Sydney start-up Catchability has signed a sponsorship contract with Shimano, the biggest fishing brand in the world.

Catchability is a social app for the Aussie fishing community run by four Sydney entrepreneurs: Andy Donaldson (tech), Ken Wong (UX), Wayne Botha (sales) and Julian Peterson (marketing).

Shimano is a billion dollar-plus Japanese engineering giant whose fishing and cycling products lead the world.

Julian Peterson from Catchability said, “Catchability has been our tech side-project for a couple of years and we encountered the issue that many start-ups reach: a) how much more of our own money can we spend on this and b) how do we monetise this in a meaningful way?”

“We looked at the usual advertising options such as in-app advertising and decided instead to approach the most likely advertising partners with whom a tie-up would really benefit both parties.”

“In Shimano Fishing we found that perfect partner: Shimano are able to use our functionality to run their events, we developed extra functionality to allow them to do so and in return they promote our app. This is an example of app functionality helping a brand to be useful rather than just carry advertising.”

Shimano Australia Fishing marketing manager Drew Dunphy said, “Catchability has offered Shimano another unique way to communicate with the Australian fisherman. The app offers a number of great features that enables likeminded fishermen to engage with each other about their favourite species and techniques.

“The app offers a user friendly way for anglers to track their catches and other critical information like lures, line class and current weather conditions. With constant updates and improvements the application is evolving with the Australian fishing market, making it the perfect partner for Shimano and the Australian fisherman.”

Catchability is designed in Australia specifically for fishing in Australia and includes hand drawn pictures of fish species, maps of where they can be caught, bag limits for each state and live weather and tide information.

Catchability now has 30,000+ signed up members on the app (not downloads). The app allows users to:

• Follow a fish: Follow the species you like to catch – who’s catching them and where?
• Follow a spot: Find out where to go fishing near you and which fish have been caught there. Enter spots of your own.
• Follow a person: What are your friends catching and where?
• Leaderboards: Who’s caught the biggest, longest or the most fish?
• Weather and tides: Check the weather and tides before you go and for the next 6 days. Save your favourite places for future checks.
• Bag limits and pictures: Identify fish and check the current bag and size limits.
• Bragging rights: Share your catches on social media (if you wish).

In addition, Catchability have teamed up with well known independent marine biologist Dr Julian Pepperell who is involved in ongoing analysis of data created from the app about many aspects of fish populations, including:

• Seasonal appearance of fish at different locations
• How the fishery reacts to news of ‘runs’ of fish in different situations
• ‘Peaks’ and ‘troughs’ in catches of certain species through time
• Sizes of fish of different species being caught by users of the application (it is anticipated that this will be especially useful to monitor catches of the larger ‘trophy’ sized fish – an indicator of health of a fishery).
• Correlating time of day of catches with tidal movements and day of the month with moon phases.