The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 139: X Marks the spot

Episode Date: October 22, 2018

Bozeman, MT- Steven Rinella talks with Eric Siegfried, Matt Seidel, and Zach Sandau of OnX, along with Janis Putelis of the MeatEater crew.Subjects Discussed: magic circles, rut fests, and meat balls; prairie dog guide by day, tech visionary by night; more memories from Steve's pre-OnX days; unsolicited advice from meddling uncles; partisan diseases; good old American elbow grease; a killer goose pastrami recipe from the forthcoming MeatEater Fish and Game Cookbook; and more. Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are

without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less. The Meat Eater Podcast. You can't predict anything. Giannis, zap them with your faraway elder bugle sound.

I feel like you've gotten worse at it over the years. Hit it again. Sometimes they stir my soul. You have gotten worse over the years. I just wanted to set the mood because you guys both, two of our three guests, both got elk.

Three of our three? Two. Two. Who else got one? I shot one last week. Sweet. Congrats. Hunting with the Elk Foundation.

That's cheating. Yeah. Yeah. It was weird. It was a good time. It was pretty tough there still. Yeah. I mean, there was a day and a half we didn't see or hear elk.

Oh, okay. And then there was a morning where we saw and heard a lot of elk. And what was going on? What state were you in? We in montana eastern montana so hunting just you know they were coming up river bottom and some farmland and catching them up coming into the hills picked them off and i mean it was uh it was wild and crazy for about an hour and a half calling them or getting out in front of them got out in front of them and cow called them in. So there was 12 bulls bugling, so that just really got them to talk. It didn't actually get them to come over,

but then I just kind of snuck in and was able to cow call them over the ridge to us. Okay. 12 bulls bugling. Yeah. There was a big herd going through, and they were kind of navigating through. What kind of big herd? I mean, there was 100 elk, easy. Really? Yeah, and I mean, you know what kind of big herd i mean there was 100 elk easy really yeah and i mean you know there's a bunch there's a bunch of different bulls with

the harems you know six or seven yeah and then my bull was kind of following up the rear and i could hear him bugling off and so we just waited till he got over out of sight and then i cow called a couple times he responded right away and then i could tell he was coming our way and i had found a pinch point that they all funneled through and so we just waited there cow called one more time he responded and crested the hill and came into 40 yards really how far did he run after you hit him he went a little ways so no excuses didn't put the perfect shot on him so hit him and ended up watching him go over the ridge a little bit and then decided to back out for a couple hours and went back, and he was dead there. So he made it a couple hundred yards.

Yeah. I kept it real in western Montana public land. Were you using OnX? Oh, yeah. Sharing waypoints, checking out where water is. I got to look at intermittent streams to see where the water's going to be when I'm up on the mountain. Dip my little Nalgene in there. I use a SteriPin.

That's smart. Get water. I don't like to carry water around. So just check out those intermittent streams. Get down there. Get a little drink. Zach probably had to use OnX just to figure out, make sure he wasn't going from one private to the wrong private.

Yeah, we were definitely navigating boundaries, making sure I was on the right places there. And then also just being able to mark, you know, we were sharing waypoints where to be at certain times. What do you guys call that? This is kind of not off topic, but a little tangent here. But what do you guys, because I was talking to a friend of mine that was telling me about.

We're not done talking about Elkhorn, are we? No. Okay. No, definitely still in Elkhorn. But he was telling me about how his guiding season was in Colorado, and he was saying, man, I had just the last week multiple, like a half dozen magic circles. Now, does that mean anything to you?

Someone said they were out hunting elk. It would depend on the context, man. Out hunting elk. Oh, okay. And they got into like the magic circle. No. I would say in that situation,

would you happen to be referring to a honey hole? Hmm? Which, I know what that means. You wouldn't ask him if there were any wizards involved. Yeah, well, yeah. If he was hunting mushrooms, I would think he found a bunch of fairy rings.

Well, I'd forgotten that we used that term back when I used to guide there. The magic circle? Yeah. It means like a honey hole. No. A navel? No. Like a rut fest?

Yeah. That's what I was thinking. Rut fest. Some people call it like a, I've heard it called a meatball. Never heard that one. I've heard it called a, God, what did the guy from primos um well jim horn from those early primos videos used to call it uh oh god place where there was a lot of bugling elk activity sure but it's so rare and it's so special that when you find yourself all of a sudden in

there circle yeah and it's just like, holy shit. They're 360 degrees. They're screaming. I don't have to do anything. I can just stand here, and most likely one's going to come walking by me, and you feel like you're in a magic circle. You know what? I'm going to start using it heavily. Ruck ball.

I'm going to use it heavily. I'm going to use it for Turks, and I'm going to use it for elk. But that just reminded me, because it kind of sounded like you got yourself into we did into that we found them they were migrating up and no what do you mean migrating they're displaced by pressure they're doing their daily like going to get water and food and sleeping so they were down at night they would come out to the fields and then you could hear them all night you know down in the hay fields and then they would migrate up top into the hills and they'd go bed up on the north facing slopes and some on that property some on the neighboring but really what it was is we could hear them and there was two predominant ridges and a big creek in the middle and so we kind of slowly went up at dark or at

first light listened and we could tell they were crossed and when we got to that kind of cliff we could just see them all moving up so we had to dive down in the creek and go get in there try to get ahead of them some had passed us at that point and then i didn't call until i knew that last one was there we just kept trying to sneak in get on them ended up having a rag horn at like 50 saw two really nice bulls fighting at about 110 couldn't get around them the wind was bad luckily it was all coming down the drainage and then uh the biggest bull i saw we had him at 150 and we were pinned down just some in some timber and big flat couldn't get

across so i just told the cameraman i was like hey we can't do anything here just film him yep they're filming that one for one of their rms videos yep so you're gonna be in it yep so i don't know if that one's going tv or online but yeah they were filming for that one so we got a couple really nice bulls on camera just unfortunately i'm i'm an opportunist and that you know i knew that bull coming he was fired up and ready to go and i found the pinch point that he was going to go so we just waited and we were ready for them nice yeah it was a good hunt it was fun but i mean before that we had one bull no two bulls within 150 one within 100 you know it's not you know it was tough hunting they were kind of their normal patterns they weren't really following

the script there so it was a lot of glassing a lot lot of silent days, a couple days where we didn't see elk, and then we ended up finding where they were. Do you have in your head, like, the distance beyond which I will not shoot? Absolutely. I kind of do, like, a hard stop, and I think with elk, I think it moves that distance should be shorter or closer. They're tough animals and i mean man they're not like oh you got me and fall over yeah yeah i mean it it varies from everyone else but

everything's got to be perfect regardless but 50 yards on an elk's a poke i mean that's a good shot you know yeah i i wound up having um yeah in my head like the like the the non-debatable distance beyond which you will not absolutely not have to be like well i'll wait and see yeah yeah because they look big man yeah we're looking there today we're looking at a spike standing there and i'm like man you could you know lob an arrow over there don't be range for it's like 72 and i'm like well a lot of people do but that's a long distance for something that's aware of you. Absolutely. He's already looking over.

Especially when they're aware of you, man. We talked about this on the podcast on Monday, and we got to review it because we filmed it, but the bullet Steve shot really jumped the string, and it was because he was aware right he was tensed up because something was amiss yep he was standing around long enough because he was still listening to a cat a supposed cow over the hill right but like when he heard that arrow or the bow go off man he launched and we got it yeah there's a frame there's a frame

where you there's a tree that there's a the arrows pass in front of a ponderosa and the frame happened to catch the blur of the arrow okay so you know where the arrow is in its flight path yeah that thing is already on its way yeah did you guys cow call him stop him well he's coming into a cow but then you know yanni was hiding and i was out you mean after the shot no before so eric and I were talking about this. My bull was moving parallel to me, and I cow called him, and he turned and looked. And, you know, we were wondering if that played into why I didn't hit

exactly where I wanted to. I'm not using that as an excuse, but preferably would have stopped. You used it like as an equivalent of saying like, hey. Yeah, exactly. Which works really well too. Yeah. Yep. But then they're looking at you and

yeah then they're like he had no idea i was there he was looking forward and then when i cal called you can see he looks right over on film and then when i shot obviously you can hear the string regardless how quiet a bow is they can hear something and so do you feel like he jumped too he he whirled a little bit, absolutely. I mean, he turned, but I think what it was, I think he knew I was there when I cow called, and I think he wouldn't have, and if he would have stopped, I would have had an elk that had no idea.

If he would have stopped. Yeah, if he would have stopped. And at that point, he's moving. He's not moving fast, but he's moving to go up and follow these other elk. And I shot last year at one that was just very slowly walking thinking like oh there's no way if i'm just tracking him i touch off it was like 20 25 yards there's no way that i won't just smoke him right where i'm aiming and i i didn't do it i mean i hit him way back yeah you know straight like just above the guts

no vitals yeah and i know you know eric and I were talking about that. Not take his story, but he didn't calc all the stuff. He was patient and it paid off. Well, I want to talk about that. Then I've got to have you guys tell who you are. First. No. You can tell who you are or you can just tell us about this, then tell you who you are.

I'll just tell the story to start. Then you'll tell us who you are. So here's a story coming from a from a just from a voice from the darkness of lone voice from the blackness so yeah i was an elk tail last weekend i was out elk hunting with my brother-in-law can i stop you for a minute yeah you used to guide yes i did throw that in there because i used to guide over by where zach was out with rocky mountain elk foundation eastern montana mostly elk um mule deer and elk but yeah i guided for a couple of seasons for elk hunting and in september all of september that

was a good time tiring though seven days seven days when you got the long days where you're getting back to camp at 10 eating going to bed at 11 get up at 5 a.m and they're trying to serve you a big breakfast after you talkers yo ate it i'm like no i cannot eat i just ate it stuffed myself at 11 o'clock i cannot eat but yeah it tires you out you guys would do seven day hunts seven day hunts over this type of country, eastern Montana, the breaks type stuff, Yellowstone River breaks. And you had hunters that could no problem make it through that, or did you feel like they waned after halfway through? Yeah, they could do it.

When you're doing just one hunt, it's doable, but then you do one day of rest and then another hunt seven days, then one day of rest, seven more days, another day of rest, seven days, and you're like, okay, I I want to get behind the computer again. That was fun. When you start longing for your computer, if only to answer some emails. Those were the early days. So there you are.

