“What you’re about to get is the short story, not the long story of bad weather, killer mosquitoes, getting stuck on rocks and trying to figure out how to get off them, and destroying props 20 miles from nowhere,” laughs LakeMaster founder Mike Wood, whose official retirement was July 31st, 2013.
Taking a break from snow-blowing his driveway, Mike recounted the Cinderella story of a small PC software company that made good in the fishing industry by creating a whole new technological product category that helps anglers catch more fish.
THE PAST
“We founded the original corporation WayPoint Technologies in 1993,” says Wood. “The core of our digital mapping and GIS business was providing digital maps in a PC program for various industries. Our target markets were street maps used in school bus routing, the real estate market and 911 locations.”
“We were pioneers at that point, creating our own charts and street maps. We had a product based in the Minneapolis and St. Paul area using the map CDs and books. Then came the internet and maps were free – and it’s pretty hard to compete with free – so we shifted gears in the late 1990s with a ready-to-go backup product for my favorite industry, fishing. So we converted our platforms to display lake maps.”
The original product was crude compared to where LakeMaster is today, but the seed was planted and a whole new product category was born. The fishing industry would never be the same.
“In late 1999 we released our first product with 101 lakes, which were pretty much basic DNR maps, and you know the accuracy of those, but you could load them into your PC and plot waypoints and transfer them to a number of GPS units. We also started selling paper maps. But keep in mind that there really weren’t any maps on GPS at that point. So, with 101 maps for $49 we walked into Gander Mountain in November 1999 and asked them to put our product in the store for Christmas.”
And that’s when Wood says he learned how outdoors retailers play ball.
Continue to the full story on page 60 of the April 2014 Fishing Tackle Retailer…
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