Meet The Siblings Behind Danglers!

Whilst many new businesses are founded each year it is not often that you find one that has been created by a number of siblings. Check out the trio behind this fishing innovation. It is three brothers, Daniel, Harry and Kane, working together that are the team behind the recently launched business, Dangler. Paul Andrews spoke to them to find out more.

The idea for Dangler originated back in 2017 when Daniel Hughes was rummaging through the garden shed looking for something and soon realised that he had loads of fishing tackle that he no longer used.

He thought about selling it and uploading it to the current second hand sites such as eBay or Gumtree. At the same time, he was selling clothes on Depop, a marketplace app for clothing, where he was taking pictures from his phone and uploading straight to the app, which is full of people wanting to buy clothes.

Depop was a simple but effective buying and selling community around clothes. But nothing like this existed in the fishing industry. As Daniel explains, “the birthchild of Dangler was created. The aim was to create a social marketplace to buy and sell fishing tackle, and with all 3 of us brothers being very passionate anglers it seemed the perfect fit!”

Dangler is a social media marketplace app that provides a platform for the everyday angler, alongside retailers and manufacturers to buy and sell their second hand and new fishing tackle. Dangler will provide a social platform that includes lower costs, buying and selling protection and the opportunity to build a social profile and communicate with other fellow anglers.

Dangler’s aim is to create an innovative community that enables anglers to share their passion for buying and selling fishing tackle. Dangler is founded by 3 brothers, who are dedicated to revolutionising the way that anglers buy and sell their fishing tackle, by creating an online marketplace in every angler’s pocket.

Like most start-up businesses there was a lot of up-front commitment from the brothers to create their vision and start building the dream. As Daniel continues, “from the beginning of Dangler, we worked mostly on weeknights and weekends, fitting it around full-time jobs and studying, but when we began working with Shout About Suffolk (a Suffolk based incubator) it meant we had the freedom to allow Harry to work full time throughout the summer on the business.”

This proved a turning point for the business as it allowed them the time to prepare to raise funds and when they successfully gained ‘seed funding’ for Dangler it allowed all three brothers to go full-time in the business. As Daniel continues, “this was a great time for us as momentum was gaining but of course, this meant having specific job roles. To be honest, it was fairly easy to decide. With Kane being an experienced chartered accountant and experiences of working with VCs, he walked straight into the CFO job title and focused on the numbers and technical operations. My role is the CEO and management of the companies marketing and general strategy. Harry is the COO and therefore handles the daily operations of the company such as legalities, recruitment, development etc, and this is done mostly in conjunction with Kane.”

“For us, selecting these roles became relatively easy, Harry comes from an academic background and is research and ‘document’ focused, hence the suitable decision for him to become COO. I am very creative in my thinking, and so it made absolute sense for me to have the vision around the public persona of Dangler and the role for executing this too.”

Setting out on a new venture is not always easy and as Daniel explains, there have been a few challenges along the way. “Even in our ‘short’ lived start-up life so far we have had to deal with finding a suitable partner to develop the app with us and then also finding someone who can work on Danglers’ behalf to ensure we are doing things right with the development and processes. This in itself was a challenge that we didn’t foresee, but we now have an amazing interim CTO, and we have often mentioned that we wouldn’t have half of the knowledge and correct processes in place without him, purely because of his experience,” continues Daniel.

“I would also say our biggest current challenge and one that we are dealing with daily is recruitment. Being a tech company means we need to begin fleshing out our own internal development team, but the current market is massively in demand and lacking supply, and is something we are spending a lot of time trying to get right too,” he adds.

Working closely with siblings is not always easy. As Daniel continues, “We were warned numerous times by people when we started out that family business is often a bad idea, and will turn toxic in the end. But we are stubborn individuals, and we are good at putting our emotions aside, so any decision or ‘formal’ conversation is always business first, and I think that is so key to keep a family business on its feet.”

“We work with great synergy, and although we may operate in very different ways, our general thought processes and outcomes are very similar, and so we balance each other out really well and we all want the same outcome at the end of the day. It is a rare opportunity to work closely with your brothers or your family, and so I think we are all very fortunate to be embarking on this journey together,” he continues.

Dangler is on a journey and the energy and drive of the brothers who are collectively working towards a shared vision is palpable. Clarity of vision is clearly helping them turn the idea into a reality and they have a clear goal in mind. As Daniel explains, “in 10 years’ time, Dangler will be the number 1 global marketplace for Anglers. Becoming a one-stop app that all Anglers will use to buy and sell any fishing tackle they have, and who knows what other features we may have by then.”

“But our mission statement is to revolutionise the way anglers buy and sell their fishing tackle, by creating a direct anglers’ marketplace in your pocket, anywhere in the World. And that is where we expect to be in 10 years.”

A bold aim, but one that is clearly within reach and these brothers have identified a niche, have passion for the end result and a collective skill set that is driving change and bringing innovation to the angling world.

We look forward to seeing the continuing evolution of Danglers.

To find out more please visit www.dangler.co.uk