Featured Founder: Ethan Reistad of Boats and Buyers

Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Ethan Reistad of Boats and Buyers, the first auction-style marketplace for boats.

What were you doing previously, and what inspired you to launch your company?

Growing up in Minnesota on the lakes, my family and I bought and sold a new boat every year, and we also worked professionally in the industry. When we moved to Florida and bought and sold in another market, we realized the same frustrations and inefficiencies of buying and selling boats existed universally. This is when we had our “there must be a better way” moment. While launching Boats and Buyers, I was an entrepreneurship student at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU).

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Boats and Buyers addresses the inefficiency in the boat-selling process. It typically takes over seven weeks to sell a boat, and our standard is seven days. As boating enthusiasts, we are driven by the lack of innovation in the industry—it is like an undeveloped land. I get excited to go to work every day because we are genuinely disrupting an entire industry, even at this early stage. Also, some might say that working in one’s recreational passion causes one to enjoy it less, but the opposite has been true for me.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge we have faced, and continue to navigate, is the lack of innovation in the boating industry. When an industry is slow to innovate, change is met with resistance, and adoption takes time. Building trust with both buyers and sellers in our marketplace has been a lengthy process, but we have persisted. Once users experience our marketplace, they get excited and see its value.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We are currently focused on dealerships, but our next step is to re-enter the private sector by segmenting the industry based on “reason for boating.” We are working alongside prominent industry figures within these niches to offer a unique and seamless end-to-end transaction experience customized to the unique needs of the buyers and sellers of the different types of vessels.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

In our experience, we have found that one has to please the market before it can be disrupted. It took us over a year to learn this, but it was a valuable lesson. We also learned in launching a marketplace, that in the early stages, the marketplace assumes responsibility for any actions whether positive or not that occur during the users’ interactions.

Why Tampa Bay?

The Gulf Coast is a boater’s paradise. Tampa itself offers a growing, young, and active city that still provides somewhat of a “small town feel.” Best of all, Tampa has boatable weather year-round. Enough said!