I get in the circle. The circle of life, was it? What is the circle? The magic circle. The circle of magic. Yeah, the magic circle. The magic circle. So we locate. But you're just hunting joe blow public land yep any time dick and harry tons of people go up this trailhead tons of people so yeah everybody that's why i went thursday morning i found them and then we

kind of bumped a little bit we figured they went into this other base and kind of worked around the other way and sure enough we figured they were into this other base and kind of worked around the other way. And sure enough, we figured they were in that base. And so we went and made the trek up there about five miles and did a locate Friday afternoon. They responded. So we're like, okay, well, let's set up our camp. We actually went a little further, went over the ridge, set up camp, came back. And by that time, we bugled from the road. You guys on horseback or walking? Walking. Okay. Yeah, by that time we bugled from the road you guys on horseback

or walking walking okay yeah by that time we were on the road it is a road though but um it's a gated road yeah and there was one above he bugled and there's what response above response below in this big basin like oh sweet well why don't you i wanted my brother-in-law to get one so i'm like go up after that one he's above the, why don't you? I wanted my brother-in-law to get one, so I'm like, go up after that one. He's above the road. We don't really want to go down there. That would not be fun. So he starts working in, so I start bugling. They wouldn't answer to a cow call, but they're answering to a bugle.

So I'm like, well, stick with what's working. Thinking that you're going to keep it talking, he's going to slip in there. So I'll keep him talking from 400 yards, and you just slip in and see what you can get. We know he's probably got cows. He's chuckling. So he's got cows up there. But just slip in and see what you can get we know he's probably got cows he's chuckling so he's got cows up there but just slip in and get close that's kind of our strategy so i kept him bugling although the one below me was more responsive to all my bugles so i just sat there and bugled well sure enough he's working in here comes a bugle coming up out of the base and i'm like jeez this one's gonna come right It must be a satellite bull, but he bugles. And I'm about 100 yards from him. And he somehow got by me without me seeing

him. And anyway, he ended up coming around. And he probably heard me and got close enough to be watching where the sound was coming from and got nervous. But I kept bugling. My brother-in-law finally got close to that one. He said he got 30 yard opportunity but the bull came in and the wind shifted a little bit and kind of walked off the other way so we so close to that one but I've been bugling for like every you know every 10 minutes I bugle dude just do locate bugle and this one just keeps responding so I've been bugling for like an hour and a half now. And this one just, you can tell he's like leaving his cows and like coming up halfway up the base and just, I'm like, geez, he's like moving. I think he's leaving his cows and coming up. So I knew, I went up to the head

of the drainage and seen these wallows down there. So I went down in the wallows, like maybe he'll come up and get upset about this if I go into his bedroom and start bugling. So I bugle there. You can hear him responding. But then that's about the time I met up with my brother-in-law and we were talking about, he told me about his whole scoop of getting close and everything. And while we're talking, I hear the bull bugling right in the wall is where I was. I'm like, oh, he's like leaving his cows. He's pretty fired up. So anyway, we keep walking, and we get a little bit around the base, and I'm bugling again. He's responding.

Now the other one, Ryan thought he spooked the other one, but he was still up there bugling right from the exact same spot. So I'm like, geez, go back there. Circle of life. I'm going to go around here. We're in the circle. We're in the magic circle. Let's do this. So I just keep going around the basin on this road,

and I'm bugling, bugling. He's responding. And I get a little further. He stops responding. I'm like, oh, man, what's going on? He hasn't responded to like three bugles at that point. I'm thinking, man, do I need to go down here? I'm just kind of slowly moving along this road.

What time is it now? Now it's about 7 o'clock. We had started at like 4.30. Now it's about 7 o'clock. I've been at like 4.30. Now it's about 7 o'clock. I've been bugling with this guy for two and a half hours, and it turns out he's about fed up, and he's going to see who the hell is in his bedroom. But the wind's not blowing down to him?

It did when I was on that road. So anyway, yeah, it did kind of swirl down in there. The wind was still. It was actually kind of coming up still. You know, 6 o'clock, it's still coming up. 7, it starts to want to drop down. Oh huh yeah oh sorry i was mixed up seven so you're going that way so yeah yeah it's 4 30 p.m to 7 p.m then so i'm just thinking oh what do i need to do i bet that so i can't believe that not can't leave but and you're half expecting other guys to show

up because all this racket uh potentially yeah i mean i was i potentially expected some guys to show up because of all this racket. Potentially, yeah. I mean, I potentially expected some guys to come up the road. Yeah. There's a lot of guys that go in there. Yeah. So I'm thinking, well, he must have just went back to his cows, whatever, and was sitting on the road thinking about what I should do. And all of a sudden I see Tan coming through.

I'm like, what? Oh, my gosh. He's like 60 yards away coming up the mountain just like this and i had my range finder out earlier because i had that one bull come in well i put my belt strap around when i had my range finder from in my pocket so i'm like doing one of those like oh i did that again i just gotta get my range finder out from underneath my belt strap oh my gosh he's coming in so i'm getting nervous at this point and i'm ranging okay i get 20 30 40 okay he's this is close like wow i love hunting the timber this is

it's actually doable he could come into 30 so he's coming up i get an arrow knocked and by the time i get that arrow knocked he's at like 30 and he stops and i think he hears a little bit and he's just sits there about 20 seconds he's sitting there and I'm just like I hadn't I usually am pretty calm being a guide and everything I'm pretty pretty calm and collected but I was nervous at that point and I started like because I had seen his rack I'm like this is a monster I'm just like oh no he's gonna win me I felt the wind go right on the back of my neck i'm like oh no just like hyperventilating no no but just this is one of those situations usually it goes all wrong downhill you know something happens and they blow out everything went right here i'm so thankful that everything

went right so he turns and starts coming uphill he kind of does a little number you felt the wind on your neck and yeah it just switched it wasn wasn't directly at him, but it was. This is a steep slope, so I think it was just floating over him and off to the side. So he turns, and he starts going through these gaps, and I have a chance to draw. I'm like, okay, there's three gaps there. Please stop there. No, he doesn't stop.

He's moving up. Stopping that one, please. No, he's like, oh, my gosh, should I cow call? Should I cow call? No, don't do it. Don't do it. He doesn't know anything. He's pissed. and there's the third gap and he stops and i'm like okay that's 30 i like put it on his shoulder then my gosh no i gotta do further back i gotta

do further back get where that lung is really big like mid-body where that lung because i always shoot a high it seems like so sure enough shoot boom he starts trotting off i look in my binos like oh yes it's good like blood starts forming right mid-body like okay that's a good shot i've got to get his lungs he trots about 40 yards goes over this little rise and i hear crash crash crash crash he made it like 40 yards in just like six seconds he boom tumbled and was done i'm like yeah i hadn't like that's good yes yelled out loud you know yeah i couldn't believe because it was like just a monster i hadn't even come close to getting anything like that and

in public land archery so turned out to be a huge mature fully mature bull and i'm just stoked 290 pounds of meat came off of him we got a meat processor yeah just enormous to the point where we got all three quarters off and we still couldn't like get him flipped over because he's on a steep hillside yeah we got him tied off and we couldn't like geez we just like 1 a.m we've been cutting on him for four hours just couldn't quite get him over even with one all the other quarters off, guts out. Big old, big old massive bull. All right, man.

So awesome. And I just can't believe how it happened. Bugling this guy, and he comes in like that. I haven't had an experience like that in a long time. It's probably going to change your hunting tactics a little bit next year. It's like, man, if you just sit back and get in the magic circle and start bugling. Bugle some more. Get in his bedroom and bugle some more.

Get him fired up. Take a couple hours. You never know what can happen while you're bugling. So you never call Kel once? We did try it in the beginning. They just wouldn't respond to it. I'm going to stick with the bugle. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just ladies. He had ladies down there, I'm going to stick with the bugle. He's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just ladies. He had ladies down there, I'm pretty sure. It was Chuck Lennon. So, but yeah. We should probably tell who you are now. Okay, I can do that. My name's Eric Siegfried. I'm the founder of OnX.

Okay, go ahead. I'm Zach Sandow. So I'm the marketing project coordinator at OnX. And you got Matt Seidel, product owner for Onyx. What's that mean? I do a little bit of everything. I guess I kind of like

to think of the customer voice, but day-to-day operations is a lot of marketing strategy, go-to-market strategy, and kind of product development. So product owner. It's kind of like a term that software companies use. So kind of overarching vision for the product. Oh, I got you.

I got you. I would imply, I would think that that means that you see things through from beginning to end. Is that not true? Like who's the owner of this? Some things. Yeah. Yeah.

How long have all you guys been with Honex? In the years? You're starting. I've been here the lowest seniority. I've only been here, so I'm coming up on three years. Okay. Coming up on three years. I started right out of college as an intern,

and then just kind of went my way up through. Yep. That's cool, man. I'll be hitting eight years in January. Which is stretching back. Yeah, back to the old days. What are we at? Like nine years now? 2009 was the first launch

of the product in fall 2009. Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. No, tell me now. How many years did you mess with it before it became a thing? I had been messing with that GPS product for about a year. Kind of figured it out late 2008. And it took me about a year to come up with figuring out how to get the data onto the chip.

And that was the original Garmin product for Garmin. So what... Okay, march me through this. Because let's step back in time. When I was a boy, and when I would look for, I would like scour for trapping permissions, muskrat spots, whatever. I would go down, I'd go to the township,

the various townships around where I lived in Western Michigan. So all the townships in all the counties. And I would go down there and get their tax record books and they would let you photocopy pages for 50 cents a piece or whatever. Or you could just go and you could also go and buy a township plat book. I would hand that to my father

and my father would work the phones. I would mark for him where I wanted to be, and he would get on the phone. He would look up the name, and he would work the phone until he found an in. That's awesome. Right? Like, oh, you know, it's a guy. It turns out that's a guy from church's cousin, And he had a really good success rate. And that was something that, yeah, that was like a high-level land information at the time.

That was like the most granular sort of piece of information. It was not easy to go get. I mean, you had to really go. That's advanced. Passive people. that was not easy to go get yeah i mean you had to really go like that's advanced passive people well yeah like like someone who's like flippant and passive and half-assed about shit they're not doing that yeah so enter when did like when did people first start having gps's to walk around with that was i mean the mapping gps has come out in the early 2000 2002 2003 where they actually

could put a map on them but in mid 90s for like just remember the garments where you could just like see your location and see your little yeah the first one we touched was mid 90s and it was my brother he was working he was doing a federal research project and had one but it was before they fine-tune them they were still within 25 feet or something like that. And I remember wondering, like, is this whole thing going to catch on? We would mess around. He had to, like, check it out and check it back in

because it was federal property. But it didn't have any kind of mapping stuff over it. Yeah, I remember using the ones with the black and white screen or black and gray screen or whatever, and you just, like, you can mark your vehicle, and then you can see where you walked, and then you just walk back. That's all you can see. There's no other data except this, like, gray background. Yeah, exactly.

