Brad Luttrell - Co-Founder of GoWild

There's all kinds of apps out there, Shannon, and. And yet there's always one more to find out about. And that's what we got to do today.

Yeah.

Yeah. Last week we talked about this, the athletic or athlete dating app, you know, which is. Which was awesome with Amanda.

Yeah.

And this week, you know, after something I just love so much, being outdoors and, and, you know, being on the river or being up at the duck club, we're going to get to meet a. Just a great guy, really knowledgeable, that talks about his experience launching a social commerce platform for outdoor enthusiasts, which I'm really looking forward to learning more about.

And, you know, the lessons that, that he teaches us and shares with us are go like run so wide. He. This guy really is a student and a, and a mass. A practicing master of running business. Like, that's what he is doing out there. And it just so happen.

Yeah.

He's developed a great system. Right.

To do that and bring it together. And I'm kind of on this kick of trying to find guests that are running kind of interesting businesses that maybe they started, you know, as a side hustle or something different or just they're passionate about it. And he's the first in what I hope to be a series of folks.

That, well, even last week we had. I mean, with Amanda, that was, that was the case with that too. I, and you'll hear this in his story, but was his frustration with the fact that what he wanted to offer couldn't exist, that he created a platform where it could like that. That was, it wasn't just, I wish there was an app for this. It was, I wish there was a place for me to do this or marketers to do this, and it doesn't exist. So let me create it and then let me bring those people in. It was very like. It was, it was, it was expert level. It was one additional step that most people, business owners don't think to take. And I, I really credit him for that. It was very.

Too.

Yeah.

And, and I met, you know, Brad on LinkedIn. So if you're up on LinkedIn, you know, make sure you connect with myself or with Dave. If you'd like to have your business featured on the show, reach out to us and let's talk because that's how, you know, we make some of the best connections that we have.

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So I'm ready.

He is Shannon Jean. I'm Dave Hamilton and this is episode 283 of the Small Business Show.

I'm always surprised at how many people don't have a product roadmap and or service roadmap or like a company roadmap, like where are you going? And they don't have. And this goes back to my branding experience, but they don't have a vision that everybody should be working towards. And it sounds fluffy, it sounds stupid, but the deal, if you're a startup, if you're a small business, what are you trying to do? And you know, this is a great example of how you weed out the squirrels. You don't know a squirrel is a squirrel if you don't have a vision. And so you know, something that we are always trying to refine and actually I did the most thorough dive into this a few months ago. I've been working on it. It took me with COVID throwing everything for a loop. It took me a little bit to, to really get this executed. But we just launched our product roadmap for the next seven to eight months and it's to keep us focused. And I'm always shocked at how many companies are like, yeah, we're trying to be the best at this thing. And it's like, cool. What is steps to get there.

Hey, Dave, you know, if anybody who follows me on social media or knows me, you know, knows that there's not many places that I'd rather be than hiking along a river with a fishing pole in my hand or sitting in a duck blind during the winter with, you know, some great friends. And, and I love those things. I also really love small business, as everybody knows. So I like to always see if I can put those things together. And I'm always impressed by people that create businesses in this outdoor space. I've never done it so, you know, bringing together a love of outdoor activities like fishing and hunting with a revenue generating business. It seems like.

Surprised you haven't done it yet. I know that you say this. I, I like. Yeah, that is kind of weird.

Yeah.

So I, but, but you know, it's. I have some reasons. I'll talk about them someday. But you know, the great thing is we get to meet people that have already done that, done this. Today we get to meet a business owner that's built a great business and a platform, a social commerce platform called Go Wild. Brad Luttrell, he's the co founder and I'm really glad to have him here today. Brad, I've really been looking forward to talking to you. I've been stalking you on LinkedIn for a while and then finally reaching out. So thank you for joining us today.

Yeah, thanks guys. It's fun. I already enjoy the banter already. So this is going to be a fun show.

Yeah, that's cool. We're all about the banter, the banter brothers.

Oh, there you go. I like it.

Yeah. So, okay, tell us about Go Wild. You know, same thing on, on LinkedIn. I've been lurking on the, on your platform for a while. There's a lot going on and so, you know, for outdoor enthusiasts and was the kind of overarching. Well, you tell me, what was the overarching goals when you started the business and the concept for Go Wild?

Yeah. So it's kind of funny in that I thought the year that I came up with this idea was one of the craziest we had seen. It was 2016. Trump and Hillary are standing off. Social media was a nasty place. And I thought at that time, I'm like, it doesn't get much worse than this. I didn't have the 2020 vision to know what was coming and I mean that in the way of looking forward. But the, you know, this year has been absolutely banana grams. But the. At the time, I was a creative director at a digital ad agency and I knew I wanted to start a company. I actually got hired after I got fired for trying to start another company. Long story, we might get into that at some point, but I came in and I was like, look, I'm going to quit at some point. But it took me five years to figure out or to get to that point to where I could quit with, with a new company. But I had, I've been looking for what I wanted to do and I considered like, multi level marketing for dudes. Like, what if you had beard products?

That's awesome.

I went down all kinds of avenues, man. Like, I really wanted to do my own thing at a big level and I'd had a couple runs at small businesses that were various levels of failures and I wanted to do it big and do it right. And I, I am a avid outdoor enthusiast as well, but I kind of sucked at it, which is what really started the idea of Go Wild in that social media was a Nasty Place in 2016 and Hunter bullying had, had really picked up over the last couple years. And then that election year, we just kind of lost all civility for each other, you know, it. And it became really what we still have today, which is now even more amplified. But, you know, there was just no, no, there was no, you know, reverence for anyone else's feelings about anything. You know, it's like, oh, you shot a deer. That's wrong. I don't agree with you. I'm gonna, you know, bully you or harass you or threaten your life, whatever. And so I kind of gotten into this mindset of like, well, that sucks, man. Like, I, I really enjoy this and I can't talk about it. And that was the clicking point of like, what a shame that I have something I could love so much and I don't have a place where I could Talk about it along with this idea that I have something that I want to get better at. And I also don't have a place to turn to because within my Instagram following, you know, I got people that follow me from work, my family, or all these people connections already have. It's like I've already tapped into that network of who can help me get better. And so I kind of realized that there needed to be a place that operated kind of like a Reddit where you could just drop into, you know, Reddit. You can pop in and you can talk about politics, you can talk about, you know, baking cakes. Whatever it is you want to find a topic on, you could find that. So really the impetus for starting this was to get away from all the BS that was going on elsewhere and then also to, to really be able to dive in and to content like around the content itself. If we want to talk about trout fishing, I can find other guys that are really into trout fish fishing. Or if I want to talk like we even have gardening, we have 50 plus topics that you can really dive into and explore with people that are into those topics, but also around you. So that's, I mean, that's the, the short origin story of Go Wild. And that's not necessarily the biggest overview of what it is, but I'll kind of stop there for a second, see if you have any questions of that origin.

