KHC 179 - Craig Francis

Every step I take, I move my truth. Every time they tell me stuff, I use it. Every comment, date that makes my feel. Gather up my energy and boom. I hear them talking, saying the way that I move is so reckless. That is a part of my mind I've been blessed with. Giving my blood so I am relaxing. There you go. And that's the Keep Hammering Collective. I just took a piss. No, we're getting set up here we got craig francis marketing guru ultra view legend how about how's how am i doing that's pretty strong but thank you for the compliment yeah it's uh so we're going to talk today i i was going to give you this feel beforehand but this feel right now is i have no idea what we're going to talk about me neither but what i like is so i've been you know bow hunting for a long time been involved in you know whatever whatever we do for a long time and uh you know ultra view caught my attention and that's your job to get attention when did it catch your attention uh i'd say a couple years ago just seeing the sights you know and then you know following along um you know saw the arrows coming out saw i don't i don't do much of the release stuff like you know what you guys push i'm pretty old school i'm old school on everything until like until like you know it's noticeable like hey this is pretty sick let me check this out so i'm slow to change on anything but i did know the sites and then like one thing that you know for me i like to how you know storytelling is a big part of it which we can talk about all this but But if you just put in, I hate AI, but whatever, you just put it in just as kind of fun to ask it stupid questions. Usually it's like, who's the most hated bow hunter? And that's me, number one, always. But I say, what is the hottest bow site right now? And, you know, I shoot SpotHog, been with them forever. So I'm not, I'm just asking a question. And it says UltraView is, and I'm like, okay, so why? You know, because as I said, I've been involved forever. You've got companies like, I think, Spothog Bulletproof Product, love what they do. They weren't even on the list. Okay? So they've been around forever, too. Why are they? It's like, so you think about, well, why is that? Why is a tried and true product everybody trusts and knows, not even mentioned on the hottest, is because of the longevity? But whatever the case, I want to know why is UltraView deemed the hottest site right now? How did you build that? By the machines? By AI specifically? Yeah. But that's taken like a, you know, I mean, that's what people are saying. You know, that's how they get that answer. Well, I'll start with this. I can't take any credit for UltraView prior to about a year and a half ago is when I started. So kudos to the team that was there before me. Okay. I didn't build the whole thing. But Ultra is only seven years old. Colby started in his dorm room at Georgia Tech. Okay. Target archery guy. As to why does UV have the perception that it does, we push out a lot of media. We try to make it look great, have a premium aesthetic feel to it. Why do the machines think that our stuff is dope? I couldn't tell you that. I think a lot of that algorithmically with the large language models, it's pulling data just from the Internet of aggregate mentions. We get talked about a lot, for better or worse. Based on my understanding of how those models pull data, I would say that a non-trivial percentage of their ranking algorithm algorithm is based on how many times do those brand names get mentioned on the internet. We get mentioned a lot, so that probably helps us in that regard. Why does SpotHog not do so well in that arena? I couldn't speculate on that. It's a great product. I shot SpotHog for 10 years prior to coming to UV. It's the only other site that I would recommend other than ours. We'll just leave that right there. Okay. Yeah. Chris was an internet pen pal of mine for years. Yeah. They're great. Great guy. I love all those guys. And the product, I mean, it's really about the product. I wouldn't use it if I didn't believe in it. Yep. So, yeah. But, yeah. I get that. Man, we just try to tell great stories and put stuff out that meets our customer where they are. we're on a pretty big initiative right now of moving all of our manufacturing to the states which is new for ultra view we just got another cnc machine in the building last week i think the robot is getting set up today actually i'm missing that i got my guy filming in the building okay good um but yeah dude we we are just trying to champion a marketing strategy which is pretty popular in adjacent injuries, but I would just call it build in public where you try to live storytell in as real a time as possible what is happening with your business to invite people to follow the journey. And if that captivates their attention and your product is good, then maybe at some point in the future, you are, have engaged them in such a way that they are interested in shopping with you and trying out your stuff. Right. Like that's my holistic marketing strategy. I want to talk to 95% of people who are not in a purchasing window to buy a widget right now, but be top of mind when they self-select to enter the 5% of, I'm in a buying window. I'm looking for a new release, a new site, new arrows. If I've talked to them in a way that they found compelling the entire time that I wasn't trying to sell to them, then it just percolates up and maybe they shop with us at that point and then see if our stuff is good. That's literally all that I do. Yeah. It's very, it sounds easy, but hard. Yeah. It's a, I would say that, um, it's complex. It's not complicated. Those things are different. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, you want the customer invested in the story. Um, I liked, uh, you know, precision builds confidence. That's perfect. That's exactly. I mean, that appeals to the archer, to the bow hunter. So I get that. And I love taglines like that is in which you explained makes perfect sense, but very hard to do. Some people talk about discipline and values. 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Every purchase helps feed families in need through Operation Conquer Hunger. Right now, you can get 20% off your purchase. Just go to mountainoffs.com and use code CAM at checkout. This season, don't settle for sluggish. Ignite the hunt. If you look at, you know, sometimes I get frustrated with the industry marketing just in general. Because if you look at like an old magazine from 30 years ago, the ads aren't that much different. And I'm like, from today, you know, if I know magazines are kind of whatever, but they still are out there. And I'm like, well, it's the same words. It's sort of the same photo. It's like, are we still just doing the same? What are we doing? There's a lot of that. Can we not evolve at all and get more creative with this? Yeah, it's a business and it's marketing, but I mean, it just, it seems weird that we haven't got better. Just as an industry. As an industry as a whole, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I have ideas and a lot I could say. No, I don't. On a couch, what I'm going to say is like. This is like nobody even listens to this, and this is just between us. I'm totally not going to get myself in trouble. No, no, you're not. No. I grew up watching all this stuff, and I love this space. it's the only space I've ever wanted to work in. I would say that I've been in it for 12 to 13 years. I worked at Sitka for a long time before Ultraview. I was at Philson in Seattle before that, and I did agency work and freelance before that. I've kind of, like, seen a lot of inroads and different angles into how stuff goes in this space. I think, and this is going to, man, I'm not trying to chirp anybody personally here. this industry for better or worse really can be like a good old boys club and guys get comfortable and they get soft and they stop pressing new ideas forward because well it works so let's just keep doing it yeah it totally makes sense to me and i say that knowing that i myself am susceptible to that line of thinking on a long enough time horizon. And so I fight against it by just trying to come up with new stuff to say in a way that feels the most honest, that will pass through a very finely attuned bullshit