From Tackle to Tech: The Omnia Fishing Strategy With Matt Johnson

Matt Johnson is the Co-founder and CEO of Omnia Fishing, an innovative ecommerce platform that personalizes tackle shopping through map-based technology and community engagement. In 2010, he co-founded Contour Innovations, developing the lake mapping platform Insight Genesis, which was acquired by Lowrance in 2014. Matt also co-founded Able Seedhouse and Brewery in Northeast Minneapolis. An avid angler, he has fished globally, from lake trout in Lake Superior's Apostle Islands to yellowtail kingfish in New Zealand.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [2:45] Matt Johnson explains Omnia Fishing’s personalized, map-based shopping experience
• [4:19] How spatial data and fishing reports drive customer acquisition and engagement
• [7:16] The origin of Omnia’s tech-first approach to fixing retail challenges in the fishing industry
• [10:46] How Omnia diversified revenue and increased loyalty through its subscription model
• [13:09] Building and scaling an MVP for a data-driven ecommerce platform
• [18:57] Strategies for tracking user behavior to boost conversion and average revenue per user

In this episode…

Choosing the right product online can feel overwhelming — especially when selection depends on real-time local conditions. Shoppers want confidence in their purchases, but traditional ecommerce sites rarely offer personalized guidance. How can brands use data and technology to craft intelligent shopping experiences that encourage customer loyalty and keep shoppers returning?

Matt Johnson, a technology-focused entrepreneur with a passion for fishing and consumer behavior, offers a deep dive into how his team solved this exact challenge. Matt shares how leveraging spatial data, community-sourced fishing reports, and real-time environmental conditions can create a highly personalized customer journey. By prioritizing the user experience through features like AI-powered recommendations, location-specific data, and a content-to-commerce loop, Matt explains how other brands can think beyond the product to create meaningful, loyalty-driving experiences.

In this episode of the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, Raphael Paulin Daigle interviews Matt Johnson, Co-founder and CEO of Omnia Fishing, about creating a tech-powered, customer-centric ecommerce platform. Matt discusses how to scale a data-first MVP, why a subscription model complements the shopping experience, and how mapping tools increase repeat purchase rates.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Raphael Paulin-Daigle on LinkedIn | X
• SplitBase
• Matt Johnson on LinkedIn
• Omnia Fishing: Website | App
• Omnia PRO Subscription
• “How Bay Smokes Scaled to Eight Figures Without Traditional Advertising With William Goodall” on Minds of Ecommerce

Quotable moments:

• "Our business is really about sending confidence in your product selection by building a personalized shopping experience for everybody."
• "We recognize that retail and fishing was broken. The solution was based in technology, with a map as the core."
• "As venture dollars have started to dry up, we've been forced to prioritize our roadmap, always putting the consumer first."
• "We started acquiring user-generated content as a feedback loop, leading to the launch of Omnia Pro, our subscription service."
• "It's almost embarrassing what it looked like when we first launched. Now, I'm proud of where we've gone."

Action Steps:

• Use customer behavior data to personalize shopping experiences: Analyzing user interactions like clicks, lake searches, and fishing reports helps tailor product recommendations, increasing conversion rates.
• Invest in scalable tech infrastructure early on: Establishing a flexible data structure from the beginning enables your system to adapt and improve as you collect more user data.
• Diversify revenue with subscription-based models: Offering value-added services like real-time data or exclusive tools can attract a new customer segment and boost LTV.
• Balance utility and commerce to drive repeat engagement: Providing helpful, non-sales content like fishing reports and maps keeps users returning — even outside purchase cycles.
• Track engagement metrics to optimize conversion funnels: Monitoring how often a user interacts with custom tools like fishing reports or AI summaries can reveal conversion thresholds.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by SplitBase.

At SplitBase, we design, test, and manage high-converting landing pages and on-site experiences for fashion, luxury, and lifestyle ecommerce brands. Our optimization program pinpoints exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix that.

The result? Increased conversions and profits for our clients.

With our team of conversion optimization specialists, performance marketers, and conversion-focused designers, we've got your back when it comes to testing and optimization.