Yeah, it's fascinating trying to create, you know, the safe space, if you will, to have these conversations and to build this, this, this resource that you have was, you know, one of the things I read about, it's a social commerce platform. I mean, was that always the goal? It's like, okay, we're going to put this together and then we'll also going to have this revenue generating side of it to sustain the business. Was that the thought process?

Yeah. So there's a Marketplace in our V1 business plan and we realized that we needed multiple revenue streams in the beginning. It was never imagined we would build what we've built. And, and a lot of the concept and origin story was around that safe place. It was around. We knew we would have really good data for outdoor advertisers. And, and I was an advertising guy. Like, you know, actually several of my co founders came from ad agencies. We knew this part of the business well and we knew if we could get people to tell us that they liked trout fishing in Colorado, then we could find brands that are trying to find trout fishermen in Colorado and so on and so on. And we also Made the prediction that if online bullying was so bad for, for users in 2016 around hunting, that the advertising would follow suit. And that's been absolutely true. You know, you actually today, you can't, obviously can't advertise guns. Most people have some awareness of that, but they don't know how deep it goes. It goes really deep. I mean essentially if you have a, even a holster that's a gun accessory, scopes, if it has certain types of imagery that have firearms in it. So it could be a hunting brand ad for camouflage. But if it has a gun in it, it can get flagged. Like there's all these levels that these brands struggle with and most people have no idea yet. You have this $156 billion industry in hunting and fishing that struggles to be able to advertise. So we knew we could build a business model around helping those brands connect with a really passionate, valuable consumer. The Average hunter spends 2800 a year on hunting. Average angler spends $1400 a year on fishing. We knew brands were trying to find these consumers, but the, the core of that original business model was going to be advertising. And then we would eventually build in. We, we envisioned it more of a marketplace with consumer to consumer trade, kind of like ebay. We started looking at that and it was a freaking nightmare. The, the idea of the logistics and all the, the legal, just the legal portion of the idea of gun sales, it's like, holy crap, get away. Like, let's walk away from this now.

Yeah, Run, run.

Right, right.

This is fascinating. You, you sound, you remind me of me 20 years ago when we started a website for Apple fans. Right. You know, but it's the same kind of thing. It was like there, there is no place that really will do this. And, and then really the business that we started that, that really kind of took off was the, the business catering towards bringing sponsors that needed a home to all of these places where this home existed and coordinating that and all of that stuff. So yeah, that really smart man.

Yes. So what, what ended up happening, you ask about. I'll finally answer your original question here of like did you, did you see that this was going to be bigger than, than what you built initially? And we, we had an idea but like what we built now we really focused on the value for the consumer side on the E commerce side and the brands come second. Like we are prioritizing a really altruistic, like trying to help the customer find the best product for the job, sponsorships be damned. Like, we don't Cater. In that shopping process, we're really trying to build a very organic experience, authentic, that's getting you real feedback from other members in the platform. It's not biased, like, in that we're funneling stuff that is sponsored to you. Now, you can have advertising advertisements in there that might tell you to buy the scope, but when you're searching, we are really trying to help you find. Like, we're building in best price shopping. We're building in based on reviews, based on the experience of the people that are using those products and, and trying to help the consumer wade through this outdoor gear mess. I mean, if you're into fishing, Shannon mentioned that at the beginning, like, oh, my God, like, trying to learn to fish online. It's like, holy crap, there's spinners and crankbaits and jigs and like, I don't know how any of this stuff works. Right. Like, I don't know when to use it. I don't know, like, time of year, species. There's hundreds of things to consider. So we're trying to build the best system that will cater to you and really give you a wide reach if you're looking for something specific. And in the outdoor industry, like, oh, my God, there's, you know, there's tens and tens of thousands of widgets for just fishing. And. But if you want to come in and you want to have a curated experience that really is helping you have a, like, okay, how to start bass fishing. What do I even buy? Like, we're trying to build that in there as well. So it's kind of caters to what that, that user's experience level is. That's where we see the future of this. Because now I also, I have opportunity for advertising and I have a really, again, a really authentic shopping experience. And then we can also work with brands to help them understand consumer behavior in a way that's not creepy. It's not like, hey, we've got Dave from Knoxville, Tennessee here ready to buy a product. And here's all of Dave's purchase behavior. It's like, no, it's more like we can help brands understand overall consumer behavior. Like, hey, you guys are focusing really heavily on bass fishing, but you actually have a lot of people that overlap with behaviors with trout fishermen. Like, maybe you want to look at that angle as well. You know, we can help them understand their consumer better. So there's really three revenue streams within the platform. Advertising, E comm and data analytics.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. We talk a lot about the revenue Stack and pulling together different parts of your business that can, you know, really within your own business, create their own, you know, their own revenue. And I love that. The other thing, I really. Go ahead.

Well, right now, I mean we've never seen a better example of why you need that right now. Because the advertisers aren't spending, but consumer spend in the outdoor space is up 500%. And so the. In some categories, some aren't that high. But like firearms in March, sales jumped 80% every month. This year in firearms has been the biggest month over month for that particular month ever. It's like we've never seen a bigger. And it's all, oh, it's almost, it's all. These are largely driven by new gun owners too. So the whole landscape is shifting dramatically. As many as the guy just did a podcast, he was predicting that in one month we saw a million new gun owners created. And that's going to shift, you know, a lot of really interesting things. Politically. It's going to, you know, these are, these are people that are probably didn't ever see themselves becoming firearms owners. But the spend is up. So now our ad business might be down, but our E Commerce search has gone through the roof. I think the first 30 days in lockdown we saw a 44% jump in searching for gear. And pretty much, I think the last that was from March 15th to April 15th, the first, we kind of call that the first 30 days of lockdown. That was pretty much, pretty much when it happened. So that was interesting. We saw a minute and a half longer spent on the app. 44 increase in e. Com activity, a 36% increase in people spending time outside. We have a way to track that with the app. Pretty cool. And then, you know, this last 30 days, well through June essentially is this stat. We just had this pulled today. We saw a. Another 12 12% increase in our Gearbox functionality. So people are shopping online a lot more. So we're still early phase. You know, I was going to make a joke earlier, you guys, you guys talked about the revenue generating company. I was going to ask you who that was, but yeah, we're still, we're still really young, right? Like last year was our first full year out of beta. We're making money, but we've still got a ways to go. But it's been cool to have something to be excited. If we were still an ad only business, oh my God, we'd be getting raked over the coals right now. But we have a lot of excitement with, with investors and our stakeholders because of the E Comm experience. That's great.

I'm curious about the app. Have, Are you, are you a developer or did you farm that out? Like, how tightly involved are you in either the design, the development of the app? Because, I mean, that's your business right there.