filter in the customer marketplace in a 2026 environment. And so just doing status quo stuff is just like mailing it in. You're not going to earn any extra attention, get any like brand accolades, or have someone kind of develop a sense of tribalism for your thing, which is really what I'm after. One of my kind of brand tenets that I really do believe in is I want to be loved or hated. Both of those are totally fine. Having an ultra view, that's the worst. That's the worst thing. Having somebody be like, I have no opinion on that. Yeah. Complete apathy. That's the worst. I would rather have somebody be like, I don't like those guys because of the way that they are. that's totally fine. You just like something else, which is your prerogative. And that's cool, man. I don't have to be for everybody and neither does the company. So you should say something to turn a phrase like, say it with your chest. Put an opinion out there. Have a POV. And what that does is it forces people to make a decision about you, which is really what you're after in an attention economy. it should be like i believe what they believe therefore i want to align myself and my purchasing behavior when it comes to archery and bow hunting products with ultra view because we're we're aligned on a on a values level right or i don't like the way those guys's faces are and they bother me and I shoot fill in the blank brand and I don't want it. That's totally cool, man. There's enough pie for everybody. So I'm after that result. And so I think to the staleness of the space, I think a lot of places it's just like, here's a system that works well enough. Let's not change it. Right. Right. That's that's a scheme to not lose. Yeah. It is not a game to win. Yeah, I get that. I want to win. I think do you think that part of it is, you know, once you've established yourself in these, you know, in a marketing position or in the industry and the numbers are the numbers, as long as you don't deviate and don't it up, you're going to you're going to keep your job. So it's like it kind of devalues people taking big risks because there's a trend line in the sales. And it's like we've got to keep these bows selling or we've got to keep these products moving. And you said to do this, and here's what happened. Yeah, so this is like a – there's an employee psychology angle in this that I do think is interesting that's a factor into this conversation. as a creative or brand person or a marketing executive or wherever you're at. Also, wait, isn't everybody marketing in some way? Not on my team, they're not. Okay, go ahead. They think they are. A lot of guys think they are, but they're not. Okay. To have, like, the air cover and the freedom and the trust from whoever is your boss. Right. To try and fail or come up with a campaign that's going to press the edges of the sandbox and have it not work. that's a level of freedom that is given and a trust that is given by whomever is the hmfic at the place that is hard earned and easily lost yeah brands get stale when whoever is in charge of narrative doesn't feel the freedom to be creative And that is a human level of if I take a risk, is my job now at risk if this campaign doesn't go well, this product launch flops? Like, I have a mortgage. I have kids. Like, am I not safe to try? Right. That's totally part of the calculus. And that is very individual. and I see that having just worked at a couple of different places, I can kind of sniff out the brands where their people are empowered and the brands where their people are operating with some percentage of fear-based motivation. Okay, now hold it right there because I used to do a lot of interviews for my old job. And when people would say stuff like that, do you know what my question would be? tell me give me an example i want to hear you said there's companies where there's freedom to be creative and there's companies that are stale and whatever so you're gonna get me in trouble cam no that hey we're trying to help the industry i thought this was positive i think so it's tough love sometimes sure have you heard that yeah 100 percent um i try to be relatively diplomatic in my like brand relations uh that's great market it's good for my career i know that that being said i definitely have a reputation of sharing a strong opinion all you have to say is like who who is kicking ass and who's leaving fruit on the tree okay i have some examples okay i'm gonna talk about my own house because it's the one that i that i that I know the best. Right. My situation at UltraView is very unique, given that our founder, Colby Hanley, he trusts me almost implicitly to run brand creative and marketing. It's a wild, I have a level of freedom and autonomy that is exceptionally rare in this space. I share ideas with him and we go back and forth. and he actually is a very astute brand mind and understands positioning and narrative and high-level creative. He gets it. He's an engineer by trade and has a very technical background, but he appreciates good brand play. I don't think he's told me no yet on a single idea, and I don't really ask for permission. I just do it now. Now, they were a consulting client of mine prior to me coming in-house, and so I had a decently established rapport prior to coming on staff. And trust. Sure, and that's cultivated, and you've got to have a runway and put some wins on the board to develop that. But I operate in an extremely privileged framework that is not lost on me, that allows me a lot of leeway and creative freedom. But I will say, for you to get to that, that takes a lot to get to that point that you played the game right, or you made good decisions, or you presented your ideas right, and you have this proven track record. You said you stacked up wins. So, yes, you're in a great position, but all that was earned over these 12, 14 years. Yeah, I mean, that's true. I'm hesitant to, like, give myself that much credit. I try to be relatively humble about how I've gotten to where that I've gotten. But I know what I'm talking about within a very narrow band of niche shit. Yeah. But that is like an example of myself, my team, the creative partners that we work with externally. We play very fast and very free. And so if you look at it as a team sport, it's like we understand the game. The playbook is wide open, and I'm sitting there calling plays, and everyone is in the exact right position and well-trained, highly motivated, like, let's go win. That team dynamic is not common. Right. There's pre-vinted defense being played out there. Yeah. And not being aggressive. And there is a – I've worked at enough places on the agency side and the in-house side to know that there is a significant and fundamental difference at different sizes of companies that are in different phases of growth or retraction. And when you're at a smaller brand like Ultraview that is growing, you get more freedom. And there aren't as many hard and fast rules in the brand book. And there isn't a list of like, no-nos, don't go over there. If that list is not as long as a bigger established company that the perception might be, they have more to lose. So I want to be very careful right now. Sounds good. The example that I would use is where I was prior. I would say Sitka. I know that you're working with Sitka now, so I'm respectful. That's all good. I'm not throwing shade. I started at Sitka in 2019 when it was much smaller than it is now. I shot my first photograph with Sitka in 2014. And so I left in the fall or summer of 2024. So I had some form of working relationship with Sika for 10 years. Yeah, that's a long run. Watching that company grow and change and morph from starting as a freelance photographer that just sold a handful of photos a year, but got invited to participate in pre-product launch shoots to transitioning to an agency where Sika was a client. to then eventually going in-house as a creative producer in 2019 and kind of climbed up senior creative producer and then director of communications. I watched that business grow, morph, and change with a massive asterisk on that entire, like, 2020 to 2020 early four program of, like, pandemic fund money coupons. Just like, dude, you know better than anybody. Like, that fundamentally changed the outdoor industry. Yeah. for better or worse like a