Request a proposal on SplitBase.com today, and learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend.

You can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. Don’t miss out on our exclusive podcasts at Minds of Ecommerce.

Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:06

Welcome to the Minds of Ecommerce podcast, where you'll learn one key strategy that made leading e-commerce companies grow exponentially. We cut the bullshit and keep the meat in a 15 minute episode. Founders and executives take us through a deep dive of a strategy so you get to learn and grow your online sales. In the last episode, you heard from William Goodall, founder of Bay Smokes, who shared how to grow an e-commerce brand and acquire traffic in a highly regulated market. Now, today, on episode number 45, get ready because we've got an exciting episode. Matt Johnson is the co-founder and CEO of Omnia Fishing, a fishing gear ecommerce store where the shopping experience is powered and constantly improved by an active community of content creators filing fishing reports and talking about gear on specific bodies of water. Pretty novel and interesting approach, so make sure to listen to what Matt has to say. Now we're also going to talk about exactly that, and specifically how the brand leverages this custom tech to personalize product recommendations, grow, and obviously go beyond. I'm your host, Raphaell Paulin-Daigle, and I'm the founder of SplitBase. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 01:49

Now this episode is also brought to you by SplitBase. At SplitBase, we help leading eight and nine-figure ecommerce brands such as Doctor Squatch, Hyperice, and Amika grow through customer-focused conversion optimization programs. Our programs pinpoint exactly where your store is losing money most, and then we help you fix it. The result? Well, you get increased conversions, higher AOVs, and of course more money, which in return allows you to scale advertising profitably. We've been at it for over a decade, and we can help you manage the entire CRO process from A to Z. So that means customer research conversion design strategy, copywriting and development so you can focus on growing your e-commerce sales while you get to focus on what you do best. So request a proposal today on splitbase.com to learn how we can help you get the most out of your marketing spend. All right Matt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here.

Matt Johnson: 02:21

Of course. Good to be here.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 02:22

So you have a super interesting approach to ecommerce. You don't just sell, you know, fishing gear online. There's a whole software that powers the store. And I'm guessing that also helps you get leads. Tell us a bit more about what you guys are doing, because it is quite complex. And before we dive into the details, I want to make sure our listeners fully understand what you guys are actually doing here.

Matt Johnson: 02:45

Yeah, absolutely. So the fishing industry is a really interesting industry, surprisingly big in Canada and the United States specifically. And when we were starting Omnia, one thing that we saw that was, was was hampering the ability for fishing and tackle and gear to be sold online was that it's pretty overwhelming for the majority of consumers who really want some suggestions on what they should buy. And what we found is that the underlying details, you know, the top questions that somebody will ask is where do you want to go and what do you want to catch? And it's because of those late characteristics, the time of year, the weather conditions, the movement of the species of the sportfish you want to catch changes, what tackle you need and what strategy you need. So our idea was, could we build a map based shopping platform where spatial location is is really the key driver of how we make recommendations and provide a really personalized tackle shopping experience for every lake in America and Canada. And and so we launched Omnia as essentially an ecommerce platform. But really at the core of it was this, this GIS, this map based platform that organizes data and information and builds community and then makes high quality recommendations that are unique for every lake.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 03:55

Amazing. So I'm curious, how does that fit? Obviously it's a great acquisition channel. But then what do you promote? Like when you run ads and everything? I'm sure you're going to send some traffic to the ecommerce store, but then the platform. Obviously there's a community aspect, which I'm sure helps drive traffic, but how do you choose what to promote? What and how do they play together?

