Over the last two Archery editorials (you can read here and here), we’ve discussed our industry navigating the social media space as it stands today, including potential alternatives to social media channels. GoWild’s news last week that their app grew 75% in seven days in early January compelled me to dig into this deeper with GoWild co-founder and CEO, Brad Luttrell. Brad is also on the POMA Board of Directors with me, and I’m glad he’s there. He’s a wealth of knowledge and I encourage everyone reading this to check out GoWild and see if it is good fit for your brand/company. I’m not saying to leave the more ‘traditional’ social media spaces, but I am saying to get ahead of this curve and learn what you can now.

Now, let’s chat with Brad. Thanks for reading and subscribing to the Archery Wire, means a lot to me and the Outdoor Wire family – Michelle Scheuermann, editor, Archery Wire.

Q: What is GoWild?

GoWild is a free social media community that helps outdoor enthusiasts learn new skills, find better gear and share their story.

Q: Last week, you sent out a notice that the GoWild app grew 75% in seven days in early January, after Facebook restricted firearms content and further blocked ads. That is huge growth! Is that the largest growth since you launched in 2017? How are people finding you? And why do you think it’s taken so long for them to get there?

We haven't seen typical tech growth because we aren't your typical tech story. I grew up in Appalachia and we're based in Kentucky, so we like to say we are a Silicon Holler company. GoWild started in a basement with four guys, a pizza and a dog—the dog is still with us but has yet to do an ounce of work. We worked on that first app late at night, early in the morning before the sun rose and we had to go to our "other" full-time gigs. We worked on weekends and even spent our holidays together working, hacking away with just a $500 total budget.

That first bootstrap-built product launched in the Fall of 2017 with our iPhone-only beta release. Android took another six months, and it would be summer of 2018 before we had just two of us full time. So, we aren't your typical Silicon Valley success because we didn't do it Silicon Valley's way—raising millions up front on an idea and going for growth at all cost. We put people first—our employees and our platform members. This sounds counter intuitive, but we've grown thoughtfully slow. Over time, we've figured out what works and what doesn't, and it led to building a really great product. It has an astounding member retention rate because we took the time to get the product right before we chased growth like we saw this month. We're now ready for scale—we can deliver for members, and for brands. Too many tech companies raise literally hundreds of millions of dollars and they spend their entire life running the horse dead to catch the cart.

After a year in operation, even LinkedIn only had 100K members. Over the last six months, our growth has largely been word of mouth because we shut off most advertising in Q3 of last year. Despite spending nearly nothing on our marketing every month, we have achieved record growth—our best by member totals and percentages ever. More people are using the platform in a week right now than we had in any given month of Q1 of last year. The growth is great, and we're proud of it. And if it's been slow for some, it has been by design. I am focused on building a sustainable product with a real business model, not just growth at all costs. It's not the Silicon Valley way, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Q: If a company is experiencing ‘difficulties’ with Facebook and Instagram, and they come over to GoWild, what are a few ways you can help them reach potential new customers/audience?

The first thing to call out is our platform is simply a different architecture than Facebook or Instagram. Brands have to pour so much effort into building a following on Instagram and Facebook just to have an audience. GoWild is forum based, so you can tap into hundreds of thousands of people at once. Most members who sign up quickly realize you get more out of our vertical, niche audience than 50K followers on Instagram. I have seen people with 5 followers get more comments on a post than the last 10 of a brand that has 250K. That's because when you post in the Archery Trail (a forum in GoWild), you're hitting all of the people who follow it. It's why we see posts on new accounts getting 50 comments in the first 12 hours, despite that member having only 3 followers. If brands tap into this architecture, there is real engagement waiting to be had. But you have to drop the "impression" mindset. These big tech platforms have gamified our brains and filled presentations with "reach." Would you rather reach 1M poor targeted people, or 100K hyper focused? By Instagram's own data, 70% of the content goes unseen. Half of Facebook's ad impressions are a complete waste, according to Facebook's own internal marketing team. Brands that try GoWild authentically are going to find our members want real engagement—they're going to ask you questions about our product, so you best be ready to answer it. When small brands, like Walton Rods, for example, have engaged and crowdsourced research on GoWild, they've seen tremendous success.