lot of companies right now are finding out that it was for worse yeah it was it was not real that that bump wasn't real it was fake yeah and then a bunch of companies put plans in place as though it would never stop and it turns out that was a heinous thing to do i'm not saying stick it did that yeah but what i am saying is stick it got really big really fast and started installing people that were being generous adjacent at best to the lifestyle in decision-making chairs. And that has downstream effects and consequences. Now, what I do want to say is that there are still people there that are great. Barklow, great friend of mine. I know he's a friend of yours. He does testing and evaluation for me at UltraView. that guy we don't have to talk about how great he is at what he does you know as legit as it gets right yeah and so having people like him like a gilmore um like a jay matthews who's who's running product like guys that are deep subject matter experts but also process oriented to run the giant machine on the product development side that that place is high integrity dudes that want to make great stuff because they're of the old mind of we make great product for people that are getting out and doing the thing and that's why we succeed as a business. That part of Sitka is like a, it's like a vestige in my opinion. A lot of decisions are being made on a spreadsheet there and if you look at turnover and people coming and going and why some people get rewarded and why some people get killed. I got killed off. I got fired in a group of 15 people on a reorg in 2024. Really? What did they say? That is difficult for me to answer in public. Okay, gotcha. You don't have to. Well, it's just like I was right for a phase of business that that company grew out of. As America turns 250 this year, good ranchers wanted to take a moment to honor the people that helped build this country. Not the ones in the history books, but the ones who wake up before the sun season after season without looking for any kind of recognition. These people are America's ranchers. Most of you know I eat a lot of wild game, but let's be honest. You don't really get a marbled elk steak, and sometimes a good hard-earned steak is tough to beat. That's where Good Ranchers comes in. What I really like about Good Ranchers is what they stand for. They are 100% committed to America farms and ranches. Every cut of meat comes from right here in the United States. Their packaging and fulfillment happens here. Their customer support team is in-house. And with every order, they donate a portion of their profits to veterans' organizations. That matters to me. For more than 250 years, ranchers have fed this country through droughts, wars, recessions, and everything in between. They kept showing up, and they kept doing the work. That is a legacy worth supporting. So if you want to support American ranchers and eat great meat at the same time, go to GoodRanchers.com. As a subscriber, you will save up to $500 a year. And when you use my code CAMERON, you'll get an extra $25 off your first order. That is Cameron for $25 off your first order on top of the savings. Hoyt began with a dream and a simple desire. Create the best bow hunting and target archery equipment possible, and since 1931, that is exactly what they've been doing. I'm skeptical every year that this year's bow will be better than last year's, yet somehow their engineers seem to figure it out. I think what sets them apart is their engineers are all avid hunters themselves. So they take their bows in the field every year with the intent to make them stronger, faster, and more accurate. Hoyt is actually my lifetime bow sponsor. That is how much I believe in them. Their products and their drive to always be the best. Hoyt is giving listeners of this podcast 20% off products in their store with code CAM. Sorry, it doesn't work on bows, but it does work on accessories, including quivers, rests, and my favorite, the go stick. That's code CAM at checkout at Hoyt.com. I can have extremely strong opinions, and I'm not afraid of saying them to my superiors. And as someone that was, like, installed in a fundamental part of the creative part of the business, I was like, this is how we should be doing content. This is how we should put our products on display. These are the types of human stories that we should be telling. and I felt personally that those things just started to erode. And I was given less and less freedom, put on a tighter and tighter leash. And until it became like, I can't do something under my skin, I'm going to say it. I'm just wired that way to my own detriment often. And I just started barking and they cut me loose. You're going to get a result one way or not. Yeah, and it was just, it kind of dovetails beloved or hated. That's like a personal ethic for me too. It was very just like, dude, in my journal in 2012, when I was, I think I had sold like less than 10 photos in my career at this point. I wrote that I would be the creative director at Ziggy Gear. You made it happen, didn't you? I didn't have that title, but I was freaking close. And then once I was in the building, it was very clear to me that, like, I was not equipped to fill that chair. And so I filled other ones. Gotcha. The CD job at Sick Good during the time that I was there, quite honestly, was not a fun job to have. I didn't want it. I worked with some good dudes that were there that had that role at a couple different CDs during the five years that I was there. All very talented, all doing other things. when companies get big and you're looking at spreadsheet math to determine why you should do this and not do that for creatives and marketers specifically your KPIs and how you're measured changes and you get executives who are just playing a different game that are calling the shots and saying these are now the benchmarks by which we will distribute pass-fail markers. Where I really landed on this, and I do really believe this, I understand I've kind of like levied some version of criticism against Seiko right now, which I want to be very careful and respectful of because still have friends that work there that are doing great stuff. Yeah. the game that i'm good at playing changed and that was a me problem not a business problem i just define success differently than that company does now yeah i think that any creative they're not going to get to the dollars and cents part they're not they're not going to value it no so i'm like wondering though isn't like isn't the growing pains part of a company like sidka Isn't that part of it? Like this transition from the more grassroots. Everybody loves the grassroots story, right? You know, Jonathan and Jason, that whole thing. And then whatever happened, then the QU and all this. But everybody loves that to come up. Yeah. When you get corporate, then even people internal hate it. It changes. Because it's like, wait, I really believed in, you know, this. And now it's like venture capital. I don't even know who bought or I don't know how the money part of that worked, but I just know just in general investment firms come in. Now you're judged on different things. The grassroots doesn't mean shit. The game changed. Yeah. And so that's kind of what I'm really getting at is I know personally that I'm better at a smaller brand. You get these like from zero to a million dollars, just like a wildly different thing than say from one to 20, and then 20 to 50, 50 to 100, 100 to 2, 2 plus. Like those are kind of the buckets. Yeah. I'm really not good once things go corporate, personality-wise, because I, on my own teams internally and to people on other teams within the building that I interact with, I'm like, dude, this is like how my mom talked to me when I was a child. It's how I learned how to communicate. it's extremely direct. It's like, say the real thing. What are we talking about? I can't do the political thing. So if a company gets big and then you have jockeying amongst the ranks, I can't do it. I'm not good at it. I don't believe in it. I'm just not interested. And so for me, that was a learning. I started to pick that up when I was at Filson. And then when I, like later, back half of my time at SICA, I was like, dude, if a company is bigger and getting siloed in terms of departments and