It gives you the arrow to point to a waypoint. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't matter if it's through five valleys. It'll point you as a crow flies directly to it. So what was, like, what's the basic, my um my like plat book thing was just like a precursor to like that's at a time if you wanted to find out land ownership stuff at a detailed level particularly when it applied to private land yeah that was like the way to do it yep and then like but give me hit me with like a rough sort of like gps timeline like when based on on your guys memory when was the gps became like

you know early adopters were using them and how did it come to be that the what are the sort of year markers where all of a sudden you could get you know basic map like basic geographical features it, and then all the other overlays. Do you remember that at all? Not so much, but I could kind of guess. I mean, early 2000, I bet, it's starting to catch on with early adopters with like, oh, cool, at least I can mark where my truck is

and I can easily go out for a hike and figure out my way back as long as I mark my truck. So lots of people probably have those early GPSs in like 2000. Hunters are starting to use them for that purpose. Then you get the mapping GPSs where they actually can have a topo map on it coming in 2003, 2004. I'm not sure on that

100%. I think Garmin released a lot of their maps in 2008. Yeah. 2008? I feel like it was earlier than that. Their 24K topo maps. They had the 100K topo in like 2005, I think. In 2004, maybe. But some early adopters probably had it.

But then like 2006, 2007, I remember getting my first 100K. Got a new GPS with the color screen. 100K topo came with it nationwide. Right. And then it's like, oh, cool. That's pretty sweet. I can at least use the topography to figure out where i'm at and so i'd use it for that and then uh there's then they're now they have these mapping

gps's so then there's people making maps for them and kind of third parties making maps for the garments and that's where i actually looked up online how to make a map for a Garmin GPS unit. Why? What was going on? What were you wondering about? There's so many times I've been out there where I'm using a Forest Service map or a BLM map and I don't quite know exactly where I'm at. I'm usually pretty good about figuring out

I'm on this road or this road, but sometimes I take the wrong road and I'd waste two hours of my day. Gosh, gosh, I just made a mistake. And I went down that ridge and I should have gone down and stayed on this ridge and I'd waste two hours of my day or whatever. And it's valuable time. So I had many experiences like that. So I was, uh, I was thinking of, I don't know why, let's see, late 2008, I had a certain experience where I was using Google Earth. There was one time I remember I was using,

I had like studied it all from home. Like, okay, I looked at all the aerial imagery using Google Earth. I'm going to go try to hunt these elk where they're coming off private, going on to public. And I went out there, I had studied it all, and I went out there and I still couldn't there's like a fence and another fence

and I'm like gosh I still don't know where the boundary is even though I've done all this research at home I need this with me out here I've got this Garmin with these maps why don't they have boundary information on them so that was probably an experience in 2007 so then I started googling learning a little bit more about it.

You went and typed up how to make a... Garmin topo map, yeah. Then there's this website that shows, here's how we make these topo maps. All they didn't do was put the public land information underneath. All I had to do was figure out how to put the public land data underneath it. So I go to work and... What were you doing for a living?

At that time I graduated from mechanical engineering at Montana State in late 2006. And I was doing, in Missoula, I'd moved to Missoula, Montana, and was doing HVAC design, heating, ventilation, and plumbing design for supermarkets.

There you go. So that was more inspiring for me to try to start my own company. And that left you some brain space to start messing around with math problems. In the evenings, I was just messing around. I started a few websites and was really passionate about helping people get outdoors and had a vision for recreation information on Google Earth, more widespread, rather than having to get one map here and there,

just nationwide recreation information. I was messing around. There's a website called recplan.com that I had a long time ago, and kmellers.com. I started a few websites. I learned a lot about SEO. What were some of the websites you started? RecPlan.com, like Recreation Plan.

Not too many people know about these. Massive failures. Were you just using your own money for this stuff? Yeah. It didn't take much. Ten bucks to get a website domain name and ten bucks a month to host. What were you hoping RecPlan was going to be?

I was putting trailhead data and recreation site data on Google Earth. I got you. So you were heading in the direction you went. Yep. You weren't like, wow. It's like 2007. Yeah. Yeah, it was all about, I was passionate about organizing recreation information.

So then I figure out, oh, wow, I should make maps for these Garmin GPS units. You can do it. Here's, they're showing you how to do it right here. Okay, when you do this, is it in partnership with, does it need to be in partnership with Garmin?

Or are you just saying like, here's a platform and you can produce a product that's usable on the platform? Or does it need to be that you need to be in bed with them in some way? Nope, it didn't need to be. There's third-party mapping.

You'd be like making an app to run on Android. Yep, they allowed third-party mapping for their hardware. So there was instructions on how to do that online and went in, figured out how to get all the topo data from the government. They showed you how to do that. And then they just didn't have all, like, I had to figure out where to get all the public lands data from the BLM

and the Forest Service. So I went and did that, and those were the first maps. They only had the color-coded public land data underneath all that topo and roads and rivers and lakes and streams. That was the first map. Then right after I launched...

So what did you start with, though? Did you start with a whole damn state? Started with, yeah, creating a whole state. Montana, Wyoming, Colorado were the first products I launched. Once I figured it all out, that was like mid-2009. Then I was able to crank out three states real quick. How many hours did you have into it by that point? That was evenings.

I probably had 600 hours into it. I mean, I did a lot with those other websites and messing around. I probably had 600 hours into it. I mean, I did a lot with those other websites and messing around. I had a website, kmlers.com, and I would create... What was that one? K-M-L-E-R-S.com. KML file is the file you create for Google Earth. So I create these files for people for their hunting areas.

I just do small pieces of property boundaries. Oh, like boutique specific pieces. Hey, I want to load this onto my GPS. So I go get this one specific hunting area for people and get the public land boundaries and send it to them to load onto their GPS and load into Google Earth. As one-offs.

You're doing this as one-offs. And what do you charge people for that? Pretty much nothing. I mean, like $20 for that type of file, $30. Really? Yeah. I just was doing some prairie dog guiding at the time. That was early 2009.

Prairie dog guide by day? I'd make prairie dog maps on Google Earth and send them prairie dog locations. Yeah. Really? Mm-hmm really so you're mapping out so that's so so mapping just random things and helping people get outdoors so people would go onto your website and place an order yeah i'd sell various things on the website had little products through buy through paypal type thing like what other kind of products all digital product product i would basically say custom. I'd make a product for their custom GPX file for GPS for your boundaries.

Are you getting any government people or anything? Or is it mostly hunters? Yeah, that's mostly recreation. Then that was very few sales. We're talking just MVP style stuff where you're proving out that you can actually sell this thing to customers. And at this time, how many other people are out messing around with putting property ownership information into GPS things? Is this like a

crowded field? It's not a crowded field. There's a ton of guys I later learned that people are like, in 2005, I was making these maps for my buddies, and they told me to make a business out of it, and I never did. So I've heard those stories. But yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of people out there, actually. Government workers were making these maps, probably 2005 to 2009. They were making these maps. And you were, but nobody else was commercializing it.

There's one other guy in North Dakota who was so close in the exact same timeline. It's really funny. He was doing the exact same thing I was. And were you compiling all the layers or just putting the ownership layer on top of something? I was getting all the topo data from the government and the waters.

So you're using USGS, geographical features, roads, water courses, and you're just laying the ownership layer on it. Yep, underneath it. And were you finding that all of that stuff was at that time, was all of that ownership information online,

or you needed to go in and digitize like paper files? So that was, remember, that's just the public lands at the time so there's it's just gonna say private and this is blm this is forest service this is private i got you it was white and you know white color so you hadn't got into like the tax record materials yet right you were just into like go or no go yep that's like late 2009 it's binary binary, public, private. Oh, no, but you were doing BLM. It was basically, the concept was,

here's a BLM map, but it's digital, so you could see your location on your BLM map or your Forest Service map. That was kind of the vision. If I could just see my location on this BLM map, I'd have it made. It would be a lot easier. I was telling a story the other day, me and one of my old girlfriends

one time we're hiking. We thought we were hiking in Montana. You know how crazy the Bitterroot border is between the Idaho Panhandle? Yeah. There's even a famous story where they sent some people in there to map out the range divide. They got all screwed up, and that border is supposed to follow the range divide, but it ve up and it split that border supposed to follow the range divide but it veers wild wildly yeah wow so for you know we were up there for a few days backpacking around

at one point we hit a lake and there's a sign hanging on the lake like you hit the trail there's a lake there's a sign saying what lake it was can't remember what lake it was now and i'm like looking at my map i'm like by god i don know. This lake must be a brand new lake. Eventually, I find it over in Idaho. We must have taken a wildly wrong turn at some point in time because we're not even in the state we started. We found a new lake. I'm going to name it Steve Lake.

Yeah, we found it. We had veered off into the wrong state. Yeah, I got the going to different. There's a lot of different sources. There's a nationwide public lands data set that you could get at the time. But then you can go to the state BLM offices. I found that these state BLM offices

were a little more accurate than this nationwide public lands data set. So I'd go get Montana's BLM statewide public lands set. And that's what I used to put underneath that topo map and create the Montana product, Colorado, Wyoming were the first three I launched with. So when did you come up with a company name and stuff? Has that already happened or not happened yet?

Man, that probably hadn't happened. Right as the time I'm creating this, I'm thinking, okay, how am I going to market this? And I had learned a lot over the failed websites. I learned a lot about search engine optimization. So I'm going to use Google to, I don't have to pay anything. I'm just going to make sure I show up when people search for hunting maps. I sure as hell want to be the first one that shows up.

If it's like Montana hunting maps or Wyoming hunting maps, I want to be there. So that's when I came up with hunting gps maps.com stupid simple just say what it is get fancy like these guys like to do were you married at that point i was yep i got married in 2007 so was she buying into this whole thing oh man i didn't make money for a whole year there than her oh only a year yeah i was that was 2008 i i guided that that year and prairie dogs came back to the hvac firm and they're like yeah you can't no it was it was like fall guiding for elk okay they're like yeah you can't really take a month off anymore like that and then i was like okay

i'm gonna start my thing i'm gonna try to figure out a way to make some money online and that's really what it was like i just want to make like 50 000 a year online i'm not having to do much and now here we are still working a lot something went wrong built a big old company and now it's still somehow working. So then, yeah. So hunting GPS maps.com. And you come out with three products. Yep. And what year are we now?

This is right at September 2009. And still no employees. Still no employees. Yep. And you got three states. Three states. Montana, Colorado, Wyoming. Why did you pick those states?

I knew the opportunity there was the most, and it was the most fitting product. Is it the most? What do you mean? You know, Wyoming, there's so much opportunity for people to come into Wyoming and get tags. Well, I guess compared to, I guess, Whitetail in the East. But I knew this was more Western-type focus where you got the BLM maps and forest.

Yeah, because at the time you're dealing, you're thinking public. Yeah. You're thinking about public land. You're not thinking about like. This is awesome. I can see where the, where I'm at relative to public land boundaries.

Nice and easy. All I got to do is stay on this color coded piece of land and stay off the white, the private. It's easy. It makes it really easy. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. And when you put it up for sale, you put it up for sale originally.