Yeah.

So I'm just curious where your expertise sort of begins and ends in that. In that realm.

Yeah. So I, I. Funny enough, nobody saw this coming. I have a journalism degree, which has nothing to do with the tech side of this. Journalism has, you know, there's like, no advanced tech has come out of journalism, I would say, period.

But we're podcasting here, right? That's okay.

Yeah. But even, even, even then it's like, how, how long did it take for journalists to be like, hey, I think we should do the podcast thing? You know, like last year. The.

But I've been doing it 15 years. But. But yeah, you're right. Yeah. The rest of the world took a while.

Like, like the radio guys. Definitely. You guys said your radio background. Like, the radio guys picked it up quick.

No, I'm a, I'm a musician, which is where it came from for me. We were publishing Mac observer, and then.

Ah, okay.

It sort of made. When podcasting began, it was like, oh, this makes like, I already know how to publish and now I already know how to like, use microphones and record things. So it made sense. And yeah, so. And then Shannon and I started this five years ago.

So. Yeah, yeah, so. So the, you know, you have. I think I'm lumping podcasts together. I. I literally just came out of another one. So if I continue to think like, like my next one, if I ask you guys something about the gun industry, you'll know that I have no idea. I' into the. But the. But the, you know, the radio guys came along pretty quick into it. Like, NPR was doing some cool stuff, like five, six.

Absolutely.

But the, the overall, like, I didn't learn a lot about tech in school. I actually, I spent two years as a photographer and it was during the Great Recession, and I was like, I gotta get out of here. And so I got into advertising and I kind of worked my way up to being a creative director. And I'm not a developer, I'm a copywriter photographer. I've done video. And really what my takeaway from all that is the storytelling aspect of it. And I have a good amount of experience in working with really good user experience designers. And so in terms of building an app, I could not sit down and do a lick of what you see, like, not a bit of it. I couldn't build any amount of it. Now I did a prototype on the design that I took to my co founder Donovan, who did all of the design work for our app and still continues to. And so I had ideas on a, you know, Photoshop file. I'm good in Photoshop, but I still can't do what he does. Right. So. So my experience really was the vision, the. I. I'm a sales, marketing and creative guy. Like, that's really my expertise. My, I'm the, I'm the guy out there raising money. And now my co founder Zach, this last funding round has really helped with that and he's a numbers guy, so we compliment each other really well. But my role in building the app is, you know, that I didn't sit down and code, but I've been, I remain highly involved in user experience. I still, I still. This might be like, I'm clingy, but I still write all the copy, for the most part that you see in the user interface. Like when there's any amount of copy that, like onboarding and whatnot. Most of that's coming from me, although our director of marketing is kind of taking that over. But when we started this thing, I kind of looked at with the guys we were founding this with, we said, you know, there's really going to be four pillars of what we need to do to get this company off the ground. It's going to be the marketing, sales and fundraising. And then there's the, you know, you build a social media app, the data and the analytics and the news feed and all the stuff that we had to figure out. Like I needed a data scientist and my co founder Zach does that. And we actually launched with only iOS. It was our beta run and we stayed in beta for a while. But that was with my co founder Chris, who Chris has built four apps for Coca Cola. One of those was in partnership, the Olympics. Just a fun side fact about him, he launched a satellite with NASA at an internship and I think they still use some of the code he's written like, like for some of their dps. A good partner dude.

Yeah.

These guys are mad men. And so, so, so I want to.

Ask you about your partners because if, if I, if I let you finish, you'll never finish. So I'm just going to grab the reins while we're on topic. But you're like, we are big fans of partners and partnerships here. As long as they're the right partners. And it sounds like from what you've just described, I mean, you're also a marketing guy, so you're. You're going to highlight the high points, and I appreciate that. But how did you find these great partners? Like, what was your process? How did that come together? Did you know any or all of them before this?

Or was.

Were they people you attracted in just for this business? How did. How'd that work?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I get asked this a lot, like, how do I find, you know, how do I find my co founders? And so Zach and I had tried to start a business before. That's what got me fired the first time. The only time. Only been fired once. But we got. Zach got laid off, and then they found our operating agreement on his computer because they went through his personal Dropbox and they were like, hey, are you starting another business on the side? And I said, yeah. And they said, why didn't you tell us? I said, because you would have fired me. And they said, that's silly. And then they fired me three days later for it. But. But. So Zach and I had a good relationship. We had tried to start. We tried to start that company, then we tried to start it again two years later. Later, McDonald's bought the same company concept for $300 million. And I was like, well, must have been a good idea. But we didn't execute, so we didn't deserve any of that. But the idea was there. But then I. So I worked with Zach at that company at an agency. I worked with Donovan at an ad agency. And actually Donovan was working on my team at the ad agency when I quit. So I've worked with Donovan at the agency level for six years. And then Chris was really. Chris is the developer. Chris was the wild card. I had never worked with Chris, and I got a referral to him from someone at the ad agency because they had worked with him on a project. And we met up and I tried to pay Chris and Donovan as contractors, actually, because I was new to this and I didn't really understand how many co founders it's going to take and all this. And sure, I tried to pay Chris $25,000 to just build the V1, and he turned it all down to just make no money instead as a co founder.

That could be a great decision, you know, in the long run.

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, I think long term, he's happy with that now, but at the time I thought he was a little bit off his rocker, but it worked out for my.

My he knew what he was going to build.

Right?

I mean, he trusted. He trusted himself, but he also trusted you, right?

Yeah, he was really excited about it. I mean, we met over coffee and the end of it, he was really amped up, and his wife actually is the one that told him, like, don't do it as a contractor. Go all in and try to build this thing. So. Yeah, and. And then Donovan was the same thing. I tried to pay him and I was like, you know, I. I think he and I had a more open conversation about it wasn't just him, but it was like, you know, you. You can make 10 grand here and there, but this is going to be an ongoing thing and I need somebody like you, so just come on and. And do this with me. And, you know, there's been so. So when you're getting started, you got to have smart co founders. But the other thing I advise people to do, so many people stress out about hiring, and a lot of people. I just talked to a startup founder yesterday, and she hired an agency, and I'm not a big fan of that. And I've been in agencies, they're not very efficient. It's a great way to blow 30% of your budget on product management and just getting lost in the ether. And I'm a big fan of working with contractors, though, so there's been times when we couldn't hire and we needed to get, like, our Android product. Early days came along with contractors, and so, you know, what we didn't have out of the gate with our founding team we've supplemented.

Yeah, that's great.

Makes sense. That makes sense. You said something in there that I just want to highlight for. For you, but also for all of our listeners. You said we didn't execute, so we didn't deserve any of that. Speaking of the thing that, that McDonald's acquired, what a. A. We say this on the show in so many different ways all the time. Ideas are great, but they're worth nothing if you don't execute. And it's so important to hear others saying that. So I just wanted to kind of cheer for that a little bit.

