When I joined Sportsman Tracker, which would later become HuntWise, we had users, a good product idea, a small team, and almost no revenue engine to speak of.
We knew hunters liked what we were building.
What we didn't know was how big it could become, what customers would reliably pay for, how to acquire them at scale, or what kind of company we'd need to build around the product if it actually worked.
Several years later, we'd reached millions of hunters, built a multi-million-dollar subscription business, and sold the company to Kalkomey.
That makes the story sound a lot cleaner than it was.
We made some really good decisions. We made some expensive mistakes. We wasted money. We grew faster than our systems could handle at times. We hired talented people and didn't always do a good job setting them up to succeed.
We also had a ton of fun and built the company with people who are still some of my best friends.
A lot of what I know about growth today came from those years.
Not just marketing. The whole thing.
Why somebody buys. When they're most likely to buy. What they're willing to pay. How you acquire them efficiently. What gets them to stay. And eventually, how you build the team and operating structure around all of that without making a mess of it.
We definitely made some messes along the way.
The starting point
Early-stage companies usually have more problems than resources.
That's part of the fun, and part of the challenge.
You can't solve every problem by hiring somebody, buying software, bringing in an agency, or throwing more money at it. You have to figure out what actually matters.
At Sportsman Tracker, we had one important thing going for us: a real customer problem.
Hunters are constantly trying to make decisions.
Where should I hunt?
What's the wind doing?
What's the weather doing?
When are animals moving?
Where did I see deer last year?
What happened the last time conditions looked like this?
The phone was becoming an obvious place to pull a lot of those answers together.
That probably feels pretty normal today. It wasn't as normal then.
The outdoor industry had historically been built around physical products. Guns, bows, clothing, boots, optics, tree stands.
We were asking hunters to pay for software.
And eventually, we were asking them to pay for it every year.
That's a different challenge than getting someone to download an app.
We had to figure out whether we could create enough ongoing value that someone would actually subscribe and keep subscribing.
Before we worried about scaling, we had to understand what we really had.
Finding real demand
One of the biggest things HuntWise taught me was that demand isn't evenly distributed.
Hunting is obviously seasonal, but learning how much that seasonality changed customer behavior was really important for us.
As deer season got closer, everything changed.
Hunters started scouting more. Trail cameras went up. They checked properties, weather, wind, and hunting conditions more often. They started buying gear. Hunting moved way up the priority list.
Someone who might barely think about HuntWise in February could be opening the app constantly in September.
That changed how we thought about acquisition.
Instead of just asking, "How do we get more users?" we got much more focused on who was most likely to need us right now.
Timing, geography, species, season, and intent all mattered.
A whitetail hunter in Michigan in August or September is in a very different state of mind than that same hunter in February.
Once we understood that better, we could get much smarter about when and where we spent money.
I've carried that with me ever since.
Great marketing often looks like great timing.
You can have the right product, customer, and message and still spend a lot of money putting it in front of someone when they don't really care.
Understanding when the customer cares can change the economics pretty quickly.
Building the revenue system
Downloads were never the real goal.
We needed revenue.
More importantly, we needed recurring revenue that made economic sense.
Consumer apps can produce a lot of numbers that look impressive. Downloads, registrations, sessions, impressions.
Those things are useful, but eventually somebody has to pay you.
So we got increasingly focused on what was actually happening underneath the growth.
Why did someone subscribe?
Which features did people value enough to pay for?
Where were people dropping out?
What should we charge?
Monthly or annual?
What drove retention?
Which acquisition channels were bringing in customers who actually paid?
Those questions became much more interesting to me than any individual campaign.
Over time, acquisition, product, pricing, lifecycle, and retention started working more like one system instead of separate activities.
That's a big part of how I think about revenue today.
Marketing doesn't own revenue by itself. Neither does sales.
Marketing creates demand. Product has to deliver value. Pricing has to make sense. Lifecycle has to keep customers engaged. Operations need to work. And you need enough data to understand where things are going wrong.
If one of those pieces is broken, eventually you're going to feel it.
That experience shaped a lot of how I think about revenue architecture today.
The goal isn't just to make the revenue number bigger.
It's to understand why it's getting bigger so you can do more of it.
Scaling without breaking
We made some big mistakes while we were growing.
Some of them were expensive.
We missed on spend. We put money into things that didn't perform the way we thought they would. There were definitely stretches where the business was growing faster than our understanding of exactly why it was growing.
But some of the mistakes I think about most now weren't marketing mistakes.
They were operating mistakes.
We didn't build systems, process, or documentation fast enough.
For a long time, that was fine because a relatively small group of us had a ridiculous amount of context in our heads.
For most of those years, many of us were sitting together in one small room.
We knew what had happened six months ago. We knew why a decision had been made. We knew what somebody meant when they said a few words about a project.
If something was confusing, you turned around and asked.
That works pretty well when everyone has been there for years.
It works a lot worse when you start hiring.
We were horrible at onboarding people.
