For Reel Flies (2025)

Ryan Klivansky & Matt Bockelmann

ForReelFlies is a one stop shop for fly fishermen and outdoorsmen. We connect fly tiers and consumers on a centralized, secure platform.

Sam: Show me the buyer experience.

Ryan: On the homepage you can browse categories or dive into the shop. Users can view flies, add them to cart or wish list, and check vendor pages to build trust. Checkout is powered by Stripe—shipping is auto-calculated, coupon codes work, and past orders include tracking numbers.

Sam: What about the seller experience?

Ryan: Vendors get a store manager dashboard. They can add products with descriptions, tags, images, prices, discounts, and quantity tracking. Items go out of stock automatically. They can post without Stripe, but must connect Stripe to withdraw money.

Ryan: They click “Become a Vendor,” fill out an application with shipping info, and we review and approve it on the admin page. Approved vendors get dashboard access immediately.

Sam: Have you officially launched?

Matt: We’re in pre-launch. The focus is onboarding sellers and building inventory before going public. We want at least 50 posts live to avoid looking empty—we’re around 30 now, with 15–20 vendors signed up, about 12–15 posting.

Sam: How are you finding vendors?

Matt: A mix of industry contacts and poaching. Facebook Marketplace is easiest—we target fly fishing hotspots, DM sellers, and pitch them directly. Etsy is trickier—people find flies there via social media links, not searches.

Sam: Break down your costs for me.

Matt: Shipping is calculated via Shipo API.
Ryan: Average is $4–5, usually USPS or UPS flat rates. Buyers pay at checkout. Revenue: 10% cut per sale, Stripe takes 3%, so we net ~7%. Backend is on Firebase’s free tier, hosting is free on Vercel/GitHub.

Sam: What are the next steps for the product?

Matt: Get vendors to post more products so we hit 50 and can fully launch. We’re also setting up social media within a week. Neither of us are great at it, so we may hire someone short-term for marketing.

Sam: What’s been the most surprising thing you’ve learned from building For Reel Flies?

Ryan: Shipping is way more expensive and complex than we thought, especially when buyers order from multiple vendors. An order from 3 different fly tiers will triple the base shipping costs, without any kind of warehousing to aggregate ties from all our vendors.

Matt: The seasonality of tying. People tie flies in late fall, winter, and early spring—not summer. So our tiers are all fishermen too, and the summer has been tough for onboarding because they’re all in season. The plus side is that we should have a lot more success onboarding vendors this fall.

Sam: What are your favorite failures from this summer?

Matt: We wasted two weeks sourcing custom fly boxes from Alibaba. We put the cart before the horse; we didn’t even have a functioning site or users yet. Ryan: I wasted a week trying to rebuild everything to make it “perfect.” It was almost launch-ready already. Lesson: don’t obsess over perfection before you have users.
Sam: Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Sam: What feedback have you gotten?

Ryan: Matt’s dad was our first outside user—he found the site confusing in ways I couldn’t have guessed being so familiar with the website. It was humbling, he showed us our blind spots.
Matt: Vendors asked for better filtering. “Dryfly” alone was too broad. We tried scientific taxonomy—too complicated. We landed on a two-step system: e.g. dryfly → mayfly. Later, vendors will be able to add scientific names as optional gray text, building data without overwhelming casual users.

Sam: Advice for other student founders?

Ryan: Don’t wait for perfect—ship something users can touch, then iterate with feedback.
Matt: Just do it. Use university resources. Write out your idea and workflow—stage things properly so you don’t waste time on things you don’t need yet.

Sam: How could this summer program improve?

Matt: Focus on passion. Ryan and I clicked because he loves coding and I love fishing. Pairing passion is key.
Ryan: Flexibility helped too—we each worked other jobs and brought ideas back to this project. Taking breaks actually fueled creativity.
Matt: Programs could be customized—more funding for time-intensive projects, or lighter support for groups who already bring passion.