Yeah, man. So I hear so many people, like, patting themselves on the back for stuff like that. And I don't deserve any credit for something like we had an operating agreement and I had, like, a little bit of research into something. I didn't do what they did. But it's a funny anecdote now because it keeps me and Zach motivated. Early days, it kept us motivated. We have other. Other motivations now. But I so many people try to brag on having ideas, I'm like I don't care. Like I just don't care. You know, it's like you didn't do so many people that bring ideas to, you know, you have a lot of one off startup conversations too and a lot of people want to float their idea to you. And I'm like, yeah, but like that's not going to be, no one's going to pay you for the idea. Like that's the hardest. That first funding round is really hard to pull together if you're at that idea phase. Like if you haven't put any of the legwork in, you know, you got nothing. Because investors know that ideas aren't worth anything. It's all execution.

Absolutely. Yeah. And they're investing in you and not your ideas at that early stage especially. Yeah.

So I want to ask one of the things I notice on the. Well we've been involved in businesses before that you know, require lots of engagement and that's what you're looking for from your users and you guys seem to have a significant amount of that. How do you promote that engagement? And maybe now it's a kind of self fulfilling thing because you got so much stuff going on but maybe you got to go back to the beginning. It just seems like that would be a constant challenge to be make sure the users were interacting with the platform. Do you have specific ways that you promote that?

Yeah, well one of the. That goes back to. I mean I still have this post it like one of those oversized post its where we map this out and all of our research said that friend to friend or follower platforms really struggle. You know Twitter, if you download Twitter and you install the app, they beat you over the head to follow people. Right. Because they've struggled until you hit. It used to be 33, I don't know what the number is now but until you hit 33 people that you were following, you didn't have enough content to find the platform valuable. So we decided we were not going to build a follower oriented platform. We were going to build a content first platform. So out of the gate we decided to essentially it's kind of like Reddit. I mean it's really like Reddit for the outdoors and it onboards you in 60 seconds and all of a sudden you're getting content populated to you that you didn't have to do anything for other than tell us if you like to hunt, fish or enjoy the outdoors. And then you can go in, you can Curate it. You know, it's like more into bass fishing. I don't care as much about cat fishing or trout fishing or what have you. You can kind of curate that down. But the platform doesn't rely on followers. Now if I, if I see Shannon on there and I'm like, oh, cool, he's posting cool stuff, seems to know what he's talking about. I'm going to follow him. Well, now Shannon will keep coming back into my feed whether or not he's posting into something I'm following along with. But the reason we did that was to have engagement out of the gate. And I'll tell you, like, we Launched this thing September 2017, Bootstrap built version of the product and we had no idea it was going to happen. And I was shocked at how quickly there was engagement on the platform and people were getting 10 or 15 comments because of the content first approach. Now, I'll tell you, we do see ups and downs and obviously, I mean, this is something that we think about all the time. I obsess over it and there's metrics that we, we follow that we've kind of created on our own. I don't, I don't know, I don't know what other social platforms are looking at, but like post per user and that kind of stuff. And we obsess over that stuff and try to get that up. And you know, you do that through good onboarding, you do that through good user experiences and good products that don't suck. I mean, honestly, like, people think that we are competing in the outdoor space. It's like, no, man, I'm competing against the Chase bank app that you use and your email app that are really good experiences. No one tolerates a bad user experience anymore. So we have to really, you know, keep our bar set high on that kind of stuff. And the engagement happens. A lot of it happens naturally just, just by the nature of the way the content is structured.

Yeah, that makes sense. So once you got things going, I know you said you had a couple of kind of false starts, maybe with other businesses, but that this one took off. I mean, what surprised you the most after you jumped in and everything you got started?

Probably the passion for, from our core, we, I mean, this isn't everybody, but the passion for our core kind of super users, for the brand, that's been the most shocking thing is, is that I had a guy one time put it like this. He said, man, I don't even know if this is a thing, but I've never thought about buying an Instagram hat or an Instagram shirt. But everything this brand touches, I want to be a part of. I want to have the stickers. And we decided one thing we didn't like about social media in general is that it's all faceless. I mean, people know Mark Zuckerberg, but, you know, no one, no one really takes the time to listen. It feels like when you're on these platforms, it's not like if I post onto my personal Facebook, which I don't have, I deleted it two years ago. But if I did, I don't expect Mark to see it. And if I tagged Mark, I don't expect him to see it. And if I, if he does see it, he doesn't. He's not gonna answer. Like, we all just know that it's how it is. I can tag Jack Dorsey all I want. Not very likely to get a response. Right. And. And there's a scalability thing here. I don't know that my, like, our brand can't do this forever, but we decided that we were going to be very involved. So when you sign up for our app, we, you, you get a, a series of onboarding messages. You get one from my co founder, Chris, you get one from me. My director of marketing and creative, Erica will email you at some point and we're all checking in with you on how, how it's going to. All that's automated, right? Like there's, there's a. You set off an onboarding process when you sign up. But what's cool is I get people to respond back all the time. They're. They're like, is this real or is this a bot? And I'm like, well, that was, that was automated, but this one's really me. And I'll send them a fist bump emoji or something. And people really buy into that, man. Like, the idea of this community that we have being a family has really taken hold. And those core users from like September of 2017 are literally like warriors for the brand. And you're pro.

Your pro staff, right?

Yeah, we kind of call them ambassadors now. I like it. But we have about a hundred people that, that get to see products early. They get discounts on stuff. They get insider information. We did a zoom call with them the other night, which is crazy. You know, there's like insider fun stuff that they get to do, but beyond them, there's still like thousands of people that are die hard and like, buy the stickers and everything that we come out with and want to be Involved. That's been the most surprising thing, man, is just like, I didn't. I didn't really. I knew we had to have a cool brand. I mean, I've done. I've. I've worked on hundreds of branding projects, and, you know, I knew we had to have a good brand, but I thought it was more to pass a sniff test, which is like, it's pretty much what you tell a lot of brands that are working on commodity stuff. It's like, you know, you really just want to have something that looks the part. I thought we needed to look the part, like I said, to compete with these other apps you're using. I thought people would get passionate about the content, and they do. But it's been absolutely shocking on how many people love the brand. They buy into our personalities. Even my co founder, Zach, who's probably posted on the platform like, nine total times since September of 2017. He doesn't engage a lot. He has his own Persona that people call him the Sasquatch because they're like, you know, he's there, but you never see him. That's great.

The one thing I want to point out that I thought it was fascinating that you said at the beginning of the show is we're all surrounded with, you know, platforms, books, companies that were started by experts.

Right.