Was it just micro SD cards? Or you're selling? Micro SD cards and then a download version where you could download it. That same year. Originally I created the download version. There was instructions on how to do that. Then I had to figure out how you could actually put it on an SD card

and lock it down to that device. When I realized, oh wow, it's stupid simple. You just get this chip, I can sell them at retail, and you plug it into a Garmin and it works. It's like, oh wow wow, it's stupid simple. You just get this chip. I can sell them at retail. And you plug it into a Garmin and it works. It's like, oh, wow, that can be a business. That makes it easy. So I had the micro SD cards. And then you could do the download version

where you load it into Garmin's map source at the time or Basecamp. Basecamp, yeah. And then you can download different areas. Yeah, what did it used to be called for? It was Basecamp. Mapsource. Yeah. And there was no such thing as a smartphone for? It was Basecamp. Map Source. Yeah.

And there was no such thing as a smartphone, so there was no such thing as an app yet, so you didn't need to think about that yet. In 2009, they had iPhones. Very first versions. I didn't have an iPhone. And iPads. Flip phone.

But it wasn't really in the, it wasn't at that time, you weren't thinking about putting it on a phone. No, not at all. I had my flip phone and didn't even think about that. Didn't even know about iPhones. And it wasn't something that could be... Was DeLorme in the business back then?

Who else was making handheld GPS? Garmin, Lowrance was big. Magellan, I remember them. They always wanted us to make products for them, but we could see the writing on the wall as far as like, no, you guys don't have a lot of market, so we're not going to spend much time building that for Magellan, L'Oreal, and Lowrance.

So you're still, like, when you go and fill the product up and you're selling to three states, no employees, you put it out there and what happens? You start selling them? Start selling them $100. I'm taking phone calls. I'm working 16 hours a day, Like, oh, taking a phone call. Yeah, we'll make it.

Make a sale. $100. Like, ba-ching. This is awesome. Selling on the website. People are buying through PayPal on the website. It's like, oh, sweet. Was it wild this season?

It happened. Yeah, oh, yeah. I just launched it in the season. And I think that first season made about $60,000. Well, there you go you were 10 over gold this is sweet this is gonna be big i told my wife this is this is like an idea that's gonna be big this is a million dollar idea did you have a lot of money into it at that point no like no loans and stuff invest really much in marketing except free free ways of marketing

search engine marketing um she did a little with google adwords but not much at the time and your wife was like at this point she's like believing it so was it starting to believe it was it tense or not tense no she's supportive but it's a little tense with i guess other family members like when you're gonna get a real job what are you gonna do like jen's supporting you basically oh it's been about a year i was gonna be a firefighter i was i went to the firefighter prep thing just trying to figure out what i wanted to do because it wasn't gonna be hvac it wasn't to be hvac no i always feel like our families let us down like we're the i never hear the story we're like yeah my whole family's just going yeah go eric go

eric go you got this no you're gonna get a real go get a real job know what i i gotta counter that because i'll tell you what um my old man was a firm believer My old man was a very firm believer. He said, he used to pound it into our heads when we were kids. He says, you're going to spend one third of your life working. He's off by a fair bit. But he said, you're going to spend one third of your life working. You have to find something that you want to do. Zero pressure ever about any benchmarks of,

any traditional benchmarks of what success might look like in terms of fiscal or financial reward ever pounded that in about you have to do something you want to do and then even when i picked something that was like seemingly impossible from where i was because i had never met a writer. Super supportive. I published one thing in Field and Stream, and I'd walk into a bait shop and be like, you guys know who you're talking to? Yeah, early on, man.

I can't say that I ever and definitely never got any heat from my wife. You need to be. Nice. I'm glad you're proving me wrong. I ever, like, you know, and definitely never got any heat from my wife. Right? You need to be. Nice. Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're proving me wrong.

Have you had people beating you down? When you were out guiding and people calling you up, being like, that's not a real job. Oh, yeah. Really? Oh, yeah. You're hearing it from your pop? My dad was pretty supportive

but I think we can go down a rabbit hole here but I think it's because elk guiding was better than where I had been and so he was like alright we're heading in the right direction you know but no I remember stopping my brother and I had a very

similar experience where we were driving from Michigan we used to always stop at my aunt and uncle's in Iowa and just stop overnight, have dinner, and keep driving the next day. And both of us had the talk from our uncle that was just like... From an uncle? Yeah. What the hell does he care? Sounds like that's fun. But when are you going to start being a member of your community?

From an uncle. Yeah. That's a meddling uncle. Pretty old school conservative. Is that partisan? Being a meddler about having a real job? That's not partisan. It doesn't matter um you're bringing that up because we were having a conversation the other day about what was it that we were

deciding like how some things become partisan yeah yeah like why like dietary restrictions are right dietary restrictions that's right like yeah gluten intolerance tends to strike people on the left side of the political spectrum yeah it's like a weird, it's like a partisan disease. We've talked about that in the past. So no pressure. No one's like, when are you going to pull your life together? And you're like, oh, I have a feeling that there's a business to be made in doing this. No, he is getting a little bit of pressure from the in-laws.

But not from your, no, no, no, from your family, your immediate family. Right, no. Oh, it's pressure from the in-laws. But not from your... No, no, no. From your family. Your immediate family. Right, no. Oh, it's coming from your in-laws? Yeah. Wife was a little supportive. Ooh, that'd be hard to deal with.

The in-laws are hitting you. Through your wife or hitting you direct? That's direct, yeah. Was it like... There was one time where I remember... Was it barbed? No, no. But it was present.

What are you thinking about... What are you going to do? I don't know if it was when you're going to do it. Right now I'm taking the call because I got a feeling this is $100. It was before that. But yeah, thankfully. My wife was really supportive and she always has been. That's part of the success. Stick with her now.

First season, you're blown away. You sell $60,000 for the... This is is awesome take it down to wholesale sports shield in billings montana personally yeah like hey check this out man like you know and you made a little package so you got a little package hey you should have these brochures here and you could sell some more garments if you just sell it with this chip hunters would love it and the guys guys like, those guys got it. Like, oh, yeah. And you're doing this personally. Yeah.

Travel around. Yeah, that's why I like all this American elbow grease shit, man. Just go to the retail stores and talk to those guys. Just walk in, go to the counter. What do you guys think of this? Had it in like some really just, oh, it was a little clamshell case. And I printed out on my printer and cut out the logo hunting gps maps put some stickers like stick it with scotch tape we still have some of

the original i would sell i'd tell them the guys like that it'd be this little cut out so how many would a sporting goods store take um so they they did say they'd take uh you know six to start take six like sweet and you'd take six, like sweet. And you're doing like traditional. I don't even know what is traditional, like retail, wholesale, whatever, Marco. Yeah, I did like 35 points. You just kind of follow what's normal. At the time, I was selling them for 120.

When I started, it was 120 a chip. So you start out by just going to, but you're not getting national accounts. You're like going to sell them to a specific store. This is Missoula, Montana. Like, hey, what do you guys think? They going to, but you're not getting national accounts. You're like going to sell to a specific store. This is Missoula, Montana. Like, hey, what do you guys think? They're like, oh, this is awesome. I'll take six. Yeah, I'll take six.

See how it works. And they pay you out of the cash register, right? Yeah, then they have, some of the stores have the ability to get local goods. So they could just like, oh yeah, write a little invoice and pay you. It's more of a check, but not out of the cash register. But then went to Shields and Billings, and the guy's like,

didn't you just stop by two weeks ago? I'm like, what are you talking about? The guy from North Dakota had come over. Oh, you're kidding me. And just two weeks before, I went over there, like September 2009. Have you ever gone to have a cup of coffee with that guy? I've talked to him on the phone. What's his take?

What was the nature of the conversation? That was a couple years in. It's finally like, hey, what do you think about working together a little bit more? He's like, this is just a cash cow for me. I'm loving it. He was saying it was a cash cow. Yeah, this is just a cash cow for me. I'm loving it. He was saying it was a cash cow. Yeah, he's got a cash cow. He's in his house, working from his house,

and his family's helping him out. So, yeah, he was having a good time. Oh, you were thinking of collaborating, and he said no. Interesting. Did he stay in the biz? Yeah, he's still in the biz. Haven't heard much about him for a while, but, yeah, he's still in the biz. And you called him to him for a while, but yeah, he's still in the biz. And you called him to say, hey, man, let's see if we get him.

Like Wilbur and Orville Wright. At this point, we were thinking, well, should we just, he's doing some cool stuff. Let's just join up or see if we can buy him out. Have him join our team. See if he was interested in actually joining, like legit, coming over to Missoula and being part of our team. And he was fine? Yeah, he was good. North Dakota, he was happy with, joining legit, coming over to Missoula and being part of our team. And he was fine?

Yeah, he was good. North Dakota was happy with he wasn't going to move, so I was like, I don't know if we can do it long distance. Anyway, that was just an interesting anecdote. I'm like, are you kidding me? He launches at the exact same time. So I'm like, no, I wasn't here, but here, check this out. And the Shields guy ended up buying some

from me and got it in there there and that's a great way to that's how a lot of the sales started it's just word of mouth people coming to retail him handing out a brochure so what was the first time you had to go get a what was the first employee you went hard um that was probably 2000 that was july, right before the other season. Right before the next fall season. Had a friend named Rob Hart who was kind of in and out of

his PhD, I believe, at the time. Chemistry. I went to school with him. You were buddies with him? Then Rob hires Matt just a couple months later. That was the beginning of 2011. So you hired Rob to do

what? Just operations and help with phone calls, customer service, basic business development, sales, operations. I was going to focus on the product. He bailed on his PhD plans? Yep. He did. He was a little bit...

There was something going on there and decided, yeah, I'll join you. And he hired you? Him and Eric did, yeah. For what? So you were employee number three? Yeah.

Uh-huh. Yeah. So at that time, everything Eric just described, we were pretty much all doing full-time. So we were on the phone. I spent the first year on the phone probably like

10 to 12 hours customer service yeah and traveling trade shows i mean we started expanding driving around the country stopping at every sporting goods store just cold walking in giving them a product demo building tutorials building the website so you're employee number three yep employee number three yeah and you came in it wasn't like you guys were all like your job is this and my job's that you're all doing all hands on deck yeah at that time it was pretty much all hands on deck and i spent a lot of time the first year on the phone just just a lot of customer support. People being like, I bought this thing and it doesn't work. Yeah, I mean. Or I can't get it downloaded.

Yeah, the download product was a chore. Getting people's antivirus software to accept a download. People didn't know how to download a file to their computer in 2011. They didn't know when they saved it, what folder it went to. They didn't know how to do every step. I remember, it was like 20 steps. You think we've been doing this since we were kids,

but it wasn't. It was only six years. It wasn't that long ago. I remember pulling, I remember being so angry. Yeah. I just hit download, where'd it go?

Just on the old, just messing around on whatever, the pre-base camp. Yeah. Yeah. And how do I unlock it? Because we wanted to lock the maps. Oh, and then capacity of your device.

