of the leaders in terms of consumer marketplaces. Looking Glass Capital, Adam Besvinickt out of New York, led the round.

Adam at Looking Glass is super excited about our potential to expand across all outdoor sports and geographies. And what's most exciting to a lot of these investors is the potential for Captain to really tap into the untapped demand and also untapped supply.

Give me an idea of the ranges of costs might be for a person or a group to go.

Pricing totally varies everything from a single person half-day walking wade trip, something like that could be as low as $250 or $300, and that's with everything included rod reel, tackle, fly tackle, bait if you're fishing with bait, what have you. But for a standard sort of two-person, half day, in-shore fishing trip for speckled trout, redfish, things like that, that sort of trip is usually around $600, I'd say.

What is your favorite part of what you do?

In terms of my favorite part of what I do, it's reading reviews. I love reading every single review that comes in after our trips and am proud to say that our average review score is 4.96/5 after thousands of trips!

Jonathan Newar took a trip back to Africa for a fishing journey with a guide who had become a friend. Photo by Austin Stapleton