Somebody gets really good at something and they think, okay, well, this is the next thing. I'm gonna go start this business around it. But you. You came at it the other way in the sense you're like, well, I didn't know I sucked at this. I didn't know enough about this. And I think that's really authentic. I think you're one of your partners. Was the first time Hunter guy that you've done.

Yeah. Chris.

Stuff with. It's the same kind of thing with that. That I think really connects with people because, you know, we're all somewhat intimidated.

By, I don't know, everything.

But, I mean, when you get. Go out there and you'll see the founders of these. This platform, you know, and the app and everything, and they're just like, all of us, like, well, I need. Maybe I'm the best trout fisherman ever, but I don't know anything about bass, so I gotta go or do whatever. So I really respect coming at it from that angle and the fact that you share it with, you know, your. Your followers and, you know, your customers, I think that's really great.

Yeah, man. That we. We've prided ourselves on that since the beginning. And there you. We're not the first company to try social media app for the outdoors. There's been a lot of them that have. Have come and gone. And a lot of the early ones we saw were founded by wealthy hunters, you know, successful in real estate or whatever it was. And they paid an agency to build an app and they, they built it around a hunting experience. That's not authentic. They built it around. Well, one of them in particular that, that is now defunct. That was when I started doing the research. It seemed like it was one of the, the bigger ones out there with several thousand users, you know, and the whole system was built around international hunting. And it's just like, that's just not, it's not how consumers, that's not how most people experience it. And it's not like international hunters aren't welcome in our community. But we've built a community that, that really caters to. It's okay to not know and it's okay to ask questions and it's okay to be new. And I really, I feel like a lot of the success of the community's attitude has been around just making it okay to be new and ask questions.

That's cool. Okay, so we've talked a lot about the success you've had and how things have worked out great and you guys never haven't made any mistakes or anything. But we of course want to dig deeper into the, the meat a little bit more. So I've got a couple questions for you. What's the biggest obstacle to your success and what systems have you tried to put in place to overcome that?

We have a nickname for this. It's called Squirrel. And anytime anybody says squirrel around here, you know you're chasing something and you're distracted and that. I mean, people, you know, I could tell you about legal problems that we've had from hiring crap attorneys. I could tell you about the CPAs I've had that weren't doing a good job. Like, there's been a lot of stuff that's been an obstacle, but one. And I think, you know, there's. We could talk about all that stuff for hours. And I have tons of thoughts on that, too. Fired a lot of attorneys over the last four years. That's amazing. Yeah, right. Get rid of the bad ones because they're going to cost you more later. But the thing that I think, and I know my co founders think is the most, the biggest obstacle that most startups face is this idea that you can do everything and that you're going to do everything and that everything's a great idea and we're awesome. And we're going to pack all this functionality into our product or all this service, whatever it is we're doing that we're going to do it all. And really the hardest thing that we face every day is deciding what not to do. And literally, so if somebody's running off on a tangent or getting distracted with something we shouldn't focus on. Squirrel is literally the, it's like we even have a mascot that is a stuffed squirrel. I don't think he's at my house still from quarantine, but the, the. We have a mascot that kind of symbolizes trying to stay focused. It's a stuffed squirrel with a hunting vest on. And the, it's just a part of our culture is to try to focus and we're always narrowing that down. You know, when we started this thing, I didn't know what was going to really be the thing that people connected with. We started off with this really wide, really wide focus and we were going to do all the things. And you know, as we've grown, I'll give you an example, like we built an activity tracker, kind of like a Strava or a Runkeeper that tracked on the phone. We launched that last year with a Garmin project. And so you could track on the Garmin watch. If you didn't have a Garmin watch, you could do it on the phone. And dude, we got to the end of the year, nobody was doing it. We had spent a year and a half developing something that people weren't using. And the. We, we launched our. This. Well, what actually is funny is we, we felt like we just hadn't promoted it. Right. And all this other stuff. Right.

Of course, you look to yourself first, right? We must be the problem, right?

We blame the marketing team or whatever. You know, it's like, ah, we just gotta do a better job. Well, we launched our E Comm product and it got five times the adoption rate in eight weeks that the other product had gotten. All year long, all year long. And, and so we were distracted, right? So we, we, we gutted it. We, we, we. That's really the biggest loss, like the biggest failure we've had was activity tracking. And we spent a ton of time building out that functionality and it was a failure. And so we realized that we had this vision for being this activity driven platform and really we realized that people were using our platform to have conversations around their experiences and their gear. So the E Comm thing took off, right. Like it was a natural Fit with the conversations people wanted to have in the platform. People don't want to go out and track the. Or at least there was two problems. A, there was a lot of skepticism around the anonymity of the maps, you know, and even though we didn't do that, it was a conception that we did. And then the other thing is like, if you are in a tree stand for 12 hours and you're hunting, or if you're fishing for seven hours, our audience was using like iPhone 6s and 7s. The batteries were dead. The technology was not ready to do what we wanted to do. It's not like a Strava where you're on a two hour bike ride and you can track it and it's okay. Your battery can hang in there. So, so in some ways it was like a little bit ahead of its time. Like the, the battery life, you know, four or five hours on a phone using gps, you're dead. Right? So, but at the same time, like, that was, that was a distraction for us and we were building up all this technological debt, right? We just constantly having to fix bugs and all this stuff's coming in. It's like it's not being adopted. So we had to cut it and try to stay focused. You know, it was a squirrel. We had to let it go. No, it's great.

So my next question, you may have already answered this with, with your tracking thing, but, you know, one of the reasons why we started the show five, six years ago was because from the outside, everybody looks at businesses and go, oh man, that's so great. Everything works. And especially if you have some success, they just think, oh, they figured it all out. But on the inside, you know, we're just littered with mistakes, right? So we, we like to think of mistakes as tuition here. Would you. Is there a mistake? The, you know what we would call your biggest mistake you've made with Go wild, That's really stuck with you. Do you think it was the activity tracker? Was there something different, you know, that.