Yep. You get something and spend all this time and then fill your unit up. And then, well, now I want to do another thing, man, but I don't want to have to go through that all again. So we were on the phone all day. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to take screenshots of each step write out written instructions so then we had those like written tutorials you could like follow step by step and then we'd be like with the purchase you know they would get sent the email with those instructions they'd call it we'd be like did you read the instructions

they're like no no so you just called you walk them through it and then we got to like i was like okay written's okay, but I'm going to make a video. So I made like do a video. Some people want to watch a video version, but it was just, we were trying to do what we thought was best and help the customers really was our focus. Everybody, the feedback was so great.

We were just trying to find ways to make it easier for them to get the maps on their phone. And they were just spreading the word. They just kind of... And were you adding states? So yeah, right. I mean, right away, people are like, hey, what about Utah? What about Oregon?

Idaho. You guys did Idaho early. So by early 2010, I had pretty much all the western states done. I was just cranking them out. But you didn't hit Alaska for quite a while. Right. No. Big file. A lot a topo yeah people weren't really asking too much about alaska so you would just kind of

follow the demand yeah just kind of listen to what they're asking for and you knew the 11 western states were going to be the big ones with the all the public land so crank those out and at what point did you start getting like what point were national chains starting to buy the big ones with all the public land. So crank those out. At what point did you start getting, like, what point were national chains starting to buy the stuff? Right in 2010 we found, I met a guy at a trade show early 2010 who had a connection with

Wholesale Sports or now Sportsman's Warehouse. It kind of went Sportsman's Wholesale back to Sportsman's, you know. So it was Wholesale at the time and he got me connected up there and we got him in retail in mid 2010 and wholesale sports so that went fast yeah it's pretty quick they had good feedback from their store in missoula and some of the other stores that were able to get them locally and um so yeah they were all about it we got pamphlets and Cabela's all over the West,

and they're recommending it, and we're just trying to keep up. And at this point, are other people, I know you're bought in North Dakota. What is the story of becoming sort of the dominant, like how did it come to be that you had the dominant brand associated with the product? Because, I mean, is it getting more crowded, less crowded in these years? Yeah. No, it's just, like, surrounding yourself with really smart people, like,

Matt. No, I'm not saying, like, how did you wind up, I don't know if you want to use the word win, but what is going on at the time? Are there competitors popping up and dropping off nonstop? We're dominating the search results, for one, for hunting maps. So it wasn't like the field wasn't becoming crowded. No, it wasn't at all. And we're the ones getting into these retail stores nationwide. 2012, I think we got into Cabela's.

So we made the retail play, and then we did the search engine marketing, which those are the two plays that helped us dominate, getting into retail and dominate the search engine marketing. So no one's going to catch you there. Yeah, we really attacked the digital marketing side of it too, building our email list and building up the website for SEO and having the customer newsletter, map

updates, emails, all of that stuff, the tutorials. We kind of attacked the brand side too and reinvested I would say most of the money back into the company. 2012, marketing really starts.

Matt and Rob leading the marketing side, and I'm more on product, working with the GIS team to get all the data. So we had Holly at that point. Right after hiring Matt, we had Holly, who's still with us. She's the GIS manager, so she's leading the GIS team, getting all this data and compiling it and making land ownership accurate, so expanding into other states. Yeah, those next questions is what were the paths toward expanding the product

all around the country, and what was the path toward getting out of just public-private but getting into who owns what? Yeah, right away in late 2009, right after I launched the product, then I see this Montana cadastral. Like, holy cow, this is awesome. Montana had the whole statewide data set digitally, and you just download it, all the land ownership data. So I'm like, oh, geez, just add that underneath.

Just publicly available. In November 2009, I had downloaded the Montana and figured out a way to shove that under as a layer as well. So you got private lands and public lands. But there you get into the thing where you're dealing with something that changes constantly. Because at first, your initial products, 20 years from now, that shit's going to be basically right.

Forest Service land tends to stay Forest Service land. I was thinking, thinking hey this is cool we can with this type of product instead of like a paper map we can actually update this like every year everybody's gonna want to update the hunting district so we had hunting district boundaries in there we started having all the walk-ins like we need to update this every year so we were in that mentality of like this is cool so you you saw it as something that was gonna need gonna be updated every year especially the land ownership data as soon as i saw that and it's like oh sweet i'll download it once a year and right before hunting season we'll update it what was the first point in time that someone came in like one of the

big players one of the big you know gis or gps players or whatever i mean you had to start getting people coming in trying to buy the company yeah man that was even late 2011 Trimble Outdoors came by and made an offer I remember Trimble so they had the Cabela's recon app they were in the app space back then yeah Trimble Outdoors

late 2011 that was T-R-E-M-B-L-E T-R-I-M-B-L-E Trimble there's no name. What's that? They had a great app. They were a little before the times.

It's almost like hunters hadn't adopted smartphones at the time. They did a great app out there and just wrong timing. Yeah, a little too early. So when someone wanted to come by, they come and make an offer on the company, were they saying, and you're going to come too? Or were they just wanting it? Yeah, no, it was.

And it wasn't? You sign a two-year employment agreement type thing. And were you considering it? Eh, yeah. But then it was like, well, for that money, I'm seeing how much we're growing. In two years, we'll be making that money. So why would I do that right now?

What was the early growth like in percentages? It was crazy. It has to be like doubling and tripling. Yeah, it's like quadrupling, tripling. Then it just goes down to doubling every year after about three years, I'd say. But yeah, we're talking quadrupling, doubling in the first three years, and then it gets to doubling.

Yeah, as you sign those national accounts, Cabela's and Sportsman's, you get that big jump the next year. Then you just keep getting more growth but not that big, 4x growth. There's only so many sporting goods stores. I was just thinking of the land ownership data.

Yeah, did you talk about the counties? Montana has the statewide cadastral data set, so they actually made it easy. Download the whole state, it's standardized. Then I'm like, okay, this is awesome. You got the plat data, You're basically putting your plat books statewide into the product. Super sweet.

Let's go do that elsewhere. And I start looking around, and other states, you can only go county by county. And sometimes they're charging like $10,000 to get their plat data to get that county. So it's like, okay, wow. Who's charging that? The county.

The county's charging $ private companies five thousand ten thousand to get the data for what purpose how's it not public data it's it's public but for commercial i don't know they're like they knew it was valuable i think oil and gas companies at the time were buying it oh to go knock on doors well there's other insurance companies that buy it so there's already a market price set yeah they knew it was valuable and they figured they'd make some money on it i guess i don't know some were free some were a thousand bucks some are ten thousand

bucks so i was like oh sweet well were you going and paying the ones that were 10 grand because you had to do it we wouldn't do 10 grand but we'd do a thousand we'd do 500 and we'd go to washington i think because this day it, what, 83 counties or something? 56. 56 counties. Yeah, a lot of them have around 60 to 80. Yeah, that's pretty typical. So five or six years ago, we'd get a lot of feedback.

Why don't you have my county? And so a lot of it was, well, at that time, we couldn't afford it. We had to prove out, could we sell enough memberships in that state to reinvest the money to buy that last county or two that cost $10,000? Or some of the counties just don't even have it available, and that's still the case right now. Or if they're more rural counties, they just still have, we got these plat books, but we don't have it digitized. So did you have to get into the process of digitizing some of this stuff?

We never did. We just saw did. We would just expand to other states rather than spend time digitizing a county that wasn't digitized already. So let's say I'm in Colorado. There might be holes in it? Yeah. I don't know. Colorado probably still has one or two counties that maybe eastern Colorado. Southeast corner. There's a couple counties there that don't.

So if I'm down there and I go to look and I might not find a landowner. The landowner names you. You might have parcel boundaries or you might not have. You just have public-private. It just says private. And when people see that, are they pissed? They didn't get what they paid for?

Well, we try to make it clear. Like, here's our coverage map. You should know what you're getting before you buy it. I got you. But yeah, some people say, hey, you don't have my county. I'm like, oh, well, we'll work on it. And 99% of the time, I don't really care who owns it.

Like the personal. No. I just want to know the same thing you want to do. Not 99, but... Like what you wanted to know back in the day. Am I cool or am I not? I was on Yanni's property the other day

looking at his property. His name's up there. You got your name all updated? My wife's pissed. For some reason, her name didn't come in there too. We bought this together. They have these primary owner, secondary owner,

and all these fields that we got to try to standardize. And the GIS team does all that and makes it all look good. You wouldn't think about it, but county to county, it's different. And you've got to standardize the attributes. And it's pretty cool stuff that they do. It really should. Over 3,000 counties. So crazy.

How full now? You've got all the states. Have you hit one for Hawaii? Yep. Is that a hot seller? Not so much. So crazy. How full now? You've got all the states. Have you hit one for Hawaii? Yep. Is that a hot seller? Not so much. Not a hot seller, but. What's the hottest selling state and what's the shittiest selling state?

Matt. Matt knows all that. Rhode Island. They're not buying a lot. No. In Rhode Island, they don't care who owns it. Not buying a lot. Who's hot just roll down. They don't care who owns it. Not buying a lot. Who's hot?

Colorado's got to be hotter than hot. Top five, yeah. Montana. Really? Colorado. Wisconsin. Wisconsin's hot. Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania. Well, there you're just talking hunter numbers. Minnesota. Yeah. Minnesota, Pennsylvania. There it's just like New York is really strong. Is that right? Yeah. Washington's pretty good. Yeah. Minnesota, Pennsylvania. There it's just, there it's like, you just got to, New York is really strong. Is that right? Yeah.

Washington's pretty good. Yeah. It's like top 10, it's five and five to the kind of Midwest East versus Western hunting. Yeah, yeah. And then, so he filled out the whole, filled out the whole country. Yep. Private public. Let's talk about right now.

Right now, you can use this to feed into chronology. Where are we in the chronology right now? We're still early days, like 2011, 2012. To fill out the whole nation? It's all hunters buying this thing. No. Okay, so what other market group is starting to get curious? I mean, even early on, we're talking to rural real estate agents.

They're like, this has just changed the game for me. We're talking, I mean. My realtor, I was just shopping for a home. My realtor, he runs on experts at home. Everywhere he goes, he's walking around with that thing on. He's like, oh, that's so-and-so. Here's your property line. We can go talk to that guy.

People are using it for work everywhere. Utility companies are calling like, hey, we need this. Firefighters. Oil and gas companies, the firefighters, the urban and BLM firefighters, the Forest Service firefighters, they're needing to contact landowners sometimes to get permission to go be able to firefight on their land.

So this is a godsend. We can look them right up and get permission and get out there and get ahead of the fire. So all kinds of game wardens. Game wardens. I'm sure, man. They loved it. It's a simplified life for them. Yeah, life yeah for them yeah yeah so yeah that is like

the vision like nobody's done like a complete picture of land ownership for the united states like keep it current keep it accurate keep it complete and we're gonna go do that and that's gonna be valuable to a lot of different people and it and it is although we've have it branded under a hunt this whole time we would love we have we have a ton of people using it and it is although we've have it branded under a hunt this whole time we would love we have we have a ton of people using it for other things but what are the percentages i mean predominantly don't quite know that i mean yeah definitely 90 percent hunters and does the fish market anything people are using it for fishing but they're likely they likely find it find it through hunting their other passion and then they use it for fishing and then they use it for their work or whatever but they're maybe finding

it through their hunting passion or a friend referral yeah some people might just be a firefighter and they hear from other firefighters and they're not a hunter and they buy it hey folks exciting news for those who live or hunt in canada and boy my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join. Our northern brothers get irritated. Well, if you're sick of, you know, sucking high and titty there, OnX is now in Canada. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. The Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking.