We are working on a brand ecosystem that will start rolling out this year, allowing small businesses to "boost" posts and have access to other features. In the short term, I highly recommend brands tap into our hyperactive audience by asking members questions, posting Trophies (a unique feature in GoWild where you can share your trophies) and sharing helpful content. This is an audience that's hungry to learn, and 80% of them say they're on GoWild to learn about new products.

We obviously work with advertisers, too. We've worked with Polaris, Federal, Garmin, First Lite, Badlands, and many others. But to get started, just create a profile and start sharing. If you like it, finding us for advertising will be easy because our team is actively using GoWild, too. We're not hiding behind the black curtain—we love and use the product we've built.

Q: You also mentioned so many new users are reaching out to you, thanking you for this platform, and sharing their own horror stories with Facebook. From these stories, are you seeing any rhyme or reason why Facebook is banning or restricting firearms and similar lately? If you had a crystal ball, what is your prediction for our industry on these traditional social media platforms?

Ecommerce over the last 10 years is not what it will be in the next 10. Brands that think it will be the same will have their lunch eaten just as Amazon ate the lunch of brick and mortar over the last 10 years. Likewise, we just lived through the expansion age of social media—it changed how humans engage, for better and worse. Facebook isn't going to go away, but it is going to become less relevant to many vertical audiences at the least. One place to suit them all doesn't make sense. You can't be all of the things—you just want to be yourself. And our audience passionately identify as outdoorsmen and women. Vertical social is the future of communication, because it allows for specialization in product and expansion of expertise. So even with Facebook's challenges for the hunting and shooting industries, anyone should be able to slow down and read the tea leaves to realize passionate audiences are going to seek elsewhere to better find information, entertainment, education and commerce.

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter have one significant problem—they are so big they can't cater to every audience, so the easiest thing to do is to simply not. Wide sweeping restrictions on firearms work better than getting into the nuances of "what is a firearms part vs. what is a firearms accessory?" As these companies lean more with artificial intelligence and machine learning, they're training models that can't make those distinctions because the engineers of the models aren't content experts. Facebook isn't going to suddenly reverse its content policies that negatively impact our industry. It's less about being political, it's simply not practical. Even with 50,000+ employees, Facebook has its hands full with moderating content that includes suicides, beheadings, pornography, and hate speech, all of which is dangerous content that takes tremendous amounts of resources.

My crystal ball says if the SHOT and archery industries think they're ever going to see the viral traction we saw over the last decade, then we are building glass houses on sand—they're going to fall because the foundation is not stable.

Q: I mentioned in my last two Archery Wire editorials that people need to stop asking “how do I get Facebook ads approved” and instead look at other means to connect with their audience. I recommended investing in SEO and their e-mail marketing. What are ways you recommend companies in our space invest to attract new customers/audience?

Companies absolutely need to stop looking for magic bullets and to start focusing on their long-term fundamentals. Too many Marketing Directors are focused on the wrong metrics, and spend time chasing low-funnel keyword searches or previous customers who were probably going to convert anyways. There isn't enough focus on new customer growth. The industry has a tremendous gap in the pillars of modern marketing, including SEO and email marketing. Emails are king, assuming its white hat acquisitions. SEO is and will remain king. And a diversified digital presence is a critical foundation. What happens if your Facebook page is deleted tomorrow? What happens if your YouTube reach gets throttled? TikTok? Ha, just go look at their terms of service—that's never going to scale. If these platforms are accounting for 70% of your traffic and/or sales, you might pat the digital marketing team on the back, but I would be more concerned about the foundation of my business being built on sand, knowing that the tide is coming in.

Should a company go all in on a single outdoor platform, like GoWild? Absolutely not. That's as ridiculous as building an entire digital presence on a platform that won't even take your ad dollars. Brands should be diversifying and experimenting and doing a quarterly analysis to see what efforts are paying off.

In short, look at where the market is going, not where it's been.