power structures and all that stuff, I cannot work there. I completely took that off the chessboard for me personally. Yeah. That's a hard wiring and it's a self-awareness thing. And that's a me thing, not a I'm against big companies thing. Like the game changed. Now it's about money. Fantastic. Other people are much better at playing that game than I am. Yeah. What I care about is story and meeting people where they are in the grassroots phase. I am really good at that part and really bad at the parts that come after that. Yeah. I think everybody should take, every marketer should do some type of analysis of like, look at the chess board that you play within the organization that you're in do you fit are you well suited is who you are naturally your innate talents and giftings and proclivities and ideas like are they rewarded on the board in which you sit yeah if they're not you should go somewhere else you're in the playing the wrong game 100 yeah and this like all goes back to creative mind space of being able to feel free. If I'm on the wrong board and I'm doing creative work that I don't enjoy, that I'm not personally motivated to try to make great because I don't have a belief for this. I'm doing a disservice to myself and my employer because I'm not giving them my best. And if you're going to do the W-2 employee thing, you should give them your best. And my opinion, You should be very selfish about it because at the end of the day, you're lying on a spreadsheet and they will kill you. This is the fact. I always get fired. I have always gotten fired. It's just like what happens to me? It's because I mouth off and I say something that I really believe in and I just get killed. Dude, I always get fired. It doesn't bother me. I've been fired a lot. I've always figured it out. It's totally fine. That's a lot of freedom. I mean, to have that mindset. I mean, I know it's probably not that free all the time because you're just sometimes like, what the? And it's also like earlier, I'm 38. Let's call it 15 to 20 years into my career at this point. Earlier in my career, if I got fired and I had a four or six-month delta between jobs, I'm in a bad spot. Yeah. just mathematically, I don't have that kind of, I don't worry that much anymore. Dude, in 2011, I was pouring concrete for $8 an hour. I had $83 to my name. I did the math on how long I could live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and milk. So it could get worse. I remember. And I also, that is the best job I've ever had. Because it taught me, I'm a white, college-educated male in America, this place still doesn't know me shit. It might treat me better, but it still doesn't know me anything. And I could go back tomorrow. I know that I can go pour concrete. I know that I can figure it out. So there's this fundamental belief that's like, I could take it to zero. For what I believe in, I'll take it to zero. It's fine. And then the freedom of just having a bit more maturity a bit more personal resources to like bank into the if this goes up in smoke like i'll be fine it just age into that and then i think a lot of people going back to what we're talking about earlier you start to just get comfortable and like soft is a bit more like poke the bear phrase for that yeah you're like pillow fight right but for me it's just like that's the time to get more dangerous. Yeah. Because you can, and you're not risking as much. And I think most people think if you like swing a big stick and try to make noise later in your career as the marketer, you've got more to lose and that's more risky. Flip it. You have way more to lose earlier when it was like, if you screw up this at bat, your whole thing might be up in smoke. Yeah. Now, it's like if you present yourself and your ideas and you do work that does what you need it to do for whatever phase of the game you're in, you can just like there's time to, you know, hit singles and there's time to swing for the fence. and you got to feel that out and know when the right moment is for which instance but i think later in your career you should you should play harder because you have the the freedom to do it now and if you step out of bounds and catch a consequence cool i earned that yeah i was wrong and being open and ready to look at like i am the author of my own life and trajectory and yeah dude I'm susceptible to stepping out of bounds and having a bad idea or saying something stupid or you know clacking off in a meeting when I definitely shouldn't have because I wasn't seeing the chessboard in a way that I should have because I was prideful and arrogant yeah I'm prone to that yep I'm less prone to it now than I was earlier in my career and that was that's why I got fired a lot I had to learn but I did learn and that's the thing is like if you're going to go through to war you should take the lesson with you yeah and you know all of that just factors into in this space dude we sell bow hunting stuff yeah this should be fun yeah it's not life or death yeah if if it's not fun you're doing it wrong right and companies that get big and quit having fun i'm just like dude i'm out on that what are we doing like this should be awesome yeah like We get to hunt kind of for a living, not as much as you, but make cool stuff and tell stories and get out there and do the thing. It's like, this is what we like to do. What are we talking about in here on this spreadsheet right now? We have people for that. We're out here telling stories. Let's go. I love it. I love it. Hmm. Well, that's, uh, yeah. I mean, I think it's because there's so much passion in it. So it's like, it is fun, but people care, you know what I mean? I'm not talking about in the business. I'm talking about bow hunters. Like this is, I know when I, you know, my whole trajectory of, from when I started in 89 to now, it was just all I cared about. So it was like, that's why it's like sometimes the marketing or whatever, like we're talking business a lot, but as a consumer, man, I can't be more invested in this stuff, you know? So like, I think like if we talk about the brand story and storytelling just in general, I tell this to my son all the time, you know, he's, you know, out there in the public eye a lot, but, and you kind of mentioned it, but I just said, make people care if it's love hate whatever but make them care and you know attention is currency and he definitely makes people care one way or another the elite runners hate him the regular guys love him for chasing his dreams but they all care so how do you how do you make people care like you talk about you know i'm sure there's some great um projects you did sit kind of like What's one where, however, why did it work? Why did you make people care? Why did it have a huge impact? Tell me how that success story. I would use our Ultraview Slider 2 launch film from last summer as kind of like the more recent example of a story that I felt really mattered. and so to kind of set this up Colby founded Ultraview as a target archery company he's a competitive shooter, 50 meter outdoor was his discipline of choice he started making light kits for indoor archers and have your fiber glow better when you're shooting paper and then started kind of iterating on a series of products that were specific to target archery He and Chris B., who's the guy that you should have on your show. Yeah. I like what he does. I mean, he does a good job. Yeah. Like, dear homie of mine and part of the Ultraview business. Yeah. He really started to inject, like, he was a target competitor as well. And then as his YouTube channel started to grow, he's like, bow hunting is my thing that I'm going to do. just he and Colby started iterating on like what products could we make specific to hunters to add like in the business language like a much larger total addressable market than target archers and so it was like the original thumb button which was probably the most popular thumb release for bow hunters at that time and then the original slider which came out you know three and a half fish years ago um that was a very innovative site the way that like our pat did dual dial mechanism like nested elevation and windage and how it was put together it was like it was the shit at the time and i think that site really put ultra view on the map um but you