That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now, you guys in the Great White North can be part of it, be part of the excitement. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more.

As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. What year was it when you got your first office? That was 2011. Matt was working from his house.

In Bozeman. In Bozeman. Holly was working from my house. Rob was working from his house. But then mid-2011, we got an office in Missoula. Same office. We expanded it, but we're in the same location. Yeah, we're in that place.

We're now in Missoula. So then 2013 is a big milestone. So 2010-11, people are even saying, hey, can you get this on my iPhone? So like, oh, geez, people are calling and saying that. Like, let's start looking into that. So I start looking into that. And by 2013, we'd figured out,

I was really passionate about like the Google Earth layering system. And I wanted that type of system in an app where you could turn on and off layers and be able to customize your map and be able to make smart decisions based on turning on and off different data sets. I geek out on that stuff. I probably shouldn't. But it worked out for people like that. I know hunters who are serious about getting out there and being successful.

They're all about the layering. Figured out how to make that happen and in July 2013 we launched the ios app i believe we called it on x hunt at that time we had rebranded our umbrella company to on x and had the vision for like hey this is going to be useful for all these different markets we got fishermen using it we need an umbrella company that then you can have Hunt and all these other activities for apps underneath it. Who came up with OnX? We actually all sat down at a table.

The whole company at the time was like 10 people, like late 2012. And we sat down and we're like, okay, so what do we want? We had all these ideas listed out. I still have the document. A lot of brainstorming. A lot of brainstorming. It's like, what's a thing on a map

that gets you to your spot, man? What's the spot? We're helping people get to their target. What is it? X. X marks a spot, right? And what are we doing? We're helping people get there

and we help put you on your target, on X, on X maps. On the X. And then there goes huntinggpsmaps.com. We put you on, we help put you on your target, on X, on X maps. And then there goes huntinggpsmaps.com. We kept that up for two more, three. Yeah, we kept that up for a while, but keep the search engine. SEO is so strong. It's so funny, man. It's like such a clumsy name.

I remember so many times it was like talking to people. Yeah, it's called like, yeah, huntingmapsgps.com. And we struggled a bit with the naming over the years. I'll admit that. It was probably the right thing, right? The HoneyMapGPS.com

was the right thing at the right time. The search engine optimization. Throw that wave. When you put those words in your URL, you get a lot of bonus from search engines.

That's why I put them in there. Hunting maps, GPS. Well, as soon as the phone companies figure out the dang battery, there won't be any more GPS users, I feel like. I use the micro SDs in a lot of situations because I can put lithiums. I can put three lithiums, a lot of situations because I can put lithiums. I can put three lithiums, lithium batteries, and a Garmin GPS and get days of use out of it.

It's submersible. It can be floating around in the bilge water in the back of my boat. I can save a map on my phone. Pluck that thing out of there. Put it in airplane mode and use it wherever for four days, five days. But the thing is, in some conditions, phones are just kind of vulnerable, man. They're not like salt water.

You're getting four or five days on airplane mode. You got to put it in airplane mode. He runs airplane mode. No, that's what I did last week, and I was getting two. Two days? On a 10. Here's the other problem. Yeah, okay.

Depends how often you're using the screen. But if you're out on like an eight or nine day trip, the other thing is you got to carry external batteries. When I can just put six lithium batteries in my backpack, I mean, it's like I've been through this and I've thought through it a great deal. Listen, the user experience of the product is insurpassable on a smartphone.

Yeah. But there are situations. You look at it, it's so nice. It's way ahead of the game. The aerial imagery, you got the big screen. Everything about it. It just looks. Everything about it.

No. Everything about it. What's nice about the big screen is you're finally almost feeling like you're looking at an actual map like we still for every shoot we do we have a giant paper map because we like to lay it out and be able to look at it and be like okay this is everything at once and that's one thing that especially i mean i'm still rocking like a 62s garment right teeny tiny screen compared to steve's oregon or montana so that was better but now this is even better you're like i'm like finally feeling comfortable enough where i'm like i'm getting enough um context around right where i'm at that i'm like yeah because the zoom function is not

incremental if you're doing it on a garment you can like click up right right? And you pass by the scale that you're after, and it's hard to stop it. Yeah, you kind of like can get where you sort of like have, you contextualize yourself. But some of the detail fades away. Yes. But you can, on a smartphone, you can contextualize yourself in a broader contextual area

than you can when you're using GPS. But I'm telling you, in terms of not quite knowing when you're using gps but i'm telling you in terms of not quite knowing where you're going having a big breadth of space available to you when you didn't plan ahead to like get all your downloads right indestructibility and then just being able to run batteries for a long time there's still something to be said for for a very small subset of individuals who are like people who are knocking around on very long trips in very remote areas. Hanging on.

It still has a home. That's all I'm saying. That's all I'm saying. You guys must know. There'll be a lot of... Right? I mean, the technology's coming, right? Where our phone will last a week.

No, because they won't do it. There's been exposés on this. Yeah. That's the... The battery, this is some this is some they could do it now i'm not a i'm not a conspiracy dude you know me you know me for years i run the other direction from conspiracy theories yes i don't believe in bigfoot nothing but but people go get a new phone because their battery went to shit on them. That's valuable to phone companies.

I feel this is beyond conspiracy. It is a conspiracy because a conspiracy is more than two people agreeing to do something. I think there's engineered obsolescence. There's engineered obsolescence in phone batteries. But if you make them last seven days, they'll still probably, after two years, poop out on you. Yeah, that's true. But then you're like,

well, I still got three days on there. My wife's phone, she can't get through lunch. Yeah. Battery's dead. Yeah. But no, it's dialed. And the other thing about it is the layering system is really nice.

Really nice. Being able to go toggle through. But you wind up seeing how your brain works because i spent so many years looking at usgs quadrangles i can like like that was always the map of choice for paper maps you're when you're younger starting out doing like expedition type stuff it's like usgs quads and you get to where there's something that. And you get to where, there's something that happens when you get to where you've started the landscape on a map

and you go to the actual landscape. And there's always a moment when you sit, when you hit the ground and you have this moment of like, oh, so that's what this looks like? Right? And you, I don't know that you can get good enough at maps.

I don't think you can ever get good enough at maps to look at those and then get to the place and not have a, oh, so that's what this is like, feeling. I don't think that that skill level exists. But what does happen over time is you get to where you can look at it, you can look at the ground in a general sense and then they meld in your mind to become sort of one in the same and once you get a sense of the visual scale and what you're looking at you can look at a quad and a quad really makes sense yeah point being now for me if i'm looking at if i'm on on x on the smartphone and I look, I get more out of looking at

the topo lines. I get more out of looking at that than I do the aerial imagery. The aerial imagery winds up being more confusing to me than the very detailed 40-foot lines. We had that happen the other day all the time.

I think we shared OnX, whether we actually shared waypoints or not but we had multiple phones out with other hunters that we were running into because we were in a hard to draw unit right which is the weird thing about hard to draw units is that nobody's secretive everybody's like yeah i won't ever be back here again here's everything i know right look at all my waypoints this is how you get first guy we run we run into hasn't even tagged out yet. And he looks at me, he's like, so you want to know what's going on? But it was interesting that everybody else that we ran into was, they would pull up and they were looking at imagery.

And they weren't looking at maps. And I had to request three different times to be like, do you mind, you know, hit that button a couple of times? I want to see what it looks like on the map, you know see because it doesn't make a lot of sense it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you had that yellow yellow and green blob yeah my brother like years ago he had that shit where uh you had the two maps and then that glass piece that you slid around and it gave it a three-dimensional quality you don't know what i'm talking about you should look into that you should make a little museum i think you had some

you're gonna need to have the onyx museum it's gonna be like the history of how hunters have used it but you've never seen those cool it's two maps and an eye piece a magnifying eye piece on a stand and put your head down looking there everything pops up into 3d wow no it gives you a three-dimensional view nice but when you're running this aerial imagery you can drop thousand feet and not there could be a thousand foot incline you definitely have the need unless the sun was in the right position i use the topo when i'm new to an area yeah you got to see the contours and yeah see what you're dealing with this is probably way off what you wanted to talk about, but this is all important stuff. I was just thinking of the early years, how

I realized, man, if I get my waypoints from my Garmin and put them on Google Earth, I can learn an area so much faster. Oh, wow, that one spot seems like it's so far, but all I've got to do, I could come from this angle and wow, it's just right there. You really learn all the intricacies

from this road comes over here and this trail comes in here, like, oh, wow. Studying that. I can get there easily if I just go around and then I come up this trail here and then I can get to that spot where that bull ran or whatever. I think it's a much more sophisticated understanding. Here's the other thing. You look at like a steep slope.

Now, you can look at all the aerial imagery in the world. You're not going to see little benches where elk are going to like to lay up. But you can see parks. Yeah. Well, yeah. That's the... Okay. You got to have them both.

There's a park. There's the bench on the park. Oh, wow. On Black-tailed deer, when you're trying to find musk eggs, you will not find a musk egg on a topo map. Even if it's got the vegetation colored in, you'll never find musk eggs. You can find musk eggs all day long just little open patches well they're actually uh dead lakes muskeg patches are uh like extinct lakes but um you can find those all day long with aerial imagery so it really

depends if i'm hunting up in like coastal rainforest and i had to switch i'd be like yeah i don't give a shit about the elevation. I just want to know where the patches are. Open patches. So yeah, one doesn't replace the other. But do you get what I'm saying? That's why I make sure the point's clear on something. Do you get what I'm saying about that no matter how much you look? Do you remember when we flew into that prop lake

on Moose up on the north slope of the Brooks Range? I had it in my head exactly what that looked like. I could in my mind walk around and then i landed on that lake i'm like that's what i've been looking at do you know what i'm saying is this resonating with you at all yeah but i'm guessing it's because you like your experience is put of a picture into your head that that you know you just overlaid onto the map right like you're like oh we're going hunting moose so you who would think that we would land in a place where you're

like like the nearest moose habitat seems like it's miles and miles away we're like up yeah yet we were dropped there to hunt moose right so in your head you had a picture painted and it just didn't match up yeah where's all the lily pads? Totally. But yeah, the aha moments, man, of early GPS use and then of early Onyx use, just so many mind-blowing moments of being in the woods and just feeling like, oh, no shit. These two parks are that close to each other

where I could just hop through the timber 50 yards and all of a sudden i'm connecting you know one park and you like you realize that it's like oh it's probably actually like a very subtle old drainage you know that's just connected in parks you know you can actually just work it all the way up you know yeah that kind of stuff and the way like yeah like muskeg patches linked together oh and just exploring country just like i see to do the same thing on google earth i'd be like park never been there get that pin into my gps and walk in a straight line there and then i'd figure out like the easy way to get there right but all of a sudden it was just like new country all every time i went into the woods new country new country we're down in

this is a little off topic yeah it's only kind of off topic, actually. We were down in South America in the jungle and these guys fish a lot of oxbow lakes and they kind of know. I mean, they've been, you know, hundreds of years, thousands of years, their family's been subsistence hunting and fishing in these areas and they fish these oxbow lakes.