Matt Johnson: 04:19

Yeah, that can be difficult. You know, there are a lot of underlying aspects of our e-commerce platform that are that are kind of generic to all e-commerce. When you think about promotion, you think about driving trends and time of year and and hitting promotions. But but what we do find is that our business is really about sending confidence in your product selection. So it really is about building a very personalized shopping experience for everybody. And so a lot of it is to try and drive that that user experience, to move people into something that's relevant to them, maintain context. So when somebody says, yeah, I do fish that water body. And while that actually is a bait that I've seen before, that's the one I should be using right now. That's the that's the promotive aspect that we're trying to say, let's put the right products in front of somebody so they feel really good about the transaction, and they feeling like they're heading to the water with with a really great strategy.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 05:07

Now, I mean, I think that's awesome. And I can see how it can be a bit complex to figure out what's what's the ideal strategy here. But I'm kind of curious, you know, like how you come from a, you know, tech background more than a retail background. And obviously, you know, you had this idea, but what came first? Was it the ecommerce store, and then you were looking for a method to kind of just, you know, improve all those aspects that we talked about. Or was it the software and the ecommerce was kind of the way to monetize it? I'm curious.

Matt Johnson: 05:41

Yeah, it's a good question. I guess I've never really thought about it in that order. But I would say that we recognize that retail and fishing was broken first and foremost. And in the basic problem solution scenario, we said like, the problem is that the average consumer still feels compelled to go in-store because the information is so fragmented and hard to find, and it can be difficult to really figure out exactly what you should be purchasing. The solution really was based on technology, and most of that had a map as a kind of the underlying how do we organize information and provide a really great experience. So it did start we want to fix retail. It's over $5 billion in transactions in the segment that we call hand to fish. So anything between the fisherman's hand and the fish's mouth rod reel line lure, it's a massive, massive market. And so we wanted to fix that piece of it. There's a lot of brands that want to have a relationship with the consumer and go direct. There are a lot of retailers that want to have a relationship with the consumer for repeat purchase rate and instilling confidence in the consumer to drive higher average revenue per user and high conversion rate. So we said, like, how can we build a technology, focus it as e-commerce? The future of our business might not necessarily be that we are an e-commerce powerhouse. We really want to be that organizer of data and try to figure out how to optimize the experience to get good transactions. So we always recognize that e-commerce really was that broken piece. The technology was going to be the solution, and the hope was that we could evolve as a business that once we had sourced and built the right strong community, we could rethink how Omnia positions to really affect the entire fishing industry.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 07:16

So, I mean, I think that's fantastic. I kind of see you guys as like a tech brand, almost more than just an ecommerce brand, you know, based on, on on what you're saying, obviously. Then also comes the risks of, you know, whoever's building a tech startup, there's there's a lot of assumptions, there's a lot of development costs, there's a lot of bets, you know, being placed and maybe to some extent more than just launching an e-commerce store. Right. So when you guys were thinking of that, how did you, you know, take that bit under consideration if that question makes sense? How did you quantify it? Because I'm thinking, you know, some people listening to this might be running million dollar plus ecommerce stores, and they're thinking of ways that technology could potentially really change your business and solve problems in their space like you guys did. But I could see it being a really big bet that may or may not make a difference on their sales.

Matt Johnson: 08:13

Yeah, and I think it's no secret that it can be difficult to run an ecommerce site or a marketplace where where margins in the economics of that transaction don't work out in your favor. So certainly is a big bet. But but I would say that that it kind of relates back to my original hypothesis that, you know, we started the company in 2000, 19. Venture dollars were still readily available for commerce and marketplace consumer was still pretty hot. That's changed. So I'd say the balance between that question would be, how quickly can you build a real company if you have to? Can you build and hit scale where where the economics of the business actually make sense? You could you have the capability to pull levers towards profitability versus continuing to invest really hard in technology? As as venture dollars have started to dry up for consumer and ecommerce and marketplace, which I argue they have over the last year or two. We've been forced to really think about prioritizing our roadmap, and I would say the number one person on the list of who, who, who receives a benefit has always been the consumer. And that has allowed us to really think about how to drive that roadmap and then be rewarded from the consumer to build a real business. And I'll give you a good example of that. This is not something we ever intended. In the early days, we knew that commerce was going to be how we monetize our technology, and there would be this long term opportunity at scale to create and build a real business there. But what we found is that we were sourcing user generated content as a feedback loop for our recommendation engine, and during that process, we started to acquire a lot of information where our customers were coming back to the site and almost diluting out our conversion rate a little bit, because they were just coming in and learning. They were watching our videos, they were reading new fishing reports. They were they were building, you know, following lakes and then coming in when new information was loaded to those lakes. So so we kind of sat back and said, is there a way to diversify our revenue streams out of ecommerce and monetize this technology and this utility platform so they can be scouting on the couch? And we actually launched Omnia Pro, which is our subscription service. Everything in Omnia is obviously free because we monetize through commerce. But we started pushing in new mapping. We started investing in satellite processing for if you know, it's the right gear, and that gear is predicated on knowing that the fish are in a spawn pattern, well, let's be able to give the customer the water temperature data. And so we started innovating in these other areas. And now we've our subscription service has exploded. And within the first year we were almost $1 million in IRR with mostly net new customers to the platform that this subscription service also had loyalty benefits that then moved them over into the commerce side of our platform. So that goes to the acquisition piece too, is like, can you build something that's so valuable that customers feel like they really need it and receive a lot of value, that they're willing to pay that subscription fee and then also become commerce customers. That then allows you to drive a higher lifetime value that allows us to continue to invest in the business.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 11:06

