Everyone needs to add to their quiver. Image: Roche
I have passion for business projects and design. My brother Pat is an electrical engineer and develops software, so in 2007 we decided to put our passions together and build Boardhunt.com, a grassroots website based out of San Diego, CA. We organically developed our custom marketplace to give surfers a better option to buy and sell surfboards online – something that has been difficult to do in the past.
Like everyone else, I like getting my money’s worth and I’m not crazy about using online classifieds to buy or sell surfboards. They’re great for somethings, but to me, a surfboard is artwork, and it deserves something with more focus and character. In today’s high-tech world, we don’t have time to find a needle-in-a-haystack, especially in a place that has been known to invite danger. Boardhunt is a small community of board-riders, a place that creepy dudes don’t think to check, or can easily find.
My brother and I grew up riding boards early in life; everything from ramps and streets to snow and water. We’re also into technology. We’re keeping it pretty simple: he makes it, I sell it. We understand technology, and embrace it for its power to replace a slow process on a consumer or business level.
Behind the Boardhunt scenes, Pat tackled the technology side of the website, while I handled the business and the creative side. Sometimes we switched hats. I had no idea how to write code, but one day Pat threw an HTML/CSS crash course at me so he could focus on the heavy programming.
It was a full commitment of weekend work, but getting Boardhunt off the ground was a fun learning experience. At times, I got a little too excited and forced a premature update that caused “a break” on the site. Of course, Pat would rescue what felt like a sinking ship. There were some frustrating moments because we had so many ideas with little time to execute. We would always say to each other, “imagine if we just focused on Boardhunt.”
During the first year of our launch, we were roommates in Solana Beach. It added a strange startup feel on top of the fact that we hadn’t lived together since post-college. We’re pretty close as brothers, but this brought a unique challenge and bond to the table. One day, we ran into an issue beyond us, and had to pull in our youngest brother in Florida to help. He was a database wizard at Thomson Reuters, and we put his skills to the test.
Pat and I wanted to build the website with fine detail and soul, as shapers often do when crafting surfboards. There are so many characteristics to a surfboard; the dims, tails, fins – all of this is missing from a conventional online surfboard market, and it drove us to make unique search filters. We wanted to make finding used surfboards easy. For example, you can see all of the retro or fish surfboards in two clicks, instead of scrolling through thousands of boards you’re not really interested in looking at. Imagine if you went to a surf shop and had to look through every board they had in stock, even though you knew the one you wanted. That’s what we wanted to avoid.
Sometimes we look back and laugh at all of the micro-stages we went through just to get our passion project off the ground. I would say the toughest part was getting all the traffic. Even if you can build it, they won’t necessarily come.
In the later years, though, we got to a point where our day jobs monopolized our time, but the sign-ups just keep coming in every day. We’d joke and say, “it just won’t die,” but that’s when we knew we really had something to expand on.
Today, we have almost 5,500 registered users (not visitors) and a team of three. To keep up with Boardhunt’s growth, we decided to bring on our newest and youngest team member, Jon, out of La Jolla, CA, who has a long affiliation with the surf industry. Jon immediately saw value in Boardhunt and is equally passionate. He brings a fresh perspective to help elevate Boardhunt to the next level with promotions and fundraising.
To kick off our big revamp, we collected our user’s feedback, which helped us plot everything out. Every website has minor kinks to fix, but we’re going way beyond by with some new game-changing features.
Since Boardhunt doesn’t have deep pockets, we turned to crowdfunding and are planning to re-launch in 2015. The goal of these new features is to help Boardhunt become safer, faster, more accurate, provide more guidance, and easier to use.
We want to bring Boardhunt to an Uber, Amazon, and Venmo level. Imagine finding surfboards as fast as you can find a cab-ride or an online date these days. We want Boardhunt to do all the work for the user, instead of the other way around. Despite these next-generation changes, Boardhunt will always be free for the average user.
With our momentum, Boardhunt’s future vision is to set a premium stage as an “inventory hub” for used surfboards in home garages and surf shops, and a showcase platform for shapers that want to tease their market with new surfboard models.
We have some really good ideas on the roadmap, and our long-term goal is to create best results for the surfing community while boosting the Surfboard Ecosystem. You can check our future plans on Indiegogo to give us a boost.