know chris is growing his business alongside ultra view it was like we had this really core audience that was true to the target archery origins and they were trying to pick up more of the bow hunting like collective consciousness and get people into the brand that way slider two was the first big project that was like from soup to nuts this was made to be like a bow hunting site and it was my big first big product launch in my role at uv and so that video i think it's like a five minute video So we made it with Collectus, our creative partner, Austin Thomas, wildly creative crew. And then like Barclow was in it. We did a Texas Audit hunt down Scotty and then just talked about our design ethos and like, why do we do the things that we do? and it's to support hunting because you should enter the field with a level of confidence in yourself and your equipment that makes you highly ethical and lethal in the moment of truth that will draw and that was kind of the genesis of the precision builds confidence line that i wrote when i first got there is that's a bridge precision being to target archery discipline it's like accuracy and precision are not the same thing you need both right so 20 yard indoor vegas face that's a precision game if you're not shooting a 900 you're not in the game and so precision builds confidence but bow hunting is a confidence thing and it's the one thing that you can't buy you gotta earn it and so that three three line motto is the bridge of our entire brand story And that slider two video was meant to put that on display and say, like, we love hunting. And this is how we think about it. This is what it means to us personally in the building. And what we care about is basically being an afterthought onto the stories that hang on your wall that you talk about around a fire with your friends. because in those moments that you love, like in this room that we're in right now, and you've got to walk me through here later, I want to hear some of these stories, it's like you won't tell me what bow you shot these critters with. It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. What matters is like how did it go down? Yeah. How did it make you feel? Which one went wrong and then you had to like scrap it out and figure it out? Right. Which one's like, dude, this is the best process ever, just super clean, pure arrow, it was magic. I've never had one of those. I punched a trigger. But like, in those stories, you don't talk about gear. No, no. It's irrelevant. It doesn't matter. In the old hunting articles they did, my Thunderhead 125 tipped Easton XX75. Yeah, the people love that. Super effective. Yeah, it just really reels me in. Yeah. But no, like that, that's the example of say something that makes people feel. That's it. That's all I'm after. That film did that. It was the first thing that I would say a lot of people in our company we launched it and then the public response in comments and on YouTube and everywhere else and then what I really after like people that know like all my industry pals and friends that just text me directly they like hey i not blowing smoke up your ass but that was legit like that made me feel something from like i'm gonna watch it qualified people now i want to see it so is the it's a slide or two yeah just do uh or YouTube UltraView Slider 2. It's why we exist. One of the hardest parts of hunting is glassing big country to find animals you know are there. That's why I run Sig Sauer Zulu Imaging Stabilizing Binoculars when I'm covering a lot of ground and need to see everything. 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Or find Ketone IQ at Target stores nationwide in the hydration and protein aisle and get your first shot free. You have to, it's my VO. Your VO just wouldn't exist. I can tell you what I like. I'm going to go fast. People have said stuff like, you're a target archery company. Bowhunters are not going to take you seriously. Or they might say bow hunting is supposed to be for everybody and Ultraview stuff is just too expensive. We've heard a lot of that. But when you're building a brand, part of the task is to filter out the signal from the noise. Some feedback is going to be helpful. It will help us improve, and that's great. We listen for that. Other feedback, though, is just not for us. We can't please everybody. We're not going to try. We're going to keep our heads down on task and our eyes front. listen we care about bow hunting and bow hunting is not a discipline that that uh frustration scene like where you you know it's like like looking away that everybody can identify with that yeah you know what i mean it's uh we know that yeah and high five we got that that's just been that's a very small percentage but most of bow hunting is that so that to me that i mean that's real just okay is an acceptable result for us it's very hard anyone who's hunted for even one season understands that but if we can design and build products that help hunters be more confident and more accurate that directly translates to being more ethical in the application of an arrow So that's our mission. Where'd that arrow hurt? Looks like it's going to be back. It's a little bit back. The walking, they don't have to be walking very fast to hit back. You know what I mean? But yeah, anyway. That's our mission. So I liked it. So to me, this video, that was a minute 24 to build. It made me care. We're trying to establish credibility with people that are bow hunters. big country i saw big country i saw the getting down the scree i saw the frustration i saw ruggedness i saw epic drone shot so i'm like looking at that that's quality video that's quality storytelling a minute 24 of it so now show me this shit what are we talking about because i haven't really seen like there was no close-up that i noticed really of featuring the site it's just like that the um just the moment and just like just bow hunting but so now i'm like okay we started as a target archery company the people that say that about us are right but for years we worked really hard to bring something to bow hunting that was worthy of being trusted in the field our og slider site was that thing and it took a tremendous amount of effort and learning for us to bring that to market. We're proud of it, but that's the challenge of designing products to a high standard. You only have the knowledge that you've gained from your previous experience. And our experience started just a short seven years ago. That show is good. The quick, you know, from the boardroom to ideas to I didn't hear no bell. That, to me, that is quality storytelling right there. That is like, yeah, people aren't good at that shit. So that is great. I haven't watched this video before, so I'm impressed. But now I'm like getting the old school. This must be Colby, I take it, in this footage. Yes. That's his dorm room where the company started. Yeah. Do I know that? Did it say it on here? Yeah. Maybe it does. Yeah. And Colby's dorm room. You know, it was 3D printers under his bed, and then it was a few more printers in a friend's basement. And then we were in the corner of an archery shop. It just kept going, stacking that experience. There was this continual stream of innovation just born out of love for the sport of archery. That's taken us a long way, and I think that's something to be proud of. But we're just as hungry now as we were back then. the new slider two is the best bow hunting site that we have ever made it's more compact i like that that's like not bs sales because you could say the best bow hunting site on the market but you can't measure that no but the best bowing site we ever made to me I notice shit like that and probably people I think other people probably do but maybe subconsciously maybe I don't know I like that that's authentic to me that's authentic everybody says other shit like we're the best ever or okay it has brighter pins and a hot swappable cartridge system it's lighter weight it has a USB-C rechargeable battery it's optional if you live in a state where you can't hunt with a light you don't have to buy it. It comes in bridge lock, pick mount, and direct mount at a killer price. We think that this is the most comprehensive sliding site available on the market right now. We might look like a big company, but really