Episode 114: Building a Subscription Community for Hunters with Chris Porter at GOHUNT

May 1

Chris Porter had never been hunting when he co-founded GOHUNT, an online subscription platform for hunting enthusiasts. He had spent most of his career in marketing in the online gaming industry.

However, his partner, Lorenzo Sartini, was an avid outdoorsman who brought the hunting experience to the team. They came up with the concept for GOHUNT in 2013 and launched in 2014 as a free online hunting digital destination community.

They started when Netflix and Amazon Prime were getting huge traction, and the idea of a subscription business was pretty novel. Chris and Lorenzo didn’t think a business based on revenue from sponsorships would be sustainable, and they loved the idea of recurring revenue streams. They decided early in the process that they would focus on annual revenue instead of monthly, even though they had no idea exactly what was going to be behind the paywall.

Going from free to paid

GOHUNT was originally launched as a free site. The idea was to build a dot com destination for hunters and outdoor enthusiasts, drive traffic, and build a community. Once they had an established brand, they would launch the paid product since that would require quite a bit of tech work.

On the first day of 2015, they launched their paid product. Hunting is very complicated because it is so highly regulated. Every state has different rules and regulations, and it can be confusing to keep up with it all.

Looking at what Zillow did to real estate, they launched a need for a destination where a user can have one go-to place to input options into a search engine and get the information they need. For example, someone could search for bow hunting for elk in Colorado on certain dates, and they could see all the options that match those criteria.

It was a DIY product designed to make users' lives easier. It is all in one place, it is searchable, and users can filter, sort and add favorites and notes as they go along. It changed the way people gathered that type of information, and Chris knew they needed time to successfully change people’s behavior.

Early marketing efforts

In the early years, marketing was focused on communicating to people why they should care about the product and what it could do for them. They needed to convince their potential users that they needed the product. It was a lot of work, leveraging, optimizing and scaling new digital channels.

They have been a digital-first company from the beginning, and digital advertising has always been at the core of the marketing strategy. They experimented with Facebook, Instagram and YouTube ads, implementing precise tracking and business intelligence tools to monitor the customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Today’s focus

They still focus on CAC to this day, and Chris says it’s critically important to know all the numbers, including the lifetime value and retention rate, in order to maintain a healthy company. He and his team focus on profitable growth over the growth-at-all-costs model that some subscription companies take.

Because of that focus, they have a strong retention rate, which has held steady over the years. This allows them to focus on acquisition, which they will continue to do until they see retention starting to slip.

They didn’t just luck into that great retention rate, they are obsessed with customer service and quickly solving problems that might arise for users. They have added value to the subscription over the years without raising the price, which makes it stickier.

Going mobile

Chris and his team knew from the beginning that they were going to focus on an annual recurring revenue (ARR) model instead of monthly. Their original product is at a premium price of $150 a year.

With the rise of the popularity of mobile apps, they recently launched a mobile-first product called Explorer that costs users $50 per year. Maps are a vital tool for hunters, and Explorer is a cloud-synched mapping product that subscribers can use out in the field.

They saw early on that the mobile app product would need in-app purchasing, which is a feature they quickly added. The original premium product doesn’t really add a lot of value to the mobile app, but Chris and his team noticed that there were people who purchased the original product through the mobile app.

After digging into the data, they came to the realization that some people simply prefer mobile apps over web browsers on mobile devices. This opened up a new, different acquisition channel that they could nurture through their marketing efforts.

Chris attributes this phenomenon to the decline in PC sales and the rise of mobile-device dependence by younger generations who grew up with phones in their pockets. As people get used to face-ID clicks for payments, it is creating a new type of computer ecosystem.

They put off focusing on apps because the 30% fee charged by Apple is a barrier to entry. Chris points out that there is a new program for small businesses that only charges 15%, which makes using the app store much more profitable.

Dealing with influencers

Chris talks about the golden years of companies using influencers to drive sales from 2016 to 2019. However, the game is changing, and companies like GOHUNT have to evolve with those changes.

Influencers have been a big part of their marketing strategy for a long time, and it is still effective for them, but it has become less efficient over the last year or two. The days of revenue sharing based on sales were a win-win for both sides, but influencers are looking for upfront fees now instead of commissions.

There is also the ever-changing landscape of how influencers work the system. Instagram can be the hot channel, and it can shift almost overnight to YouTube, and then again to TikTok. This is causing a decline in the reach and audience size of some of the bigger influencers, and many of them have plateaued in audience growth.

The focus on the future

For the first eight years of the business, GOHUNT only had its original product. Since then, they have launched three additional memberships, which they did in a 12-month span. With the new products and new features like in-app purchasing, they are focusing on optimizing the new channels and revenue streams.

They are looking to expand outside of their core in the future. They’re considering an e-learning line, and they’re talking about broadening their offerings to new markets like fishing and other outdoor activities.

Chris is looking at a future where he continues to have his hands full with GOHUNT. Not bad for someone who had never hunted when he launched the business.