🟠 This Orange Ball Just Changed Fishing Forever

Happy Wednesday.

Fishing isn’t supposed to be a hotbed for tech start-ups.

It’s supposed to be the opposite: quiet, analog, and just inconvenient enough that it stays sacred.

And yet, the most obvious problems in “old school” hobbies are still problems for a reason: nobody’s had the right mix of background, obsession, and leverage to actually fix them.

That’s what made this week’s conversation interesting.

This week, Jake and I sat down with Lawrence Sowell, founder of Fishtechy and creator of the Proof Ball — a deceptively simple orange ball + app combo that lets anglers measure fish fast, accurately, and with way less handling (especially for catch-and-release).

🎧 [Listen to our full episode with Lawrence Sowell]

5 Takeaways From Our Conversation With Lawrence Sowell

1. The best products start as pure frustration

Lawrence didn’t “find a market.” He got pissed off in the most relatable way possible: caught a personal-best fish, tried to measure it, couldn’t do it without turning the moment into a circus, and chose the fish over the flex.

He described it basically verbatim: remote river, big fish, tape measure, chaos, then the realization — “there’s gotta be a better way.”

But the interesting part wasn’t that he had the idea; it was the speed. He said the concept came together in minutes, and by the time he got home, he was already writing docs and thinking about patents.

That’s the founder tell: the “how” appears as fast as the “what,” because the person has the right wiring for it.

2. The “orange ping pong ball” is not just the product; it’s the marketing

Everyone calls it a ping pong ball. Lawrence basically said, “Try hitting it with a paddle”. It’s dense, hard, and built to stay perfectly consistent, so measurements don’t get distorted.

But the sneakier insight: the ball is also a built-in visual signature.

He mentioned users asking for a filter to remove it from photos, and said, “That’s the whole point.” The ball is the weird object in the picture that makes someone stop scrolling and ask, “What is that?”

In a world where CAC keeps rising, “the product as the billboard” remains undefeated.

3. Accuracy matters, but not for the reason you think

I came into this conversation thinking: “Why not just use a tape measure?” Lawrence broke it down cleanly: tape measures work when the fish is dead on a bank. They do not work when the fish is alive, moving, and you’re trying to keep it wet so it doesn’t die.

Proof Ball is built for the catch-and-release world, where speed is the feature. Grip-and-grin, under five seconds, fish back in the water, measurement handled.

Then it expands from there: journaling features that auto-capture context like weather and moon phase — turning a measurement tool into a fishing memory database.

4. Every tech product eventually creates a new kind of “cheating”

Jake brought up something I didn’t expect: Proof Ball could “ruin a good fishing story,” because it removes the gray area where people stretch the tape and round up. Lawrence laughed and basically admitted, “Yeah, all my fish got two inches smaller,” once he started measuring for real.

And then it got better: people started trying to game it by moving the ball farther back to make the fish look bigger. So now they’re building models to detect when the ball isn’t aligned correctly, including 3D approaches.

This is the pattern:

• A product introduces truth

• Users try to bend the truth

• The company builds guardrails

• The community starts policing it on its own

That’s not just a fishing story; it’s basically the entire internet.

5. Fishing tech is walking the same tightrope as every other sport

This was the real theme: technology is inevitable, but ethics are optional unless someone forces the issue.

Jake talked about sonar, live scope, underwater cameras, and how the fish have “never been at more of a disadvantage.” Lawrence agreed and drew the clean comparison: hunting with drones, real-time trail cams, and how states started making certain tech illegal.

What I respected: Fishtechy is intentionally not building a hotspot app. Lawrence said catches are private, and even the company can’t access precise GPS coordinates. Sharing data with fisheries is opt-in, and even then, it’s generalized, not “go stand right here.”

So the line they’re trying to hold is: help the angler document + share, without giving away closely held secrets.

Why It Matters

This episode isn’t really about fishing.

It’s about what happens when legacy hobbies collide with modern behavior:

• People want proof.

• People want stats.

• People want community.

• And they want all of it without feeling like they’re “doing tech.”

That’s why the “niche social platform” angle hit. Fishtechy isn’t competing with Instagram. It’s competing with the idea that your non-fishing friends should care about your fish photos. A dedicated community feed is the obvious fix, mirroring what we’ve already seen with apps like Strava and TheGrint.

Big social platforms became entertainment machines.

The next wave isn’t “another Instagram.” It’s tools that create community as a byproduct, and feel more human because everyone opted into the same obsession.

🎧 [Listen to our full episode with Lawrence Sowell]

📩 And don’t forget: Bottom of the Ninth is back this Friday with the top three stories in sports and business from the week.

See you then,
Tyler & Jake