we're still just like a very young scrappy band of misfits. Everybody that works here really wants to be here. We draw on our collective talent to design and build things that we believe deserve to exist. We try very hard to present them to the world in a way that's compelling. And that's what we feel like we've done here. This new Slider 2 is the best bow hunting site that we've ever made. I like the, so Macy, we can cut this down. Where I'm not saying anything, we can cut that out, but I want to leave the commentary. I like showing the employees enjoying what they do because that's another part that doesn't get really shared a lot just in any company, but that does make you feel better about the product learn about as as we said earlier you want people invested in the journey it makes me like feel part of it almost yeah so keep going i'll we'll talk more about it after you finish it good gear is awesome we're all gearheads in this building but at the end of the day what we're about is hunting the stories that we're going to share around a campfire with our friends those stories don't have a damn thing to do with gear. Those stories that matter the most are about the spirit of the hunt. Are we leaving the field with our honor intact because we conducted ourselves well while we were out there, alone, with nobody else watching? Are we becoming more in tune with the natural order of things during a 10-day mule deer hunt where it seems like everything goes wrong and the weather goes to shit? like that's where we want to be growing as individuals as hunters we want to hear about how your ears rang when that bull ripped a bugle in your face from 10 yards away i want to hear about your arrow finding its mark on a buck that you've had on camera for the last three years but he's only daylighted that one time we care about those experiences it is our job to offer you products that are capable of being deadly in their precision it is your job to invest the time and effort required to build the confidence to kill and let's not kid ourselves that is exactly what we do out there we kill to make food and that is an ancient thing and there is much more honor in that act than society at large is ready to discuss. But real hunting people understand that. Real hunters know that confidence is the best thing that you can take with you on a hunt. And I hate to be the one to tell you this, but you can't buy that. Maybe that's weird for a company like us to say, I mean, I'm literally sitting here recording this marketing video, but that's true. And that message is much more important to us than selling another bow site. All we want to do here is to put good gear in your hands and join you in the sacred act that is hunting for wild hate. We are grateful for your trust in us. Thank you for shopping our products and for trusting our gear to go into the field with you on your hunts. That is not something that we take for granted. So when you grab your bow and you head out the door to wherever hunting might take you, take your confidence with you. be a participant go with honor for the land and respect for the creatures that call it home that's so hard doing that Yeah, that's good shit. Yeah, that's really good. and it's like hmm yeah I don't know good storytelling, good cinema, good video good script good yeah I was like I'd probably like you in that I always definitely have opinions on stuff but like when I was thinking that I think a cool thing would I'm not trying to critique it but like I love the precision of that of dialing that and you know the numbers going by really it just looks like it does look precision um i was like i think it'd be cool to show like you know back in the day recurve guys used to put like little uh notches on the riser for how far you'd want to shoot like so that's where it started almost like a little notch on the riser that's 20 some guys used to have little marks like just rudimentary sure right way back in the day so like going from that to that would be epic um and then what i had one other one ever oh yeah i thought it'd be cool at a pro and i love the pro shop life borax not even a mile from me but like having somebody like or them bolting a site on and then like a guy get in and smiling you know what i mean like a consumer yeah because you guys had you you guys and like that was all whatever but like to me that's the consumer being pumped you know what i mean everybody knows that that feels like i know when i get a new bow and i put new shit on it i'm like fuck okay this thing is dialed yeah anyway but i love the film um yeah it's like i understand you know you should be very proud of that that's killer marketing dude so great job thank you um and that like i didn't know we were going to watch that and how many of the lines that i wrote that are in that video have i said yeah already yeah so like that script that i wrote and read into a microphone for that video like that's what's in here that's all the words you have in your brain we're just repeating right this is what i just this is what i think about this is what i think is cool no it's just to me that means it's authentic Like, you've said it, but you said it here on the script that you wrote down. So it's like, no, this is how you, this is what you feel. Yeah. And it's like, that is a, that's a brand film disguised as a product launch film, which is what I wanted it to be. Absolutely. Because I'm trying to establish credibility for just knowing our product roadmap and what we're going to do in the next couple of years. It's like, I need hunters to care. Yeah. And so that was a year and a half ago almost. That's my best attempt to be like, hey, watch what we're about to do here. It's going to be dope. Pay attention. And trying to communicate in a way that is as real as possible, that meets you where you are, that if you're a bow hunter, you're like, yeah, dude. What you called out first, like the guy sucking wind and just being like, this sucks. Relatable. Yep. Because this moment is rare, boy. But like the grind of it and I'm cold and wet and I'm tired and there's water 2,000 feet down there and I got to go get it because I'm out. That sucks, but that's the makeup of the whole thing. Yeah. I'm just trying to connect and just earn your attention and say like, hey, I know you because we are you. and in the background like you're calling out our people in the building and showing how it's going my like top tier goal in the seat that i sit in at ultraview for as long as i'm allowed to sit in it i want ultraview to be the best place to work in the hunting industry for all of our people i want to send them hunting i want to pay them as much as we can i want to give them as much ability to operate within their passion and their gifting as possible. We're going to work very hard. Our crew is like everybody in that building is a grinder. And we're not as big as we might present on the internet. We're like a core team of folks that's just in there busting ass to try to make good stuff. That's fun, man. Yeah. Like, I got the jersey on. We're on the same crew here. Let's do this. I'm trying to cultivate culture within the building that bleeds out through the brand. Yeah. Because if we don't believe it inside, nobody else is going to believe it out there. I just think that that's the best way to do it. Yeah. Definitely. Like, say something real. Say it in as pure a way as possible. And have some fun, man. Like, bow hunting stuff, like we said before. This should be fun. Yeah, for sure. make good shit tell great stories and invite people along for the journey make great product one of the things that we say uh in the building i used to i had these uh during covid i started writing these like post-it notes with like single phrase marketing isms on them james you might remember some of these uh one of them is like if your product sucks and all your marketing is a lie yeah and the caption was i'm not a liar there you go like it starts with product so colby would tell you that we're a product design company and a marketing firm like we make good stuff right and then we tell a story about it and as soon as we tell that story we're back to making good stuff and so we're in the future already we've got a couple more product launches coming this year everything coming out