That comes to mind the most because we spent so much development resources building that out and marketing that and our whole website, even it still lingers on our website today because we're getting ready to relaunch a new website that's E com focused, but which, which I don't like. It's hard for me to tell you I wish we hadn't done it because we learned from it. And if, you know, I just like, yeah, you always wish you would have started where you're at now, but there's probably other things we learned along the way. We ended up with a great partnership with Garmin. Got to work with, say we've worked with Garmin now which you know, as a new guy and you're working with the 3 billion dollar a year company, like that really helps. And, and the Garmin functionality stayed. We still do that. And actually what's funny is Garmin wanted to be a partner in our E Comm model. So we actually sell Garmin watches. Yeah. So it's like there's been, I regret that it took us so long. I wish we had figured that out sooner and you know, been a little more clear headed about it. Another that's, that's probably the biggest, the longest thing. We chase that the longest and I wish we had let it go sooner. But the thing I'll also say is that we have, if I, if I thought of like a struggle that other business owners might be able to learn from. We have at times struggled with data. Which sounds funny because I have a co founder as a data scientist. But when you're, you know, my wife sometimes will say about our product like how do you not have that? And I'm like honey, it's not a Chinese restaurant where you go in and order, you know, the A2 and an egg rol. Like that's not, that's not how this works. I had to go in and cook that with flour and you know, and all of the rice vinegar and everything. I had to make that by scratch and I screwed it up 12 times because I didn't know how to make General Soda's chicken. And then I had to go and learn to make an egg roll. Like it's a much harder process when you've never done it before. Right. Versus a out of the box product. So there's two parts to this. At times we have not looked enough at the data. And again I just told you like data is part of what we're trying to do. And even, even with that mindset and a co founder as a data scientist, I think at times we've overlooked parts of that and the value of that. And the other thing I've learned and we're still trying to focus on is if you're doing something and there's a third party that does it better than you do not rebuild things that are like use third party systems when you can. And, and like we have spent a lot of time building out stuff in the past that you know, we could have just hooked up to a third party system and like I I'll give an example of one. Push notifications. There's a lot of vendors for push notifications. They all kind of suck for apps. And we were using one and we weren't happy with it. We're like, you know what? Screw these guys. We're paying 800amonth and we could go build this ourselves. We'll take our toys, go home and. And then like, we start down this path and it's like, holy crap, what are we doing? Like, re. We're gonna build this whole other. This is why so many companies launch time tracking systems, because they all end up trying to build it themselves. It's like product. I guarantee you one of the most founded companies is a. Is a product management system. Right. Because companies get into this where it's like, we could do that better. And then you.

Yeah, we need to tweak it. It doesn't do exactly what we want.

Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And I. At least to be more aware of that, I'm sure there's something right now we're using like that we're doing that we should be using a third party for. But if I were to look at big mistakes, overall activity tracking is our biggest. And then certainly not. Not looking at the data and also like, not paying attention to third parties is kind of one that comes to mind. Or two.

Yeah, you're. You're preaching to the choir. You're. You're talking to somebody that has built by hand both a content management system and a CRM. So, yeah, I think feel you. Yes.

The agency I used to work for, we had our own proprietary cms and it was awesome, but it was also super expensive to maintain.

To maintain.

Yeah, we.

I mean, we. I built our own. Because WordPress literally didn't exist 21 years ago.

Right.

I mean, there was. There was a good reason for it. I should have just gone into the business of building CMSs after that and then we would have a different conversation on my private island.

Shopify.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Or.

Yeah, or that.

That's right.

Yep. That's great.

So one of the things we talked about, social commerce and your E commerce part of it. Is that how you've branded or you've branded it as the gearbox section of the app and your platform? Or is that something different?

We could brainstorm this right now. I don't know what the hell to call this thing. Some people call it content commerce, which I'm like, that's cool, but that sounds like Wirecutter. And that's not what we're doing and a lot of, a lot of investors will call it that. And that's what they're talking about. Here's the thing, a content company like that pays employees to create affiliate link content that attach affiliate links to it. We have the biggest repository of outdoor gear in the world. And I'm not kidding, we have more outdoor gear in that Gearbox system. It's quarter million today. It grows by between 3 and 10,000 a week at the rate we're adding to it. And it is affiliate driven. Right. We're pulling from everybody's affiliate programs and we have users within the platform who engage with that and do what these content platforms pay, you know, a couple dozen, hundred maybe people to do. We have thousands of people doing that while I sleep. So I don't like content commerce. So we've kind of been trying, I don't think we coined social commerce, but it's not that really resonated and I think everybody would probably define it differently. So I've just kind of landed there until, until we figure out really what it is. But I, I do feel like social commerce is the next big thing with. I agree with you E Comm. Because you know the we every marketer knows the value of a friend as a referral is better than reading a review online, right? Our system is catering to what we know you like to do. We're pairing you with people who can help or like this is our aspirational, that's what we're working, working towards. You can't do all of this today but, but we're eventually even going to be able to help you. Like if you want to come in and say, hey, I want to buy a fly rod. Well, you'd like to know what people that don't suck use, right? Like that's the idea is that you buy gear that's, that's validated. So that's why we have five star review systems. But everybody knows brand know how to hack those. Like it's very easy to hack a five star review system. I sent out an email to the customer. Did you have a good experience, yes or no? If they say no, they go to customer service. If they say yes, they go to Amazon review. Yeah, it's like we used to do this in the agency world all the time. So reviews are really skewed. There's a reason everything you look at is like 3.8 to 4.1 stars, right. So they're relatively meaningless for that matter. Or for that, for that reason. But the other thing that happens is okay, I am trying to buy an elk hunting bag. I see that Tyler T. Has reviewed this bag. He says it's awesome. That's all he said. Well, that's great, Tyler, but I don't know if you've ever even elk hunted or if you have. If you had success. I have no idea how often you've been doing it. Within our platform, though, you would be able to engage with Tyler. You could look at his profile. You could see that the dude's a bad mofo with elk hunting. And, like, I'm going to trust Tyler's recommendation. Or you see he's like, never posted anything and I'm not going to listen to him. But, like, that's one way you could look at how. What we're trying to do. It's where you can at least have authentic conversation with these. These people. But it would be even cooler if I could just say, hey, I want to buy whatever the top people and go out are using, because we have a scoring system that tracks your trophies. It tracks how often you're outside, and we know who the most active and best at anything in the platform are. So once we start to figure out what GE they're using now, we can reinvent how people search for gear. And I really feel like this is going to be the future shopping man.

It makes sense. That makes sense. So I know you have at least a couple of podcasts going on right now. Restless Native was kind of the one that I came across to you, and now you have the Gearbox Talk. Can you talk about the importance of the podcast to the Go Wild, the brand and the platform?

Yeah. So we just recently did a big data review on this because I had a theory and I told you guys that I'm really involved in the onboarding. I talk to literally hundreds of people a week. If I don't know, it might be thousands that actually DM and I engage with stuff is like an hour a night DMing with people. And I was noticing a lot of people. It was anecdotal data, but it's still data. A lot of people said they found me through a podcast. And I heard you on this podcast or your podcast. Like, a lot of people are finding that podcast first and downloading the app. And I thought it was interesting because it's not like Restless Native is not huge. It's not like it would rank even top 20 in the hunting or fishing industries, but it does okay. It does okay. So we had a theory. There's an onboarding email that goes out, and we wanted to know of people that actually open that email and click on those podcast links that are in it, because it's an onboarding email that says, hey, I got a podcast. Since you downloaded our app, you might like my podcast. And it kind of like 10. 10 episodes of industry people, and then my co founder episodes are in there too. And so we looked at all of the emails that we could tie back from those clicks into the app to see the retention rate and see if there was a difference between people that listened to those podcasts versus anybody that just came in through any other avenue. I think they were 125% more likely to stay within the platform, retention wise if they had just clicked on that link. Now, we don't know that they listened. Right. But. But that's about as good as we could get to data wise. So. So when people ask me, like, yeah, you know, your podcast, you're not doing like, Joe Rogan. Everybody thinks you should be Joe Rogan if you're in the outdoors on the podcast, which is so stupid. But it's like, you know, if anybody were to ask me, like, yeah, you know, you're not really doing that. That many downloads on that. Is that worth your time? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's worth our time. Because what it does, the people that engage with that are absolutely our best ambassadors. They're, they're, they're people that really are passionate. I mean, somebody gives you an hour, even an hour of their week, you.

