As someone who loves to fly fish, but also design and code, Joost set out to build an online fly fishing platform. In 2022, flyfishcircle.com was launched. The latest addition is the FlyFish Circle Boutique: a platform where you can buy flies directly from fly tyers. We thought it would be interesting to interview the person behind FlyFish Circle and the Boutique to give you a peek behind the scenes.
How did FlyFish Circle start?
It really was born out of personal frustration. When I went abroad I noticed it was often difficult to find the right information about licenses, insect life, fish species and more. Next to that, there was no good place online to find fly fishing guides across the world. As a digital maker, my mind instantly went to: let me build this myself. There are many ways to describe what I do: entrepreneur, solopreneur, digital maker. They all boil down to the same thing: you define, design, code and grow something of value, by yourself, and make it available to others.
There are many fly fishing websites available, how is FlyFish Circle different?
First of all, I think there will always be a place for multiple fly fishing websites. I spoke to founders of other websites, and each has their unique vision which is great to see. Fly fishing enthousiasts are generally very open and friendly and I don’t really see these as competition. For my own vision: FlyFish Circle should be informative, beautiful, unique and usable. There should be things to discover that you can not find anywhere else. And what’s very important to me is that I don’t want it to be plastered with ads up to the point that it feels completely unusable. I spend a lot of time on the design to make sure that it’s a nice place to browse around.
How do you build all of this by yourself?
The process of creating and building to me is equally fulfilling to fly fishing. Combining them just makes me very happy! And if you do something you love, everything becomes much easier. And the way I work is pretty simple: I don’t look at the huge mountain of work that is ahead, because otherwise I would probably never start. I just start building, and piece by piece everything comes together.
Where did the idea of the Boutique come from?
When I started being more active on Instagram with FlyFish Circle, I noticed that there are many fly tyers that make beautiful and unique flies. But I realized that you need to be lucky to stumble upon these flies. And for the fly tyers: many put ‘DM me for orders’ in their bio, which means they’re dependant on the Instagram algorithms for their content to reach fly fishers. And they have to handle marketing, international payments, order flow, and more. The Boutique aims to solve the problems for both. For fly fishers, it’s a place to discover unique and well crafted flies, may of which you can not find anywhere else. For fly tyers, it’s a place where you have your own shop to sell your flies, with an audience of fly fishers coming to the website every day. All the marketing, payments and order flow is taken care of for you.
Anything that you can tell us about your plans for the future?
I have so many! For FlyFish Circle, the focus is on expanding the content available. Country information, location information, but also articles in the Library are all things I want to grow. For the Boutique there is a list of functionality on the fly tyer side that I’m working on, as well as functionality for fly fishers browsing the website. For instance, at some point it would be useful to ‘follow’ fly tyers so that you can get updates when there are new flies available. This relationship between fly tyers and fly fishers is something that I actively want to develop, as this is something of value to both fly tyers and fly fishers, as well as something that is unique in the world of buying flies online. And last but not least: I’m always onboarding fly tyers so if you feel this is something for you, visit flyfishcircle.com/for-fly-tyers for more information.Â