subsequently is going to be 100 made in the states that's like our big core initiative and so that film from from my zone of responsibility was the first big piece of content that I put out. It's like, I'm trying to plant a flag in the ground on UltraView and say like, Hey, we might be small and you might have thought you have an idea about who we are, how we operate, what our reputation is. I'm going to mold that to where I want it to go as we grow and make more and better things. Because Colby, to his extreme credit, is that one of the things that people say is like ultraview is the apple of archery i take that as an extreme compliment to colby's innovative spirit we iterate product in revisions the same as like a tech company would innovate software it's like version 2.3 2.4 if we can make something better today on an existing product line by tweaking or revising the design we'll do it right now immediately you don't wait for like a season or no why would you do that yeah why would you wait that this doesn't make any sense if we can make the pins incrementally brighter right now we'll just start building that right now and then we let people know it's like if you want the new thing here it is you buy it that's pretty rare isn't it yeah not common yeah because there's so much like operational challenge yeah tooling and yeah it's it's wildly difficult but it's the right thing to do yeah definitely Yeah. We just try to do that as much as possible. So telling these stories, is it all video or what's your path for reaching the consumer? I mean, we talk about video a lot. You love video. That's a great video. But so is the only path to reaching the consumer just a killer video? No. I mean, marketing is all like where's the attention? Go to that. Like skate to the puck, you know? Because here's like an example. James loves this example. He makes me killer real, professional, looks great, gets two views. I do a selfie out here around and it gets 400,000. So tell me, yeah, where's the focus? Obviously, you want some about with, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's like a cornerstone piece of product launch content, which is meant to be a bigger, more substantial piece of media. Yeah. We do all the downstream stuff, too, with our creative crew at Collectus. And then Carson, who's our internal creative with a camera in the building, is like we live across a spectrum of content. So that's like a champion piece of content all the way down to like we'll put a microphone on the end of a stabilizer and walk around the building like, what broadhead do you use? Tell me about it. And like that's just like shot on an iPhone, edited in four minutes, posted on the Internet. you gotta do it all everything in between and it is interesting to your point of like all of us if you're trying to distribute a message or media of any kind in a 2026 environment you are beholden to the algorithm and there was a period of time where very cinematic content outperformed everything else. And to your point, that is not the way that it is now. And so we do what I would call like lo-fi, easier, faster, high touch content of just ripping around the building or behind the scenes media. We just posted a reel the other day. Like we made this, we have a shot tester that we put our button release on that runs actuations and like loads the hook to 100 pounds of draw force and it cycles it and that shot tester is probably coming up on half a million actuations on the button we're going to get it to a million and then like show that it's still super good to go like you would never put a million shots on a release but you can if you wanted yeah if you wanted to rebuild your shoulder a bunch of times um it's so different than hoist dry fire you know 15 year dry fire yeah like you're never going to do that and that's that's like a durability story that can run the gamut of how you're presenting that and that's that's a whole different category so yeah we got got to hit all these categories do you have a road map of categories like for each product you got to hit this cornerstone piece you got to hit this around with the microphone piece or is like or is it just by feel i do almost everything by vibes okay um i don't like map stuff out um you see the now this can sound extremely arrogant i'm not putting myself in this same conversation are you seeing the they're like rick rubin clip oh you're like rick rubin now right or he's just like uh i've been around and i have cultivated a taste that people have chosen to respect based on yeah what i've done like that sounds good i operate on Some lesser version of that. That's where it's just like, this is what I see happening in the world. This is what I think would be effective communication to distribute whatever message we're trying to distribute. And I'm just going to, like, where's the wind? I'm just going to taste it out. I'm almost completely driven by that. I will nuke whatever I thought was a good idea yesterday for what I think is a better idea tomorrow. Okay. Not beholden to any type of strategy. That's kind of what I do. Yeah. I think. I don't know. I don't even know what I do. The thing with, especially like social forward content, you don't know if it's going to work. No. Post it. Yeah. If it doesn't work, here's the great thing. All of our collective consciousness is so smoked by dopamine addiction from our phones, you'll forget in 36 hours tops. So if you post something and it flops, it doesn't matter. No. It doesn't matter. Like it's not net negative. And as a like purist creative, there's so much of the like, I poured my soul into this. Like, I really hope it works. If you attach your identity to things like that, you're setting yourself up for a lot of disappointment. Just send it reps. Like, just be in the game continuously. And then sometimes stuff will really work and it'll pop off and you'll catch a moment of virality and like, it'll go. like colby has a reel on his personal page that's just like it's the release in his hand the original button like a prototype just like running the thumb barrel and like cocking mechanism it's like it's shot like this that's like 20 million views on it yeah yeah doesn't matter like it just worked that's cool you would never scheme that out like in a go-to-market strategy session for what are the deliverables that we need to launch a product? Well, something like this that's 14 seconds long. You wouldn't come up with that. But if you don't try it, you won't know if it works or not. So you can make as many cool, cinematic, high-touch things as possible. You should also do all the lo-fi stuff too. And so our distribution strategy is all social, email. We do a little bit of endemic advertising in a couple of different outlets, but we try to own our story just because I want to control the narrative. And if you look at one of our larger business initiatives is Road to USA Made, because there was two main knocks on UltraView when I started, that as a customer and just seeing what people say, It was your stuff is made overseas and it's expensive. I don't like that. So what if we could make it make sense for the business that is substantiated by the spreadsheet that we bring all of our manufacturing back to the States, most of it within our own facility, and in some cases lower the price of the product because we're no longer playing the like MOQ game. So the tariff thing, everybody thinks we're coming back to the States because tariffs are just eating our lunch. That's largely not true. I understand why people say that. But it's also in the trajectory of growing the business. You saw it. Colby started in his dorm room seven years ago, and they started making things. And the demand was just like, holy shit, how am I going to fulfill all this demand? The quickest way to get stuff made is overseas. Yeah, definitely. Especially machine parts. it's not like you have a ton of scale where you can just go to a machine shop in the states and say can you make me 5,000 of these things? That would be like a big order. It might take you 12 to 18 months to get into a machine shop on their schedule to do that. That's not true overseas. So it's like the choice to make stuff initially overseas was almost like a non-starter. It's like, we need to make stuff now. This is the way