Know, that's a big deal.

Yeah. And. And I trust people that I listen. If I choose to listen to a show, I trust that person. And it's not like people. Yeah. So. So people that I really like. I try to not devalue the fact that I don't have a ton of listeners on that, but there's, you know, there's a few thousand people that think I'm important enough to show up and be a part of their week every week. So. So we try to really put a lot into that because those are your super users, those are your most passionate people. And, and the value from the retention side is proven slam dunk. It's proven the other way. I use this for any business owners out there who don't want to start a podcast, here's why you got to do it. Everybody loves to come on and talk about yourself. Like, I don't think I put up any fight to get in here and talk about what we're doing. Right. Like, I was happy to come on.

You got it.

Yeah. And if you want, if you can email somebody 25 times as a sales tactic and they will not respond if you email them once and say, hey, I'd like you to come on my podcast. Boom, they're in. We're off to the races on building a relationship. I have done this time and time again. We have signed multiple clients out of the, out of this tactic. And some of our, our largest endeavors within the platform in terms of brands we've worked with, have started with getting them on Restless Native.

It's so smart. Yeah. Anybody listening should think about how you can apply that logic to your business. We used to hand out party tickets to people that we wanted to sell ads to. That and just like exactly like you said, we'd call them 25 times. Nobody would ever answer one little hint. Oh, yeah, we're throwing this party. Free booze. Boom. They're all over it. All over it. 100%. And there's, I mean, we could probably come up with, just between the three of us of, you know, 50 different examples in our careers where we've done this. Absolutely. Anybody listening? Think about how you can offer someone something that's valuable to them, truly valuable to them. It can't be bs. It has to be something real. And now, like you said, all you're doing is using it to develop a relationship. You're not immediately saying, now buy from me. No, no, Just, just know me. That's it.

That's it. That's so much. So much of sales is relationship. It's all relationship. Like it's all about. So what I do typically, I mean, a lot of times I'll have people on that are awesome and work for great companies. I never follow up and ask them for anything. I think a lot of people overlook the value of just like building connections and being honest.

Yeah. That long term value to each other. Not just what can you do for me or what, this kind of thing.

Right. Because sometimes somebody might not be a fit to work with us, but if I call them for something else, like, hey, I'm trying to reach this company, do you have any. I just did this the other day. Somebody was on my podcast and I've never asked them for anything. Okay, that's not true. I actually asked him if I could use his cabin for a retreat for our company and he obliged. But beyond that, I had never asked for anything. But. But no, he was like, he's happy to do it. And it's because it starts with a relationship. And I think, you know, for podcasts are a great way to do it. I I have historically hated webinars because I think they've always been gross. But we actually did one recently and our goal was to get 12 people to sign up. We had a hundred different companies sign up for our webinar and, and now we're using it as a, as web as leads, you know, and it's all relationship driven. It's like, hey, you know, at the end of those we closed out. It's like, if you want to talk, let's. Great. We had two or three organic leads came through that and now we're just kind of combing through and building some relationships out of that. So I think, you know, when you look at, I look at those restless native in two ways. My hardcore members love it. It's a great lead in for building relationships with potential client partners for Go Wild. And then Gearbox Talk, the other show that we just launched last week and we launched Episode. I don't know when this Show's running, but July 1st we'll launch episode seven of that show and it's on YouTube. It's on YouTube and podcast. And that show is a totally different tactic. Like I'm not, I'm not at all approaching brands about that because I'm not, I don't honestly don't want to have brand representatives on that show as much. We're more trying to find people who are the best of the best and get them in to talk about gear. And then the, you know, we're curating beginner level content. We are, you're going to use that for long term, long tail SEO. So building up our website content out of that. And then I'm focusing on stuff that YouTube experts often don't hit. Like a lot of influencer content on YouTube is very much like, look at me unboxing this thing or look at me building my new bow. And it's not about like how to do it, you know, it's more like it's all very vanity driven. So the, and then if there is beginner level content, it just sucks. Like there's a lot of really crap stuff out there too. So we've kind of found this sweet spot of beginner level content with that show that we're going to fill a void with with experts. And then all of that's feeding into our affiliate program too and trying to drive value that way.

That's great, man. So we've talked about it, mentioned it here a number of times throughout this conversation, which has been awesome, you know, taking action, right? Your idea is worthless without execution or you know, if you have that idea and you just over plan everything and nothing comes to fruition. So given your success with, with Go Wild, is there one action item that you can tell our small business owner listeners to, to do today that would help their businesses, something they could take action on and doing if they've been on the fence, you know, talking about something much.

I, I'm always surprised at how many people don't have a product roadmap and, or service roadmap or like a company roadmap, like where are you, where are you going to? And they don't have, and this goes back to my branding experience, but they don't have a vision that everybody should be working towards. And it sounds fluffy, it sounds stupid, but the, the, if you're a startup, if you're a small business, what are you trying to do? And you know, this, I, this is a great example of how you weed out the squirrels. You don't know a squirrel's a squirrel if you don't have a vision. And so you know something that we are always trying to refine. And actually I did the most thorough dive into this a few months ago. I've been working on it. It took me with COVID throwing everything for a loop. It took me a little bit to, to really get this executed. But we just launched our product roadmap for the next seven to eight months and it's to keep us focused. And I'm always shocked at how many companies are like, yeah, we're trying to be the best at this thing. And it's like, cool. What are steps to get there? What are you building in the short term? And they'll tell you about 12 different products that they're working on. It's like, okay, okay. But you, you don't have, you have two developers. You can't develop all that at once months. How are you going to get there? And you have to think of building blocks to get along the way if you're going to build up to be the biggest of whatever. If you're an HR resource that you want every com, every Fortune 500 to depend on you, whatever it is, you know, it's like you got to do something before that. You got to, there's got to be plans in your business strategy. A lot of people will build a business plan and they'll have them and then they never look at it again. And I was one of those people. Like, we got running, we were off to the races and it's like, holy crap, look, we built an app what else can we put in here? Like, so we start pulling in all this other crazy stuff into the platform and it's like all of a sudden you end up with an activity tracker that nobody's using. Right, right, right. You gotta look at the data and you gotta have good data. Goes back to something I said earlier. Look at the data, look at your roadmap and look at that roadmap. Often I sometimes liken this to driving a car. You know, if I go out right now and I get in my car and I only look 10ft in front of my car, God knows where I'm going to end up. I may not get home. I don't like, you gotta, you have to occasionally look up and see and have a vision for where you want to go. And otherwise you're making a lot of short term decisions. You're, you're not adjusting properly to get the car where you need it to go in the long run. And the product roadmap is so key in that. So of any, you know, just kind of thinking of action versus over planning. Have a roadmap, don't build it for five years. If you're a startup, you're not like, that's just silly. You don't know what, you don't even know what the market's gonna be in five years and you don't have enough data to know what the demand's gonna be like. Do one to three years at most and then have an actionable one for six months from now. So many startups to talk to. Do not have an actionable product roadmap. And I mean, and I don't mean like, like for us, it might say like, hey, we're gonna build in price monitoring. Like we are working on that right now. I use that as, as an example. That's meaning that's meaningless. Like my team's gonna be like, cool. What, what's it do besides price monitor? Like how does it interact? What are the milestones that we need to hit to actually get that launched? You know, price monitoring as a project has I think eight steps for each department that we have to hit in order to get that live. That's strategy. It goes into user experience and design and it's going to go into the back end. Developers have to start working at the same time, all working back from a deadline of getting that launched by September or whatever it is, August, I can't remember. But the, you work it backwards and that's how you kind of engineer that roadmap around those short term Actions you're trying to take.