I was going to say, I'm guessing on an LTV level. I mean, this is a fantastic play, right? Even if they don't subscribe to the pro version of the software. Right. If they come back to you for that piece of information. I mean, I think the equivalent with other e-commerce brands are, you know, a lot of building media companies or they have a lot of education around things. You guys are kind of doing the same things in a probably riskier way for a lot of brands. But when it plays out like it's working out for with you guys, I'm sure it's it's worth it.

Matt Johnson: 11:35

It feels that way. And then to think that fishing is potentially the first inning for us, because any of those outdoor we think a lot about like outdoor space where people are looking for suggestions, they're looking for content to commerce that could expand into other areas. So I think the way we've invested and the way we envision the power and the tools of what we were solving, had broader implications and would allow us to expand into other areas at some point. So we pitched that from the very beginning. we've never deviated. I'd say the opportunities that we've created for ourselves have changed and become more interesting, luckily, in a good way. But, but, but yeah, we had to really think foundationally, like what were we actually trying to solve? And I think we've done a pretty good job of that.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 12:15

That makes me think. Right. Like obviously in the process of building a software company, there's always the concept of, you know, having an MVP, which might be a bit less common in an e-commerce space, right? Maybe with the actual products if you're developing your own products. But in your case, what did that look like? Like today, you know, I went through the website and it's pretty amazing the amount of data that's on there. You know, I'm based in Canada. There was data about pretty much everything around the city here. But I'm curious, like, was it like that when you launched? what did that minimum viable product look like? And obviously, I'm guessing the goal is you have to balance, you know, e-commerce profitability with the cost of development and maintenance of the tools. So there has to be some sort of balance there. So, how did you guys start out with that type of project? And I also understand you guys are funded so that I'm sure helps, but.

Matt Johnson: 13:09

It certainly helps. That certainly helps. You know, it's it makes me laugh because I'm almost embarrassed by like what it looked like when we first launched. Based on where we are today, we've been around six years, and only recently have I felt like in a fundraising process that instead of putting all these beautiful slides of like what the experience could look like, I just say like, please go to the map and use it, download our app. You know, like, I'm so proud of where we've gone. And I still see all the warts as a founder. And all of our team here still has a long roadmap of things we want to do even better to make it better for the customer. But but in those early days, what we stayed focused on is we said, can we build scalable data organization? And by that I mean, can we can we invest in our data schema, the structure of how we gather the information so that when the first person files a fishing report, we can see if it matters and we can see if that changes a default set of recommendations. So, you know, a lake in Florida where we didn't launch in, there may be a default setting. That said, here are the three top rated techniques to catch a largemouth bass in the summer. And it's really generic. And it probably didn't deviate a lot from lake to lake. And over time we've hit, you know, 30,000 fishing reports and lots of those lakes have we know the characteristics of the water body. They have a very unique shopping experience where, you know, it's the black blue Senko on this one and a chatterbait on this one, and all the color variants and the weight difference, all of that's changing in real time. And I think it was I think what we wanted to do was make sure that we had the data structure in a way that as more information came back in, as that feedback loop came in, that the flywheel turned. And so it was ugly. It maybe didn't give a really good indication of what this could be, but we saw it and we just had to keep we had to just keep cranking along. It's been a long, long journey. But but yeah, it was it was it was almost an embarrassing launch. But we saw what it could be if we had enough information to train the system. And then the evolution of that has been in the last few weeks, we just launched an AI summary service. Now we've crossed the point where we almost have too much user generated content that you don't even have time to go and look at every single one of the phishing reports and all debates that are being recommended. We actually use AI to to start to unlock and determine the relationship between patterns of baits, or if a weather condition is changing based on the day that the fish was caught, does that impact the the location and the and the and the type of product? So we are gathering so much information now that we've almost had to build these AI trained summaries that the human mind can't even break down.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 15:39

