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Mallard Bay consolidates guided hunting, fishing, and adventure trips – from $150 day outings to $15,000 expeditions – into one bookable marketplace.
ENTRY ANGLES
Guided outdoor experiences booking platform · Gear and equipment marketplaces for outdoor travelers · Transaction-based marketplace model without physical inventory
VERTICALS
CAPABILITIES
Marketplace platform development, Transaction processing and payments, Vendor/guide management and coordination
Mallard Bay is the go-to platform for booking guided hunting, fishing, and outdoor adventure trips.
Every trip is led by an experienced guide. Outings range from single-day excursions to multi-day expeditions, some with cabin accommodations and others requiring participants to bring their own gear. Depending on the activity, duration, and conditions, trip prices run from $150 to $15,000 per person.
For travelers, the appeal is straightforward: one place to search, compare, book, and get support if anything goes sideways. Think of it as Airbnb for hunting, fishing, and outdoor travel.
For guides, Mallard Bay delivers a full-stack business toolkit – a marketplace to attract clients, tools to package and schedule tours, and an integrated system to handle bookings and payments.
Guides can drive traffic through the Mallard Bay marketplace, Google search, or email campaigns – the platform supports all three. And if a guide doesn't have a website (or wants a better one), Mallard Bay can build and host it too, complete with booking widgets, payment processing, and a CRM dashboard for managing client relationships.
The payments system is thoughtfully designed: it supports 50% deposits at booking, automatic collection of the remaining balance when the trip begins, and group payment splitting so participants can settle their shares individually.
Guides can use the platform free of charge or upgrade to a $99/month subscription that includes website booking integrations, reduced payment processing fees, and a 50% discount on add-on services. Those add-ons cover a lot of ground – custom website design, SEO tools, Google advertising, social media management, content creation assistance, merch storefronts, and more.
In 2023, Mallard Bay processed $6 million in trip payments. The company is targeting $30–35 million in 2024 – an aggressive goal, but not implausible given that bookings grew 7x from 2022 to 2023, and January 2024 alone already surpassed the entire volume of 2022 and nearly matched all of Q1 2023.
The marketplace now lists 380 guides across 38 US states and 7 countries, and more than 4,500 travelers have booked through it.
Mallard Bay recently closed a $4.6M funding round, bringing total investment to $6.6M.
Despite those metrics, the founder has been candid about how difficult it was to raise this round. He contacted nearly 300 investors – most of whom passed because they "just didn't feel the space" or couldn't see the potential.
And honestly? At first glance, it's easy to dismiss. Hunting and fishing feel like a niche within a niche.
Then the numbers land: Americans spent $394 billion on hunting, fishing, and wildlife recreation in 2022 alone.
That figure includes gear and licenses, not just trips – but even sliced narrowly, the trip-booking opportunity is enormous. The raw participation data tells the story:
About 14.5 million hunters took an average of 11 trips per year totaling 17 days in the field, spending roughly $3,000 each – around $857 of that on the trips themselves. Total hunting expenditure: $45 billion.
Almost 40 million anglers averaged 12 trips and 20 days per year, spending about $2,500 apiece, with $917 going toward trips. Total fishing spend: $99.4 billion.
Wildlife watchers – 148 million strong, including 96 million dedicated birders – averaged 7 trips and 88 days outdoors per year, spending around $1,700 each ($284 on trips). Total: $250 billion.
This space was [covered previously](/review/jarmarka-tshheslavija) when GoWild – a hunting and fishing community that raised $8.3M – first appeared. Catch Co ([covered here](/review/lovis-rybka-na-6-milliardov)), which focuses on fishing and has raised $61.3M, is another player. But most of the existing startups earn primarily through gear sales, not trip bookings. Mallard Bay is going after the untapped middle layer: the guided experience itself.
For a market generating 1.7 billion trips a year, it clearly needed its own Airbnb.
Startups need more than a big market – they need a compelling reason to exist. Catch Co has articulated theirs memorably: they're trying to "save humanity from four walls" – not to get people fishing per se, but to pull civilization back from a future where nature only exists in virtual reality.
Mallard Bay doesn't need a manifesto that grand. The fundamentals are compelling enough: an enormous, underserved market with very few purpose-built digital platforms competing for it.
The broader opportunity here is building services for the outdoor travel category – whether that's the guided experiences Mallard Bay is tackling, or gear and equipment marketplaces that serve the same audience.
Mallard Bay's model is particularly worth studying because it deliberately avoids physical inventory. No merchandise to buy, no warehouse to run, no logistics headaches. It earns from the transaction, not the stuff – which is a much cleaner business, and far more scalable.