We basically handed them a shovel and said, "Start digging."
Then we'd wonder why they weren't digging in the right place.
I look back at that now and feel bad about it.
We brought in talented people and expected them to figure out a company that existed largely inside the heads of the people who had been there from the beginning.
We didn't document enough. Ownership wasn't always clear. Priorities moved around. And at times, we weren't clear enough about what the few most important things actually were.
That's really hard on people.
It was also a leadership problem, not an employee problem.
I've become a lot more focused on clarity because of that experience.
What are we trying to accomplish?
Who owns it?
What does success look like?
Why does it matter?
And just as importantly, what aren't we going to focus on right now?
Growing companies have a hundred things they could work on. Everybody can't treat all hundred like they're the priority.
We got better at it.
But I wish we'd gotten better at it sooner.
It's one reason I don't automatically roll my eyes at process anymore.
Bad process is terrible.
But some process is just clarity written down.
And you need that if you want the company to keep growing beyond the handful of people who were there at the beginning.
The people you build with matter
This is probably the part of the HuntWise story I understated for a long time.
The people.
For most of those years, a bunch of us were packed into one small room together.
We worked really hard.
We also had a lot of fun.
We laughed a lot. Gave each other crap. Went out for beers. Celebrated when things worked. Got frustrated together when they didn't.
We spent a ton of time together.
And because the company was still early, most of us were learning while we were doing it.
People were taking on jobs and responsibilities they'd never had before. We were becoming managers. Learning new parts of the business. Making mistakes. Trying stuff. Figuring it out.
Then COVID hit.
Nobody knew what was going to happen.
There were real questions about the business, jobs, our families, and what the next year was going to look like.
We were scared.
But we committed to each other and kept moving.
Going through all of that together created some pretty serious friendships.
A number of those people are still some of my best friends today.
We still get beers. I've gotten the chance to work with some of them again. We call each other about work, opportunities, decisions, and just life.
I think that's easy to leave out when telling a startup story.
You talk about revenue. Users. Growth. The acquisition.
And obviously all of that matters.
But a lot of my memories from HuntWise are just that room and the people in it.
The dumb jokes. Whiteboards everywhere. Arguments about what we should do. Getting excited when something worked. Going out for a beer afterward.
Building a company is hard, and who you do it with matters a lot.
We built a good business together.
I'm just as grateful for the friendships that came out of it.
The acquisition
Eventually, HuntWise was acquired by Kalkomey.
An acquisition gets talked about like it's one event.
In reality, by the time the transaction happens, years of work have already determined most of what the buyer is looking at.
You can't suddenly create a healthy company when diligence starts.
Revenue quality matters.
Retention matters.
Customer behavior matters.
Financials matter.
The team matters.
The market matters.
And you need to be able to explain why the business works.
At that point, you're not just pitching what the company could become.
You have to explain how the thing actually works.
Where does growth come from?
How repeatable is it?
What happens if more money gets invested?
Where are the risks?
Why do customers choose you?
What would be hard for somebody else to recreate?
Those are good questions for any business, whether you ever plan to sell it or not.
The acquisition was obviously a big milestone for HuntWise and for me personally.
But what was probably more valuable long term was getting to see the business before and after the transaction.
Before the acquisition, we were just trying to build the best business we could.
Afterward, I got to see how a larger company and its investors thought about growth, capital, integration, and where to place bets.
That's a different perspective.
It helped me understand that there's a difference between having a company that's growing and having a company where someone else can clearly understand why it's growing and feel confident putting more capital behind it.
I've thought about businesses differently ever since.
What I took from it
I could probably make a list of 25 things I learned at HuntWise, but a few stand out.
Know why the customer buys before you spend a bunch of money trying to find more of them.
Scale doesn't fix bad economics.
Sometimes it just makes the mistake bigger.
Understand when your customer cares.
Timing mattered enormously for us. I've seen the same thing in almost every business since.
Build a revenue system, not a bunch of disconnected tactics.
Marketing, product, pricing, retention, sales, and operations all eventually touch the same revenue number.
They need to work together.
And build the operating structure sooner than you think you need it.
Document things.
Onboard people well.
Give people clarity.
Make ownership obvious.
Decide what actually matters and say no to some of the rest.
I learned some of those lessons because we did them well.
A few I learned because we absolutely did not.
What stayed with me
HuntWise is still one of the first businesses I think about when I'm working through a growth problem.
I got to see almost the entire thing.
A handful of people trying to figure out whether customers would pay us.
Then real revenue.
Millions of users.
A real subscription business.
More people.
Bigger budgets.
Some big wins.
Some pretty dumb mistakes.
COVID.
An acquisition.
And a lot of learning in between.
We got better as the company got better.
That's probably the simplest way I'd put it.
And a lot of the people I did that with are still in my life today.
I'm proud of the business we built and what it became.
But I'm probably even more grateful for what I learned and the people I got to build it with.
More background on my work is available on the About Spencer Blanchard page.