Makes sense. We recently had a husband and wife team on the show that had been in business together for 30 plus years. And they referred to it as their prime directive. And they would always, okay, what is the prime? Does this serve the prime directive? And if it didn't, they would cut it loose. And I thought that was a good analogy.

Yeah, the sooner you can figure out what that directive is, the better. It's funny because at the same time, I could do a whole show about how you got to be open minded about your business pivoting. And yeah.

Both of those things can be true in parallel with each other. Like you can have, right, you can have a direction and know that you're going towards something, but also be aware of, you know, like you said, be aware of the squirrels. Because sometimes those squirrels are the thing that you're like, wait a minute, we should circle back to that like that. You know, let's avoid it for now. But we might want to come back because that's a thing for us. If, if, for example, the economy shuts down, like, we could do a different thing. And then you come back and there you go.

Yeah. My dog. This is a funny way to end the show here. I, I watched my dog yesterday. My dog chases squirrels all the time. I was standing out on my deck, I was doing a phone call with an investor and I'm just watching him. This squirrel. I don't know what was like this thing, something was off in its head. It was flinging around in this tree. And I watched this squirrel fall 30ft and kind of like bounce around from every branch on the way down. And it landed on my dog. And. And you know, it's like sometimes squirrels come out of nowhere and it surprised him so bad he couldn't even, like he didn't have a game plan.

No. What hit him?

Yeah, and he like, he's only caught one once and it was long time, like nine years ago, this dog probably caught a squirrel. And so he pins it and he's like, I don't know what to do with it. And then the squirrel starts running around. He's chasing it and he's clearly confused, but he's trying really hard. And then it slips away. He didn't have a game plan. And a squirrel got in the way. He finally got to a squirrel and then it got away from him. So it's like this really weird analogy to end the show with, but I think it's kind of funny.

Yeah, that's great. Well, dude, man, Yeah, I mean, thanks again for coming and, you know, sharing your story, talking about all these different aspects of you. It's a fascinating business. What's the best way for our listeners to connect with you and to learn more about Go Wild?

Yeah, so for the purpose of what this show is about, like link, I'm really active on LinkedIn. That's how Shannon and I got connected first. I, I'm very open about our story too. Like, if something kind of sucks, I'll talk about it. And I try to share stuff that I wish I had known and share stuff that's helpful and you know, I know a lot of it's pat on the back, but it's like I don't have anything else to talk about other than what my company's doing. It's like the best insights I have.

Okay, to pat yourself on the back.

Yeah. But I do, I will share, like, things we've learned along the way. So LinkedIn's a great place. I've deleted my Twitter and my Facebook. What am I. I'm down to like an Instagram account which is mostly barbecue and like outdoor stuff. And then I'm on obviously on Go Wild and if you download Go Wild, you'll get a DM from me. And I'd love to hear that you a heard it from this show, but also you know how you're liking it overall. So that's, that's pretty much the three best place to find me though. And yeah, that's awesome.

Well, I, I, thanks again. There's, there's so many lessons in this conversation and, you know, we're definitely going to tease out a lot and highlight that and you know, keep in touch and come back and so we can check in on you and see how the roadmap's going.

Yeah, for sure. I'd love to guys. Thanks for having me.

You bet. Thank you.

You know, man, at the 20 minute mark, I felt like we had been here for an hour. The pace was so fast. And yet at the 50 minute mark, I felt like we were just getting started and I was kind of bummed that it was ending. So.

Yeah, great insight right there.

There.

Yeah, yeah, he's, he's a real talented guy that has a really interesting depth of, of experience and a great talent stack that kind of has led him to where he's at today.

Totally. Yeah, he, he, yes. He surprised me so many different times and I loved that, that, you know, it was just like, you're right, it's his talent stack. He would just start Talking and he knows his limits, right? Because he knows he's not a developer and all that stuff. But yeah, he was. The authenticity. Yeah, the authenticity. Yeah. But that, but that, that authenticity serves him beyond just being a guest on a podcast, right?

Oh, absolutely, Absolutely. Yeah. Because most people don't want, don't start a business because they want to learn more about it, right? It's the opposite. It's like, well, I've learned so much now. I'm going to create this revenue stream about that. And I think that authenticity and being upfront and telling the story that way and he doesn't just do it here. I've read about this on other places that they've had content on before. I love that.

It's great.

I think he's awesome. Another thing that I want to mention, I think is awesome is that we need your reviews. We'd love for you to go leave us a five star review on the podcast platform of your choice and as a reward for leaving that review. Because we know I always say it's easy, but, you know, I know you have to go click a few things and type a few words, but take a snapshot of that review, send it to feedbackusinessshow.co. we'll send you a free copy of our next book that is going to be on pre order in the next week.

Very cool stuff. That's right. Feedbackusinessshow.co. yeah, send us that screenshot.

Send us a picture. We'll send you a copy of the book. This book is going to be all about partnerships, which we love and we talk about so much on the show.

Yeah. Brad had some fantastic advice on partnerships and how to find partners. I mean, that dude's a master at finding the right partners, or at least it sounds like he is. So there you go.

Yeah.

Good stuff, man. Yeah. All right, folks, thanks so much for listening. Thanks for your reviews and, and you know, keep living that charmed life. That's all we, that's all we ask of you. See you next week.