But when guys started going down with drones with cameras on them, started going down with drones with cameras on them americans coming down drones and cameras and they take those drones up above the jungle canopy they started finding oxbow lakes they didn't know were there off the river corridor yeah because they were never they're not on google earth but they're sitting there looking at the monitor being like oh my god yeah yeah we just got It was like a lake we didn't know about. We just got to walk a quarter mile in that direction. Yeah, if I had to go on an extra hundred yards,

we'd know about some other lake that no one's ever fished before. Full of fish. Yeah, so it's a funny realization. Yeah, we have stories of landowners who are now, they're the third generation or whatever, and they're like, well, Grandpa always told me that was our land right there, actually. It's BLM land.

I better go take those no trespassing signs off there. We have guys that are landowners that are really great like that. I'll go take those signs off. Oh, really? They had posted. They didn't know. They didn't know.

They hadn't noticed they weren't paying taxes on it. I guess because you're getting a big tax bill for a bunch of land. Some of them were like, I didn't know we had that 40 acre shirt over there. Sometimes it's like they hadn't noticed they weren't paying taxes on it. I guess because you're getting a big tax bill for a bunch of land. You just thought that's what it is. Some of them are like, I didn't know we had that 40-acre shirt over there. I thought that was so-and-so's. Or they found land they didn't think. No, they thought it was the neighbor's and it was actually theirs.

That's what I'd like. I'd like to open that son of a bitch up and see my name written all over a bunch of stuff. I didn't know I owned that. It's a whole mountain. All right, so where are we in chronology? Go ahead. Well, because fences in eastern Montana and everywhere around the west, fences were built 100 years ago,

and they weren't built necessarily on the property lines. And so they just kind of became the communal property boundary. You can run your cattle up to here. I get the other side, and this is where it was. Do you feel that your stuff is good enough? The other day we had a thing where the fence was lying to us. Is your stuff good enough where if something doesn't seem to make sense, would you personally, I'm not saying you're advising people to do this but if you personally like here's the fence which i normally would have

acted like well that's obviously the border but in fact it's 70 yards off is the technology such would you be like instinctively like the fence is wrong, this is right? There's a lot of cases. Most cases, that data is going to be more accurate than a fence line. But there's enough cases where that data is a little bit shifted to 30 feet to 100 feet that I wouldn't do that. So 30 to 100 feet could be just off. But the angle of the property line, like if the fence,

you know the property line is going that way, perpendicular, but the fence line's crooked. Well, you know the fence line's off. But as far as where that property line could be, it could, you know, the straight line, it could be within 10 feet either way.

So I don't, I wouldn't shoot an animal 10 feet across a property line but if the property line is going this way and you're at a 30 degree angle and you're like oh i can park and access this land you know but because 70 yards i definitely do that yeah but we have a ton of stories of people like i never knew where my pins were i went out and went to the corner and started moving some dirt around and boom boom, it was right there. No kidding. Yeah.

I mean, sometimes it's like right on. Most of the time, it's right on. Yep. Found a lot of pins. But enough time that it can be 10 to 30 yards off. So I would say no. Yeah, you can walk right up on the pin. I mean, you're going to get within 5 or 10 feet. It's spot on for my four pins.

Is it really? I've gone to check them. Okay, back to the chronology a little bit but i want to get to two things i want to get to the future because like you're done now the whole damn country so there's that yep is it do you go global what is it and two like what happened where and i know this because i read a press release so it wasn't like i heard secret information yeah you guys took on like a like a partner yeah to in order to do something so yeah kicking ass just making it all go on your own what happened we've got big visions to dominate the hunting market we've got big visions to do a lot more in outdoor recreation and help more and more people get outdoors and have a

great experience so give me a for instance because i know that company guys always get like company guys always get where they won't want to tell you what you're talking about matter of fact i pressured a company guy this morning and i got some info out of him he was talking about testing new products and i eventually squeezed out of him what it was so what would be a give me a for instance i mean is it sort of like in the same vein or is it like you're going to come out with a boot line definitely in the same vein of creating an awesome location experience and revolutionizing how mapping is done so kind of going off yesterday i wouldn't be surprised if we were able to finally show like this is definitely a public road and this is

private road but that's that's that winds up being like complicated because it's history right like use it like yeah yeah i'd like to i mean we need to make that easier for hunters i that's one thing i don't like about the product like i can scout everything else but if i'm going to a new area sometimes you can't quite determine if you can actually get to that piece, if that road goes to that public land, if it's actually not gated off or not. But some people have been working on that because I was amazed when I called,

I think it's Montana DNRC, right, that controls the state lands. And they had like in each office, they had a person that I could talk to. And I had my gazetteer open and we literally just went one after another and the guy was like, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no. Unfortunately, it was all no's that day. He knew whether or not there was a... He thought he knew. Because what we're finding now is people think they know but they don't know. Because it's just passed down. It's not actually looked up from the legal records.

Some of it. That's that fight that we were talking about with the high lonesome ranch fight. He would say, oh, yeah, that's private road. But other people are like, no, man. It might have been gated since 1976, but it was illegitimately gated in 1976, or what have you. But this guy's working on behalf of the state that I was talking about.

Yeah, I got you. But even then, it could have bad info. So we'll work with those agencies, and we can actually say, here's our landlocked public lands. You have regional field offices where you do have those experts now. Tell us, is it or isn't it landlocked and can you and we talked about yesterday like the easements go to look in look into those easements and so you might even be doing like a research function because is it fair to say that like at a point

what you've done is you've taken a info you haven't gone out and created information. You've taken information, compiled it, made it usable, searchable, approachable, purchasable. We have created GPS accurate, complete picture of land ownership. That's one of the big things that we did was take this public lands data, look at the private, we talked about that yesterday,

look at the private parcel data, mesh them together, and is there a conflict? And usually those boundaries don't match up. The public lands data is a little shifted off of the parcel data. Because the parcel data has been done by county, we assume the parcel data is more accurate, and then we'll match those boundaries up to that parcel data.

Got you. And then we'll actually look through and look for these timber companies that allow access. The GIS team will do all this research on Nature Conservancy, all these organizations that potentially might allow access. We've created this data set where it highlights these places where you should potentially have access. Anything that's a government agency, city, county. You've gotten into interpretation.

We actually have this algorithm that goes through and pulls out all these owner names that we think likely give people access, including city governments, anything owned by a government. Because you're a taxpayer, you may have a right to be on that. They might have regulations, but we're going to highlight that as here's city government, here's county government, here's BLM, here's Forest Service.

You might have a right to be on that property. I remember one time going to a small government agency at the township level and pointing out a piece of land on a plat book. And I remember the township commissioner telling me, I can't tell you you can go there, but I can't tell you you can't go there. Oh, brother. We just talked about it earlier.

We went. Yeah. We took that as a green light. Just like it's illegal to corner cross. It's not illegal, and it's not legal. Yes, exactly. Anything else? Any other future things people ought to know about?

Oh, man. No one's on your guys' heels. No one's on your heels, right? There's other apps out there. Really? Yeah. Scary ones? Are they something really good that I should know about?

Nope. Nope. Honestly, we're looking no matter what you're hunting, we want to have a product that will do something to help you improve your time in the field and make it more efficient. A lot of folks are hunting two days. We don't want you wasting time, whether it's finding access, finding where your tree stand is, your game cams, asking permission,

or getting into these future endeavors and being able to pattern animals and organize your data or your experiences. So we're just looking to constantly improve people's days in the field you're not looking to get into a social app are you no social app social media type because you know these new things like i feel like it's not not gonna work but these new things like you go and you catch a fish and you make drop a pin say i caught a fish here for public consumption yeah dude those people got it all wrong. Hunters don't want to give away spots.

They're not giving away spots. People keep telling me, but I keep looking at it. There's a guy I work with that keeps sending me things about these things. But I'm like, man, the guys I know about are going to be like, well, sure, I'll look at everybody else's shit. I'm not putting my stuff on there. But sure, if he wants to tell me that, that's his business. But you do have your group. So there's a community aspect as far as like very small you have your group so that's one thing we want to do is you can create your groups for certain things certain

activities and imagine you have this 160 acre piece in wisconsin or whatever and you've got all your tree stand locations you've got all your trails you've got all your trails that go in the way you want them to go into the tree stands and you you can say, this is my group. I got a new guy coming in. He just came in at midnight, but I need him to get to that tree stand in the dark. I'm going to share this data. And then I'm going to let him take his app like this augmented reality style and just make sure he stays on that trail when he's walking in to that tree stand. He doesn't even have to do this. Bob's going to be here. Doug's going to be there.

Come in this way. Look that direction. Coordinate all that tree stand activity. Would you just call that augmented reality? Yep, augmented reality. So that would be that there would be like, it would look like a fake. Like you see the line. He's holding it up and he's seeing this line.

All he has to do is like, he doesn't know how to navigate he's looking at a photo before he's taking the photo through his lens and there's a line yeah there's a line and he just has to like if he goes off it's not going to show the line anymore and he goes back there and then you can see the line so he doesn't have to know how to navigate even a map yeah this makes navigation totally stupid simple when you can do that and it's like okay it's you're gonna have to know how to navigate even a map. This makes navigation totally stupid simple when you can do that. And it's like, okay, you're going to have to go out and 4 a.m. in the dark. I know you've never been there, but all you got to do is make sure you're staying on that line. You're not going to answer this honestly, but I'm going to ask anyway.

Any of you guys can answer this. Do you ever lay in bed at night and think, what have I done? Because what have I done? Because I'm slowly destroying woodsmanship. When I think about those future visions of like, when I think of maps, I think, yeah, I mean, when our kids, when they think of maps, they're not going to think of like this paper map and they're not going to have that. But we're going to make navigation simple. It's going to be stupid simple, and yeah, I guess it's going to destroy woodsmanship.

But I don't know. I think we can still pass that on to our kids. Like, okay, now I'm going to take your phone away from you. You make sure you can get back to the truck. Because in case there's an apocalyptic scenario scenario you might need to know how to do this the other day i was out when i was out on yanni's property looking around we're just looking around for red squirrels and i had my boy with me and i'm trying to figure out you know yanni's like uh his you know his vast acreage right and um my kids get annoyed they're old enough now to know

when you're paying attention to him or not paying attention to him and he was registering some confusion because here we are we're out looking for pine squirrels but dad's dicking with his phone and i keep him like he's like looking at me and i'm cute listen i'll just try to figure out i don't want to stray over on the neighbor's place you know and i've never been up there before and he was kind of having like are we doing this or not doing it like what are you doing work what is it you know and maybe like i had this like funny feeling that i wouldn't have had in in another situation but again there i am choosing to do it and and like you know you're going to go in that direction but i do i i I am aware of, there's a lot being gained.

