“We were something straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting.” Eden Prairie resident David Janiszewski describes his family – grandfather and father and brothers and sister – assembled along various shorelines to apprehend key ingredients for fish dinners.
“The ponds on my grandpa’s farm were brimming with perch and bullhead, and when I was 5 my parents bought a lake cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan,” reminisced David. “If they intended to raise me to love fishing, then they couldn’t have done a better job.”
Let’s go rip a lip. This was David’s father’s proclamation whenever fishing fun was afoot. David held it so dearly that he incorporated and trademarked “RipaLip” in 2006 with the intention of making it into a piscatorial enterprise; one that would run adjacent to his decades-long career in the training industry, and perhaps even one day supplant it.
But what would RipaLip do?
“At first, I had no idea,” David recounted. “The business morphed half a dozen times during its first seven years. I assembled custom lure packs. I learned to pour my own plastics. A former Delta executive buddy of mine and I even explored offering exotic fishing expeditions. But no idea would pan out until I solved a need I had for myself.
“I was towing my boat down the highway when the wind sucked the manufacturer’s protective cover off of one of my marine electronics. I replaced it, only to watch it soar away in my rearview mirror the next time I took the boat out. I said to myself, ‘Someone should really make a better travel cover for this thing.’”
Bing! The realization was instant. David drew up a prototype that he paid a local seamstress to fashion out of a sunbrella. After a few months of fine-tuning, he had something worthy of safeguarding his expensive fish finder. Almost as soon as he began using it, fellow boaters started peppering him with the same question: Where did you get that!?
Once David’s wife was on board with the investment, his prototype entered mass production.
“RipaLip began making travel covers in 2014, followed shortly thereafter by storage cases and screen cleaners,” said David. “The idea was to give anglers affordable, effective tools for preserving electronics that cost thousands and thousands of dollars. I’m happy to say that idea was very warmly received nationwide.
“My next aha moment struck at the Chanhassen Chick-fil-A drive thru. I noticed the employees were taking orders on iPads outfitted with special sun shades, and realized that was exactly what marine electronics so sorely needed – something that eliminates glare, but which is also soft, flexible, and easy to install and remove.”
After a few months of research and collaboration with Kaiser Manufacturing of St. Paul, David developed precisely what he’d envisioned: the SunShade, which he sold thousands of almost as soon as he patented it. It remains one of RipaLip’s biggest sellers to this day.
“I started doing a lot of Facebook marketing, which included answering anglers’ questions in the hundreds of groups dedicated to various manufacturers’ electronics,” David continued. “I quickly noticed I was answering the same handful of questions regarding menu navigation over and over again. It made sense. Modern marine electronics are incredibly sophisticated, with capabilities ranging from live sonar to trolling motor control. The only problem is that their manuals can easily exceed 200 pages. No one’s reading that!”
David created several of his own Facebook groups, each dedicated to explaining the intricacies of various manufacturers’ electronics. By 2017, those groups’ memberships totaled nearly 60,000. This begged the entrepreneur’s age-old conundrum.
“How do I monetize it? I posed that question to the Navionics rep I neighbored at a tradeshow in 2018, knowing they had the most successful lake mapping app in the fishing industry,” said David. “Once I learned they had millions of subscribers, it didn’t take very much math to reveal my path forward.”
David set to work transmuting his mountains of research into a series of informative guides: simple step-by-step instructions which make every high-tech functionality immediately accessible to every angler. After about nine months of development, the RipaLip University app was born. Today that app covers almost 190 pieces of equipment by companies such as Garmin, Humminbird, Lowrance, Minn Kota, and MotorGuide, and has been downloaded approximately 50,000 times.
“I’m grateful to everyone who downloaded the app, and proud to have helped them make the best use of their investments in their favorite hobby,” said David. “Thanks to them and all the retailers who carry my products (the largest being in the Netherlands, of all places), RipaLip continues to grow and grow. It’s a true American success story: just a regular guy who turned his passion into his business, and whose products will always say ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ on their labels.”
Discover RipaLip’s full product lineup including travel covers, transducer covers, storage cases, SunShades, apparel, and the RipaLip University app at RipaLip.com!