Land rental for outdoor activities like hunting and angling is a multi-billion dollar business built largely on relationships. If you’re looking to hunt on private land, you usually have to know someone with land to rent out, or get in touch with a guide who does.
FoggyTrail, an online marketplace for short-term land rentals, wants to make planning a hunting trip as simple as booking a short-term apartment rental. Similar to a marketplace like Airbnb, the Chicago startup lets users enter a price range and an area where they want to hunt, receiving a map-based list of results in return.
Founder Scott Knight, a developer who grew up in Iowa City, said he came up with the idea for FoggyTrail when he lost access to hunting land after moving to California after college.
“Finding hunting land was really tough for me to do, and impossible without spending a lot of money,” said Knight. “So I ended up going back to Iowa in the spring and the fall to go hunting on a friend’s property — and that adds up.”
Around that time, social marketplaces like Airbnb were really starting to pick up. The way Knight saw it, the difficulty he had finding land was akin to the problem Airbnb sought to solve. There’s plenty of available land out there, but would-be hunters had a hard time finding out about it and getting in touch with the owners. Curious about whether an online portal could solve the problem, Knight set up a prototype site.
Knight said he knew he was onto something when the first organic transaction through the site happened almost immediately after the site went up. About a year and a half ago, Knight quit his developer gig and moved to Chicago to start working on FoggyTrail full time. He has been bootstrapping the company since then, save for an investment it received as part of the Elmspring real estate tech accelerator.
One of the biggest challenges of transitioning FoggyTrail from a passion project to a full-time job, Knight said, was to establish processes that would let him run the company as a one-person team without having things fall through the cracks, and to take a step back and make sure he wouldn’t get carried away.
“To build a business is not just about coding. Your time is limited on the development side, so it’s all about figuring out what truly is your minimum viable product, to avoid scope creep, and to figure out what you need to push out begin learning from your customers,” he said. “As a software engineer, you typically have someone from product telling you what they want, and you fight back. Now you have to be the product person.”
In getting the business side of a startup like FoggyTrail off the ground, Knight said, the most important thing is to build up a solid database of offerings for customers to choose from. A lot of his initial work when he wasn’t programming, therefore, was focused on onboarding properties onto the site. Today, the site lists nearly 600 properties for hunting and angling, and Knight said that number is picking up rapidly.
Knight said he currently has three full-time employees in addition to a handful of part-time contractors across the country.
The platform is open to farmers and other landowners who want to open up their properties for fishing and other activities like backcountry camping and snowmobiling, but for now he is focusing primarily on being the go-to destination for hunters.
“There’s so many different companies that provide products and applications that get people excited about hunting, but when it comes to actually getting out there, so many people are held back by not knowing anyone,” he said.
Images via FoggyTrail.
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