We were able to catch up with the very busy founder of GoFISHn.com, Ned Desmond. GoFishn.com is basically the “Facebook” for fishing.

Hello Ned thanks for talking with us!

Ned: My pleasure.

What inspired the creation of goFISHn ?

Ned: The idea is to help several types of anglers make better use of the Web to get out fishing more often.

For casual anglers, GoFISHn has lots of information on guides, charters, species, destinations, Q&A etc. to help them get a trip organized. For more serious anglers, GoFISHn offer a place where they can document where they’ve been and what they’ve fished, as well as find like-minded folks and track their fishing outings. And last, but perhaps most important of all, we wanted to help small businesses in the fishing world — guides, charters lodges, fly shops etc. — market themselves more effectively and at lower cost.

We also thought it was a good time to try an ambitious project like this. What it takes to succeed online, apart from an appealing, well designed product, is relatively clear at the moment: You need to make smart use of Facebook and Google. They are dominant players. They’ve defined social and search. Simplifies things.

Was there any work done with Facebook to be able to migrate users?

Ned: We took advantage of their API, which allows us to use Facebook to register GoFISHn users, which makes registration a lot simpler for the new members. In addition, we connect GoFISHn accounts to a member’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, if they want. And anything they post on GoFISHn automatically turns up in their Facebook and Twitter feeds. Create once, publish three times, in effect.

What are your user numbers looking like and what do you predict as far as growth?

Ned: We have more than 600 registered users right now, which isn’t bad for ten days out. And we have 4000 fans on Facebook, which is great. Growth will be slow for awhile, because that’s always the way it is with a new launch like this. Google is still digesting the tens of thousands of new pages that we launched with, and we have tens of thousands more to launch, beyond what our members will create. It will take a few months to create a real growth engine, where people are hearing about us in Facebook and finding us in Google.

Awesome news is that profiles for our small businesses are already performing really well in search results on Google, usually hitting the first page of results, which is better than we expected at this stage.

Is the site just for individuals or can businesses create profiles?

Ned: It’s for inviduals and fishing businesses of may descriptions, including media firms. We’re adding a new membership type called “media” for outfits like This is Fly, which might want to get in the flow of GoFISHn for many reasons, or individial photographers or videographers.

What has the response been from the fishing community?

Ned: Sensibly reserved, I’d say. The Web is littered with the wreckage of efforts to make something of fishing online. Folks who care about using the Web to encourage more fishing are watching and waiting for evidence that we’ve got it right.

Join today people.

•gofishn.com•