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As a marketing whiz and a hunting enthusiast, Eric Clark's response to his personal frustrations with finding public hunting land was to create a search-engine-optimized (SEO) group on Facebook called Where to Hunt. Seemingly overnight, the page grew to around 10,000 followers, Clark said.
That was nearly a decade ago. Since then, Clark has built the community through a podcast, now called the Okayest Hunter. That led to an apparel brand of the same name centered around an ethos of enjoying the hunting and outdoor experience without judgment or competition.
Alongside all of that, Clark has been building an app to help hunters identify available public hunting areas. The goal is to give users a tool that could be a "digital red light" for other nearby hunters, saving them the time and frustration of driving or hiking out to a spot only to realize that another hunter is already there.
Early versions of the app, which Clark initially hired an offshore team to build, have garnered 70,000 total downloads since 2014, said Clark, a business development executive at the New Berlin information technology firm Swick Technologies LLC.
Along with his local technical co-founder Joseph Flanigan, a senior development operations engineer at Cox Automotive Inc., Clark has been working on an updated and rebranded app called Outlnd, which he expects to launch before September 2022.
The audience and community Clark has built through his podcast and apparel brand will fuel Outlnd's user base, acting as a "marketing machine," said Clark, whose marketing approach was inspired by the popular entrepreneur and author Gary Vaynerchuk.
From there, Clark said he plans to scale the app and then expand into other outdoor recreation activities.
"Hunters might want to know if someone just disrupted their hunting area if they're looking for morel mushrooms, if they're hiking, if they're biking ... and those folks might want to know if there's a hunter in the woods with a bow and arrow 20 feet away," Clark said. "We can illuminate that pressure from both sides of the fence and bring those folks together. They share a common interest of wanting to access public lands."
The product: A GPS-powered smartphone application for hunters. The free version lets users view historical data and also see occupied and unoccupied hunting land based on other active users. An annual subscription allows users to view current-season hunter density and hunting pressure.
How it makes money: The company said its revenue model includes subscription fees for an enhanced version of the app, licensing fees from other businesses that want to use Where to Hunt's application programming interface (API), and advertising revenue from sponsors and partners.
Size of the market: The hunting market is worth $880 million and the outdoor/hiking market is valued at $6.6 billion, according to the company.
Competition: The company said other hunting apps exist that focus on showing property boundaries, weather data, wind direction, stand placement and other map markers. However, it said there is no direct competition for an app focused on hunting pressure.
Competitive advantage: Outlnd showcases hunting pressure, or the concentration of hunters in a particular area. After interviewing more than 250 deer hunters, Clark learned that navigating around and away from other hunters is more of a pain point than scouting for the game.
Key company leaders: CEO Eric Clark; chief technical officer Joseph Flanigan
Advisers: GoWild founder Brad Luttrell and Spartan Forge founder Bill Thompson
Capital raised: $10,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. through the MKE Tech Hub Coalition's FOR-M startup incubator
Ideal exit: An acquisition by a major outdoor or hunting brand, the company said.
Company name: Where to Hunt LLC (doing business as Outlnd)
Headquarters: Oconomowoc
Year founded: 2014
CEO: Eric Clark
No. of employees: 2
Website: www.outlnd.io