There's a lot being gained, but there's always something being lost. But then here's the other part, the flip side when I look at it. The flip side is I like to have more information because it increases my understanding of the natural world. We use fish finders. There's a point in time I've even heard people say oh my god you guys and your fish finders okay when i first when we first bought a place in southeast alaska fish shack we were using old nautical charts which gave you really it had just basically

like soundings okay and my understanding of the contours of the of the surrounding ocean what worked and didn't work fishing was based on just these really shitty little sounding marks so later when technology came in and we started getting basically there we use i don't know the sun you guys are ever gonna get into um like good marine chart you know marine charts there's no ownership issue but like great marine charts on a gps unit that have like all the bathymetric data all of a sudden you're like oh that's why there's halibut here or here would be a great place to go and try to catch a yellow eye or i bet you salmon come pinching through here when they're moving here to there so the old timer will be like oh you whatever can't you know this and that and

you're cheating it's a big crutch but you'd also be like but listen i now have this like much more nuanced understanding of like what's going on and things that used to seem mysterious and strange and and like shit luck now kind of makes sense to me and i understand what the ocean does now better so is it that i lost something or did i gain something through technology right i don't know the answer i do you gain something and i think the argument against because i heard it too as soon as i got my gps i think i was the first one in hunting camp to have one none of the other guides did and yeah i just got shit about you know cheating this that and the other but what i

realized quickly is that like once you located that new park and you went to that new park two or three times using your gps the next time you don't bring it out again and so then you're you know learning it all you know taking in the trail and the surrounding topography and you know maybe the tree you didn't notice earlier when you were looking down at your gps that is a tree that you can sort of remember your trail by but like eventually you still come to the same understanding of that landscape yeah it's just a little bit faster and i don't know if that necessarily takes away from woodland ship skills and it kind of makes you expand it helps you jump outside of your

immediate comfort zone and gives you the confidence to go check out new places which add to your understanding and appreciation for natural environment. What it doesn't do for people, and this is going to probably stay the same for a long time, is it doesn't increase the stamina of your legs and make you want to walk any farther. And so that's the big thing that gets more people into the woods deeper. No matter how much you can know and how much it supposedly opens up. You still got to walk.

You still got to walk. They're working on a product. But a lot of people probably used to just be like, this is my spot and this is my spot. That's all I do because I know this spot. And then someone sells that spot. You expand your horizon and be like, oh, I'm confident now to actually go try new things.

It's opened up a lot of access and probably dispersed some hunters out to other properties or pieces they weren't comfortable accessing before. Definitely dispersed. Everybody just went to the same trailhead because it was marked. Here's the trailhead. But now, oh, I can actually park a mile down the road

where the Forest Service touches the road and hike it up this ridge on an unmarked trail, unmarked trailhead, and cut everybody off an hour, get in there an hour earlier, and then people walking up the trail or whatever. But other ways to use it. More and more people parked alongside the highway during hunting season.

Oh, yeah, there's one on the interstate just going over the Butte Pass. There's a guy pulled over. And we'll hear it from our customers. There's folks who have all this equity, all this time spent where they found these honey holes or access sites and then where everything that's wrong with hunting you know we open this up to everyone else but as you said you still have to hike up the mountain you still have to put a good shot on you have to find the animal i mean you still have to get it done but what's funny is we get these

guys saying we're the worst thing for hunting we're opening up all this opportunity for everyone else and then we look and most likely not always they have our product yeah and they're using it i'm 20 that guy and 80 the other guy yeah but i occupy this like i occupy that or in every aspect of life i like see both sides of stuff absolutely to a crippling degree yeah no i agree i mean they spent time they learned it you know i would be frustrated as well I like see both sides of stuff to a crippling degree. Yeah. No, I agree. I mean, they spent time. They learned it. You know, I would be frustrated as well. But it is satisfying.

You know, antelope hunting, I went and hunted a place I had never been, found a couple pieces of state section that my cousin actually found because of our product. But I would have drove by it. I would have never looked at it and ended up having a couple goats on there and hunted for a morning and shot one. Never been there. You know, might not ever go back. But it was just, you know.

That's my experience. You got a silicon wedding ring? Yeah. Good man. Not going to get de-gloved. No. You know that's what it's called when your ring tears off your hand, your skin? Ew.

De-gloving. De-gloving. It's a great word, isn't't it that's not why you wear it uh during hunting season yeah to prevent that just it's more comfortable you don't want to get de-gloved or you don't want to have a clicky noise when you grab something metallic uh it's not fear a little bit of the both shooting the gun i do a lot of bird hunting so gotcha yeah what's your ring made out of no ring you're not married i'm married shooting the gun. I do a lot of bird hunting. Gotcha. What's your ring made out of?

No ring. You're not married? I'm married. Really? What's going on there? Any prospects? Early. We'll put a plug in for you right now, man. We'll put a plug in. We've got a lot of plugs. I don't know if anything ever comes of it.

You want to put a plug in for yourself? I have a girlfriend at the moment. Okay, well, let us know. Zach's on Instagram. There's a plug. We just give your phone number where you tend to hang out and see what rolls. I'd love to hear that it worked. No one has a work frame. On X, 1925, bro.

They can find me there in fall, maybe not. I've been traveling a lot there. What's your wedding ring made out of? It's a D-glover. It's got gold and platinum. Okay. That's all right. It's a good idea, though, when you grab your bow,

click, like, oh, man, get that. I've got a tungsten one for regular season. Don't wear that. Regular season. When you burn your hand or get D-gloved, they got to use a vice grip to snap it off. You have to crush it off. Can't cut it with a drum.

Maybe I won't put it back on. My mission in life, two missions in life. One, get people to switch to these. Two, get people to have kids to keep their guns locked up and keep trigger locks on them. Help. Save your finger skin. You got young kids?

Six and two and one coming in the next two weeks. And you got two? Two kids. Five and three. I'm guessing you got none. No kids. Anything anyone wants to add?

This has been a great conversation man it's been fun it's funny because I've been watching it all like watching it all but not you know I mean just like catching little it'd be like if someone's watching a movie and you pass through the room now and then and you start getting kind of like a basic layout

of what's going on in the movie but there's a lot you missed it's filling in all those holes so we took on those investors, which we found great partners in growing the company. For world domination. World domination. We're going to try to go big.

We see a huge opportunity in the outdoor recreation space and a lot of potential there. So if you're doing something in a city, use Google. Restaurant, streets, directions. But if you're going in the outdoors, hiking, camping, hunting, fishing, it'll be Onyx.

Checking your properties, anything there. Where Google Maps ends, Onyx begins. I like that. I like that. Then I don't know if you want to have their name in there. Yeah, true. Because someday you might be buying those guys. That's true.

Any final thoughts? Oh, man. Just thanks to all our customers and thanks to you guys for your support and really appreciate what you guys do excited for our partnership coming up yeah man going forward i mean yeah we were talking about this earlier with the final thoughts and they're like oh man we got to think something but honestly for me it's like like you knew that a concluder was coming for sure

but for me this is this is surreal because i surreal because I grew up watching your show and everything and be sitting here talking about it. I grew up using OnX, and it's great. And just seeing where we've come, really, not to play off Eric's, but it is our customers. We get their feedback, both positive and negative. But we have, what, 10 customer service folks working in there, taking parcel errors, answering questions, all that, different ideas for features, whatever.

But we listen to them all. We appreciate them all, even the bad ones. And it just helps us make it. You know, they're the boots on the ground for us. Yeah. Has a customer ever had an idea where you're like, wow, that's a great idea? Oh, I'm sure. I don't have one specifically.

What's that? I want to use this on my smartphone. Can you make it? Oh, is that right? Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, it's been great and looking forward to the years to come. What employee number were you? I was 46.

So we got one, two, and 46? Yeah. Three. I'm three. Oh, sorry. One, three, and 46. One, three, and 46. And now we're, what, 100 right now.

You got any concluders? And a brand spickety new CEO. That's public information. Yep, it is. Awesome new CEO, excited. Any concluders? Concluders. Yeah, you guys kind of nailed the customer.

That was mine. But we've just been super customer focused since the beginning but uh i think the one thing i've learned is just um how kind of precious our time is outdoors so back to like are we taking away from the woodsman ships but uh you know everybody has such a busy life now with kids and families and you go through different stages of your life when i was in grad school i could go hunting every day every night just check out of town and have a lot of time. But now as you have a family, time's more precious. So just using a tool or something like this just to really maximize your time in the field,

we've just had a lot of success in helping people. You only have so many vacation days a year. You've got to balance them between family vacations and going hunting and just helping people get out there, have that kind of 20 years of knowledge in 20 minutes, kind of like our internal slogan. Like I can go anywhere new, give people the knowledge to go to a new state,

apply for new States, go explore and feel confident, have fun in the field, not feel that pressure that they're going to be trespassing or have a landowner confront them or get in trouble from a game warden. People are going out hunting to enjoy and spend time with their family and friends.

Just super proud to have a product that helps people really enjoy their time in the field. It's got to be fun to work at a place like that, man. Yeah. We love hearing the stories. Keep them coming. That's what keeps us going. Our team goes really hard to make these products for people.

We get stories where guys are like, I would have never had this experience if I hadn't had that product. It just keeps us going hard and we love it. Keep them coming. Every two weeks we have a company get together and we read positive and negative every two weeks from a customer that we'll get in.

That's a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. We've enjoyed just reading the ones since we started working with you guys that we've got. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

And then we forward them on to you guys. And then we just send them through our Slack channel where all our employees can see them and they read them. So you guys send them to us and we just send them straight to everyone working on the product. Oh, that's good. I got an idea. Is this your concluder?

Yeah. I'm at home and I'm on Onyx. I'm like, man, that spot looks sweet. Should we go check out that spot? What I need from you guys is an app that replaces me at work for a few hours and then at home

so that I have that time. It's called on export yeah uh no thank you guys for coming by yeah thank you guys we appreciate it that was fun man you guys got to come back more often now that we're like neighbors yeah absolutely definitely all right we'll do can talk about maps that was fun yeah and i want to i gotta we gotta interview 97 more employees yeah gotta talk to our gis team and learn about all the stuff they do. That's really cool. I've got a ton more questions, so let's parse it out.

All right. Thanks, Steve. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. On-axe hunt is now in Canada. It is now at your fingertips, you Canadians. The great features that you love in OnX are available for your hunts this season. Now, the Hunt app is a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown land, hunting zones, aerial imagery,

24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service as a special offer. You can get a free three months to try out OnX if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet.