Yesterday's conversation with Joe Simonds — founder of Salt Strong, author of Fishing for Happiness, and a guy who walked away from six figures in financial services at 35 to teach people how to catch fish — is a story about creating a life that actually feels right. Joe and his brother Luke built Salt Strong from scratch, pivoted hard when the business model stopped serving the mission, and turned a Facebook group and a library of online courses into something that reaches tens of thousands of weekend anglers every week. This one covers how they did it, what almost stopped them, and why Joe thinks teaching people to fish is actually the memory-creating business.
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Salt Strong is an online education platform built by Joe and Luke Simonds to teach inshore saltwater fishing through courses, video content, and a private Facebook community of over 51,000 members. The company produces fishing courses led by expert guides like CA Richardson, Peter Miller, and Dylan Hubbard, hosts weekly fishing reports covering new spots on Florida's east and west coasts, and runs a no-cursing, no-negativity Facebook group called Salt Strong Fishing Tribe. Joe and Luke started it in 2014 after leaving careers in financial services.
Joe and his brother Luke were making good money as wholesalers in the financial services industry, but they were unfulfilled. At a conference in Chicago when Joe was 35, they realized they hated half their customers, didn't want to be doing the same work in five or ten years, and needed a mission that felt meaningful. After reading hundreds of self-help books and doing a 16-question exercise with his wife about what their ideal life looked like, Joe made the decision to leave. They moved to Florida, sold everything, and started Salt Strong with no real business plan beyond teaching people how to catch fish.
It didn't. For the first six months, Joe and Luke created free YouTube videos on fishing knots and inshore tactics, built an email list, and asked their small audience what they needed help with. After six months with zero revenue, they launched an apparel line because people asked for shirts and hats with the Salt Strong logo. That apparel business grew to $50,000 to $60,000 a month in sales, but Joe and Luke realized they were running a clothing company instead of teaching fishing. Two years in, they cut the apparel line almost overnight and pivoted to online courses and a membership-based fishing club.
Salt Strong produces species-specific and technique-based courses taught by professional guides. Topics include redfish, snook, trout, wade fishing, grouper fishing, offshore trolling tactics, and kite fishing. Courses range from around $47 for entry-level topics to $200 for advanced offshore strategies like Peter Miller's sailfish trolling system. Each course is designed to shortcut the learning curve for weekend anglers who don't have time to sift through 187,000 YouTube videos on how to catch redfish. Refund rate is about 1%.
It's a private Facebook group with over 51,000 members where cursing, negativity, and inappropriate content result in immediate removal. Joe and Luke created it as a clean alternative to the toxic, argument-filled fishing groups that dominated Facebook when they launched. The no-cursing rule was controversial at first, but it attracted parents, professionals, and anglers who wanted to learn without the keyboard police and smut. It became one of the fastest-growing fishing communities on Facebook.
Fishing for Happiness is Joe's summary of insights from reading over 300 self-help and business books over several years. It's structured as a cheat sheet for achieving happiness and fulfillment, pulling lessons from experts like Napoleon Hill, Phil Knight, and others. The book covers finding your why, creating a mission, morning routines, gratitude journaling, and the 16-question exercise Joe and his wife used to map out their ideal life. Joe wrote it while struggling with discontent in his old career and trying to figure out what was missing.
Joe and Luke focus on teaching trends and biology rather than giving out exact GPS coordinates. Every week, they fish a brand new spot they've never been to before, film the entire experience from launch to catch with a GoPro, and explain why that spot works based on structure, tides, water temperature, and bait presence. The goal is to teach anglers how to replicate successful spot characteristics anywhere in their home waters, not just memorize three or four honey holes. They use drones to point out underwater structure and Google Maps overlays to show how a productive spot in Saint Petersburg looks identical to a spot in Texas.
I have watched Joe and Luke build Salt Strong from the ground up, and the part of their story that matters most to me is not the fishing part. It is the part where Joe was 35 years old, making six figures, living in a paid-off house on a golf course in Georgia, and still waking up every day feeling like something was missing. That is a version of unhappiness a lot of people never talk about because it sounds ungrateful. You have everything society told you to want, and it still does not feel right.
Joe did something about it. He read hundreds of books. He sat down with his wife and wrote out what their dream life actually looked like, and then he compared that list to the life they were living. The gap was massive. So they moved. They sold the house. They left the business. They started over in a tiny condo on the water in Florida with two kids and a third on the way, and they built something from nothing.
I met Joe early in that process, and I remember thinking these guys have energy and they are smart, but I have no idea how they are going to make money at this. A lot of people want to work in the fishing industry. Not many figure out how to actually do it in a way that scales and supports a family and creates something that lasts. Joe and Luke figured it out.
The other reason I wanted Joe on is because Salt Strong is not trying to turn weekend anglers into tournament pros. They are trying to get a parent who has never fished before confident enough to take their kid out on a Saturday morning and not feel like an idiot. That mission matters. If kids do not grow up fishing, the entire outdoor industry is gone in twenty years. Joe gets that.
Joe and his brother Luke were at a financial services conference in Chicago, sharing a hotel room, when they had the conversation that ended their old careers. They were wholesalers at that point, selling annuities and life insurance to financial advisers across the country. The money was good. The business was growing. And Joe remembers looking at Luke and saying they hated half their customers.
Not disliked. Hated. Because when you work in financial services long enough, you see a lot of advisers who are not doing what is right for the client. They are padding their own pockets first. Joe and Luke got to see the whole picture — what people actually had in assets, what they really needed, and what the adviser would recommend. The gap between those three things was often ugly.
The question they asked each other in that hotel room was not whether they liked their customers. It was whether they wanted to be doing this in five years. Ten years. Fifteen years. The answer was no. And if the answer was no, then why keep going down the same path hoping something would magically change?
They made the decision to leave right there. Not in six months. Not after one more big commission check. That night. The way Joe talks about it, you can hear his dad in his voice — the guy who decided to sell a house or buy a truck and had it done two days later. Fail forward. Do not stew on it. Make the call and adjust as you go.
But before Joe could do anything, he had to talk to his wife. That part of the story is in his book, and it is worth reading in his own words. The short version is they both sat down separately and answered 16 questions about what their dream life looked like if there were no limitations. What kind of house. What kind of daily routine. What time they woke up. Who they had breakfast with. Where they lived. Everything.
Joe finished first and was sweating it because he had no idea if his answers would match hers. They were living in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and Joe wanted to be on the water. Badly. Turns out, so did she. Their answers were not identical, but they were close enough. And neither of their answers looked anything like the life they were actually living.
That was the moment. They gave themselves twelve or eighteen months to make the move, then cut it in half and did it in six. Because there is never a perfect time to get married, never a perfect time to have kids, and never a perfect time to quit your job and chase something that is going to make you feel alive. You just do it.
Joe and Luke moved to Florida and bought two domain names the same month: fishstrong.com and saltstrong.com. Fish Strong cost them a lot because it was an established site. Salt Strong was ten dollars on GoDaddy. They knew they wanted to focus on saltwater, and within saltwater, they wanted to focus on inshore fishing because that was what they had been doing for the last fifteen years. That was the niche.
But knowing your niche and knowing how to turn it into a business are two completely different problems. For the first six months, all they did was make YouTube videos. Knot videos. How to tie a Palomar. How to tie an Albright. How to test knot strength with little pulleys and measured breaking points. They posted everything for free on YouTube and on a blog, started building a tiny email list, and asked people what they needed help with next.
Zero revenue. Six months. Two guys with families and a third kid on the way. Joe had gone from making six figures to making nothing, and the clock was ticking. His wife was supportive, but living it is different than talking about it. When you tell your spouse you might go a year without income, you think a year is the worst case. You do not actually plan on hitting that worst case.
They needed to sell something. People kept saying they liked the logo, so Joe and Luke launched an apparel line. Shirts. Hats. Hoodies. It worked. Within a year, they were doing $50,000 to $60,000 a month in apparel sales. That is real money. That pays bills. That funds the business. But it also turned them into an apparel company, and that was not why they started Salt Strong.
Two years in, they made the hardest call of the entire journey. They cut the apparel line almost overnight, gave thirty days notice to sell off excess inventory, and walked away from five figures a month in revenue. They had two employees at that point, and they had to let them go. Joe remembers one of them, Samantha, ending up with a better job at double the pay from her old boss, so it worked out. But that does not make the decision any easier in the moment.
The reason they killed the apparel business is the same reason they left financial services. They went back to the why. Why did they start this company? To teach people how to catch fish. To create memories. To get kids outside. Not to run a clothing warehouse and deal with inventory and customer service tickets about the wrong size shirt.
They kept the smaller piece of the business that was growing underneath the apparel sales — online courses and a fishing club — and bet everything on it. Today, they are doing similar revenue with way less overhead and a hell of a lot more joy.
Joe's dad did not understand the business model at first. He asked Joe if all the information in their redfish course was not already available for free on YouTube. Joe said yes, it probably is. Then he told his dad to go to YouTube right now and type in "how to catch redfish."
187,000 videos come up. Joe watched the first three. The first one is 27 minutes long, posted years ago by two guys from Texas. It is not bad, but it is not great either. YouTube keeps it ranked high because it was one of the first redfish videos ever posted and it has legacy traction in the algorithm. The second video contradicts half of what the first one says. If you watch the top five videos, you walk away more confused than when you started.
Joe did the math. If the average video is five minutes long, it would take 2.2 years of watching 24 hours a day to get through every redfish video on YouTube. That is the problem Salt Strong solves. They take a weekend angler from point A to point B without the noise. No ads. No fluff. No contradictory advice. Just the trends and the biology and the techniques that actually work, taught by guides who do this for a living.
Their courses range from around $47 for entry-level topics like wade fishing to $200 for advanced offshore strategies like Peter Miller's trolling and kite fishing systems. If you can afford to run a boat offshore for sailfish, $200 is not even a tank of gas. If you are learning to wade fish, $47 is cheaper than one trip to the tackle shop where you buy the wrong lures because you did not know any better.
Refund rate is about 1%. Some of those refunds are from people who are jerks. Some are from people who genuinely already knew everything in the course. Joe does not ask questions. He just gives the money back. But 99% of people who buy a Salt Strong course keep it, and a lot of those people email Joe or stop him at ICAST to tell him they caught their first redfish or their first snook or finally figured out how to read structure on a new flat.
That is the business. Shortcuts. Trends. Teaching someone how to replicate a successful spot in their home waters instead of handing them a GPS coordinate and hoping they do not blow it up on social media. Joe and Luke fish a brand new spot every single week, film it with a GoPro from launch to catch, and show exactly why that spot worked. If you want to go to the same spot, great. If you want to find one like it in your area, even better.
When Joe and Luke started looking at Facebook groups in the fishing space, they joined about 80 of them just to see what was out there. The pattern they kept seeing was negativity, keyboard police, cursing, and inappropriate content. It was downright dirty. People posting photos that had nothing to do with fishing. Arguments in every thread. The kind of environment where you would be embarrassed if your wife or your boss or your kid walked up behind you and saw what was on your screen.
Joe told Luke they should start a clean fishing group. Luke, who is anti-social media to begin with and only uses Facebook because the business requires it, thought it was a waste of time. Joe said they were going to be the first fishing community with a hard rule: no cursing. Not a warning. Not a timeout. You curse, you are gone. You post something inappropriate, you are gone. You act like a keyboard cop and trash someone for asking a beginner question, you are gone.
It worked. The Salt Strong Fishing Tribe grew fast, and the negativity they were booting out became free marketing. People who got kicked out would go to other fishing groups and post things like "Screw Salt Strong, they are a bunch of Bible beaters, they will not even let you curse in there." And guys who were sick of the toxic groups would see that and think, wait, there is a fishing group where I can learn something without wading through garbage? Where do I sign up?
The group hit 1,000 members, and Joe and Luke high-fived. Today it is over 51,000. It is a private group. You have to apply and answer a couple of questions to get in. If you break the rules, you are out. No second chances. And the result is one of the most active, helpful, and genuinely positive fishing communities on Facebook.
When Joe left financial services, he started making phone calls to all his old customers — financial advisers he had worked with in every state except Hawaii. He told them he was leaving to start a fishing company. Every single one of them, whether they were in Chicago or Tennessee or New Mexico or Florida, had a fishing story. Not just a story about a fish. A story about a memory. A grandfather. A dad. A trip. A moment. Some of those stories had not been told in thirty years, and Joe could hear the excitement in their voices when they got the chance to tell it again.
That is when it clicked for Joe. He told Luke, we are not in the fishing business. We are in the memory-creating business. If every kid in America had the opportunity to fish, even just once, Joe genuinely believes the world would be a better place. They would respect nature. They would understand conservation. They would see why plastic in the water matters. Not all of them would become hardcore anglers, but they would have a reference point. Ignorance is indifference. If you have never been on the water, you have no reason to care about protecting it.
Joe is not running a conservation nonprofit. He is not donating 1% of revenue to a foundation, at least not yet. Salt Strong just became profitable after three and a half years. But what Joe and Luke can do, and what they are doing, is use their platform to educate. They interview people like Daniel Andrews from Captains for Clean Water on their podcast. They put conservation messages in front of 65,000 people every week through their email list. They teach people how to fish responsibly, how to enter a flat without leaving prop scars, how to handle fish so they survive release.
Joe thinks that education and attention are worth more than money right now, and I agree with him. Salt Strong giving 1% of revenue to a random charity is a drop in the bucket compared to what they can do by teaching 50,000 weekend anglers why the Everglades matter and who is fighting to fix them. That is the multiplier. That is the leverage. And that is what Joe and Luke are built to do.
Joe Simonds is one of the happiest people I know, and I do not think that is an accident. He was living a version of the American dream that felt hollow, and he did something about it. He read the books. He asked the hard questions. He sat down with his wife and mapped out what their ideal life actually looked like, and then he built it. That takes guts. It also takes a clear why, and Joe has one of the clearest I have ever heard.
Salt Strong is not perfect. It is still figuring things out. But Joe and Luke are teaching tens of thousands of people how to catch fish, and in doing that, they are getting parents confident enough to take their kids outside. That matters. The fishing industry does not survive if the next generation grows up staring at screens instead of water.
Press play in the YouTube player at the top of this page, or scroll back up to watch. You will hear Joe tell the hotel room story, the torpedo analogy, and the part about his dad not understanding the business model. The article gives you the topics. Joe gives you the energy and the heart.
Luke Simonds · Lauren Simonds · CA Richardson · Peter Miller · Dylan Hubbard · Daniel Andrews · Chris Whitman · Phil Knight · Napoleon Hill · Jason Wink · Peter Deeks · Tony (Salt Strong East Coast)
Joe Simonds is the co-founder of Salt Strong, an online saltwater fishing education platform, and the author of Fishing for Happiness. He left a six-figure career in financial services at age 35 to build Salt Strong with his brother Luke. Today, Salt Strong reaches over 51,000 members through its private Facebook group, produces fishing courses with expert guides, and publishes weekly fishing reports covering new inshore spots on Florida's east and west coasts. Joe is based in Florida.
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