Right?

Matt Johnson: 15:40

So it's been a long evolution.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 15:41

Yeah. And at this point, right, I'm hearing about and I'm sure you still have a vision that you haven't achieved. Right. There's always going to be something next where you want to get to. I'm thinking at it from an ecommerce perspective. I think there is probably a level and correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking about this where there is likely a level where The tool becomes so evolved where at a certain point it doesn't necessarily do much on the e-commerce side of things, right? Like, you could add those features, but it's not necessarily going to increase conversions or get people to stick around because the tool is already good enough to do that. But it sounds like maybe that evolution of the tool now is really into, you know, the pro version of it. Am I correct with it? Is that accurate?

Matt Johnson: 16:24

The only way that I would push back a little bit on it is because I think you're right the only. So this gets a little bit into our into our model specifically. And if you distill what we do, you know, we source user generated content and then we provide it back out in a meaningful way to create high conversion, high rpu. That average revenue per user is a major driver for us, but because it indicates that the platform is working better and we have a lot of people that come in with purchase intent, I mentioned before, there are a lot of people that use our tools for planning, but there is a lot of people that come in kind of middle of funnel. They they really are planning to purchase, and we want to move them through the system in a more efficient way and give them confidence in that transaction. The way, the way we measure it today is we are trying to replace that in-store associate with much more information and a better experience than when somebody walks you down the aisles and says, this is what you need, this is what you need. This is what you need, because I know some things about you. Our customers volunteer that information to try and give a to get a good shopping experience. And then we measure that in conversion based on the amount of touch points we can have with the customer. So we call we have something that we call omni assistance. And omni assistance is that virtual walk you down the aisle and show you only the. We only got 30,000 SKUs in the back. We want to only show you the 10 or 12 things that we think will be relevant to you based on what you've told us. And then what we do is we look at the correlation between volume of clicks, like, did you look at a fishing report? Did you look at our AI summaries or did you go to a lake page? Those are parts of an experience that are completely unique to our system. And then we try to determine that if we can get you to five plus or ten plus, did we give you the information that you needed to make the recommendations actionable to drive higher conversion rate, higher RPU. And what we have found is that if we can get you to ten plus clicks into like a lake page or a fishing report, our conversion rate goes to almost 10%, which is that's unheard of in e-commerce. And so we're still trying to push more people through that type of experience with high-volume clicks into Omni assistance. And we're still trying to improve our Pu and conversion rate. Those are the big measurements for us because we think not only does Omnia benefit, obviously, from getting higher conversion rate, but we think that that means that the customer had a really great experience and they're going to go on their next trip and they're going to feel good about it, and they're probably going to fish again and and again, like underlying the whole industry, we have a leaky bucket problem. And we're trying to plug that. We're trying to get you out there, get you a big fish. You become the expert, you reduce your learning curve. And then the hope is that you stick around and stay loyal to us. Our repeat rate is almost 50%.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 18:57

I love it. I think that's fascinating. Just, you know, also just kind of the understanding of the data and how everything correlates with each other. It sounds like it's probably a requirement for anyone who wants to do this type of investment. You need to understand that. And you can't just hope that it's going to increase LTV. It really has to be part of the equation. You talked about Omni assistance. Now I'm curious and especially for people listening that don't really have visual support in front of them right now, how does the average e-commerce experience, how does it get personalized, whether it's visible to the customer or not? Right. Because you do have the maps, which obviously you can see is very custom, and you get to understand kind of how everything works when you use it. But for the actual e-commerce experience, I mean, the website does look like, you know, most e-commerce websites. It doesn't look like this crazy, you know, different thing. But, you know, maybe in the back end or how are things, products or how does the customer journey get affected by, you know, that data and those recommendations and yeah, the data that you have.

Matt Johnson: 19:58

Yeah, that's a good question. And we do think a lot about the entry points, like where did the customer come from. There are a lot of people that come to Omnia and say, I want to buy this brand, rod in this weight and this action, and we actually don't want to get in the way of that. Like, right. We do still want to maintain best-in-class ecommerce capability. And so we have we have intentionally structured a lot as an e-commerce company, but we surround the experience. And so as an example, if you get to that rod page, we have AI summaries of every fishing report that's mentioned, that rod with the hopes that we can give something that you see and say, well, that's my lake. And when they were fishing this rod, they bought this reel and this line, and these are the lures that they caught, a largemouth bass or a walleye in the summer. So the hope is to consistently surround the traditional shopping experience but also stay out of the way. The other example I would use is we we generate millions of sessions where somebody says, What is Lake Tahoe water temperature? And they will click in. And we're one of the top results because we have real-time water temperatures for Lake Tahoe using our innovative tools. And so we've taken the Zillow method where you search for a house, and it pops up, but you can see that map behind it. And you can see that, you know, there's other houses and other details back there. So you have a place to bail out to. And what we find is that the customer comes in, we know a lot about what they've asked, and we know what their intent is. I'm looking for a trip up on Tahoe pretty soon. I want to know what the water temperature is right now. Well, when you bail out, we hope that you see Tahoe and other lakes and real-time fishing reports and all those details that you quickly understand well, this is a valuable tool that then we can start making product recommendations. So you either come in with a product-focused intent or you come in with a utility information intent. And then we surround it by commerce and product. So the hope is to just take you in both directions. And for a while it felt like we were building two independent e-commerce platforms, one very e-commerce transaction, one very map-based utility, and it's only been in the last 18 months or so. It feels like those experiences have merged. When we brought in the Pro subscription, it felt like it was a completely independent system. And now with all the commerce benefits, that's begun to merge. So I think that's that harmony of depending on what you were looking for. The hope is to surround the whole experience to tell you what Omnia represents quickly.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 22:10

Amazing. I think that's incredible. Now we've been talking to Matt Johnson, who's the co-founder and CEO of Omnia Fishing. Matt, unfortunately, we're at time. I could keep talking about this, for I was so captivated by everything you guys are doing. I haven't really heard anything like that before. So thank you so much for coming here and sharing all of that with our audience. But obviously, if people want to learn more about you, about the brand, where should they go?

Matt Johnson: 22:37

Yeah. It's easiest. Like I said, we're excited about the platform where it's landed. omniafishing.com Click on Maps and Explore, and we're always open to feedback. We've got people that are here supporting all ecommerce transactions. Download the app. It's all free and and give us some feedback on how it goes.

Raphael Paulin Daigle: 22:56

Awesome. Matt thank you so much.

Outro: 23:03

All right. Well, that's it for today's episode. And thank you so much for tuning in. Now, if you like what you've heard, and you don't want to miss any of the new episodes that are about to come out, make sure you subscribe to the podcast, and well, bonus points if you also leave a review in the iTunes store or wherever you're listening to this. Now, if you're working on an e-commerce store that does over $1 million in revenue and you need help with conversion optimization or landing pages, well, I've got some good news because there's a pretty good chance we can help with that. Go to splitbase.com to learn more, or even to request a proposal. If you have any guest requests, questions, or comments, tweet me @rpaulindiagle, and I'll be super happy to hear from you. And again, thanks again for listening. This is Minds of Ecommerce.

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