to do it. It was always Colby's intent to be vertically integrated and own our own supply chain. It's a huge capital expenditure to do that. Other companies in the space were bolted on to existing other business. I'm a guy. I own a machine shop for decades. Down the line, I'm like, I also like to bow hunt. Maybe I'll just start making my own bow hunting stuff and I'll run it through my own company. And now just two businesses feeding each other, extremely smart. Oldview is not that way. We did a podcast with Josh Jones and he's like, I always thought that your stuff came saran wrapped off a boat and it was just like, dude, there's several hundred parts on the slider, they all come in like in bags and we assemble everything in the States. So it's like what degree of not made in the States is it? People don't really care until they do. And because the competition for bow hunting accessories is so like all the companies have chosen that made in the USA is a battleground that we will fight on. And if you're not in that game, they're going to hold it against you. Yeah. And so when I started, it was actually like in my interview, they were asking me like, what do you think about not being made in the States? I was like, well, everybody else is, and you're taking it in the teeth by not. So we should probably evaluate, does this work? Because if you're going to charge a premium price and exist in the upper tier of consumer hard goods within the bull hunting space, all the other available options are USA made. And so that's a chink in the armor. And if we can make it make sense financially and we can retool the budget and do the hard work on the P&L and our warehousing to free up the capital to do asset investment and start buying our own machines, which are not cheap, and put them in the building so that we can exit the MOQ game offshore, the 90-day ocean freight thing, where we can't make a thing unless we have three or five thousand pieces on that order right now we just like hey philadelphia send me some bar stock aluminum all of our metal is also domestic just for the record yeah we're not bringing metal in from mexico okay like the whole thing down to the packaging packaging is made in texas like all of it it's like if you're going to do something do it right what are we talking like don't half it half ass it like let's go right you could totally exit the MOQ game by just buying raw aluminum and brass and just like we can make as many as we can make and so like the button two that we just launched I have one in my pocket oh nice it was like this is my uh proto example that I've been shooting for like eight months let me see if I can trigger punch it um that's 100 made in the states and quite honestly like we just launched that on like January 14 I think like month and a half ago dude we crushed our initial forecast in the first 20 days I had to turn that off the website because like we had an allotment ready to go to dealers and direct customers and we sold that allotment like immediately How much are these? So that brass version is $349. The aluminum version is $299. Gotcha. It was an overwhelming reception to the move of made in the States, and we didn't raise the price. Our original button was the aluminum was $299, and we did a stainless steel heavy version. So we moved it to brass because people wanted brass. Yeah. $349, same price. So that whole thing of, like, it's made in the States. It has to be more expensive. I said this on another podcast a couple weeks ago. Flag on the play on that. Yeah. I do not agree. I don't think that that's true. And so. That's good. Yeah. The production. I just saw what you just did. The production unit has a rubber damper in it. Oh, it doesn't? It's much more quiet. I was going to say that. Yeah. So this is like P2 and prototype 2. Gotcha. The production unit was like a P5. I see. So this is just mine. I don't have the new one because I got to get them to everybody that's ordered them first. I don't even have one that has all the final stuff in it. Looks good. People love – I mean, that's precision, like you said, like your hat said. That's what it feels like to me. And it should – that's – our packaging is dope. people give us a lot of credit for our packaging and then people hate on it because they're like that looks expensive and that's probably factoring into the price and like i don't need this box i'm just gonna throw it away colby would say like everything is a part of the brand experience so if you give us a couple hundred bucks for a thing i want to present it to you in a way yeah that that also communicates that this is a quality instrument no that's good um and you know we're not for everybody we want to make great stuff uh if you self-select that like i don't value that to spend that much money on it there's plenty of other options for you and we don't hold that against you like we want to make stuff that we believe is great that does what we said and what we set out to do and the way we're all wired of just like this is the thing that we love and you know a non-trivial percentage of our disposable income is going to go to hunting stuff yeah so like let's make so let's make the good stuff yeah it's expensive yeah um no that was good uh so it's as part of this brand story then tell me about you know i'm from my end i was just the redneck bow hunter who just read all the magazines wanted to like go on hunts all over the world how does the how does a bow hunter since you've been involved in so many brands get attention and get that opportunity that we all dream of to you said earlier you said hunt for a living how does one make themselves well i mean it's marketable i guess but valuable to a company as just a individual yeah like uh are you asking like how did you become like a hunting personality slash influencer yeah i just want to know what you guys value from the from the company because i have my guesses i've like i said i've just been on this side of it sure sure what do you guys look for so a couple different things at a for people that we're going to pay there's a mathematical like and how realistic is being paid to bow hunt it's very not realistic. It's extremely hard. It can totally be done. I think that almost everybody that is doing that has you to thank for some degree for that because you've proven that this path is attainable. It can happen. It's possible. You should have... I listened to your episode with Greg and you guys brought up... He brought up Chris. You should definitely have Chris on to talk about because he's the pristine example of you know he's 26 or 7 he's 10 years into youtube like he's doing it live right right now um so there's a mathematical like how many eyeballs do you get um what's your i'm i'm interested in you as a distribution vehicle to help champion like this brand name get it out there that's a part of it so having like a platform from which you can speak with with credibility is like the most important thing because you and I both know guys that just shill whatever, whoever will write them a check. I'm totally not interested in that. Yeah. So, so much of how possible is it to become a personality that gets paid to hunt? And I use that paid to hunt. It's like you do much more than just hunt. I'm totally aware. That's just kind of how people frame. Yeah. it starts with do you love it and i mean really love it and i think you and greg did a good job of like framing i think he said like you should be prepared to lose money for three years if you do this i think that that's i lost for a lot longer yeah but yeah you also existed a different moment in time when you were on your come up so like when did you like the business of hunting You said 1989 earlier. What happened in 1989? That's when I started bow hunting. Okay. When did you, like, because you wrote for Eastman's for a long time, like, when did you get your first dollar from hunting? God, it was a long, I mean, maybe at least 20 years. I mean, I remember PSE had a commercial, and they said, we don't we don't pay or like something like these people shoot psu for free and i was on there and that was like in 2002 or three and then i was like kind of like going i was writing for eastman's but i'm like if they're saying that i'm doing this for free it's like i mean i have value they have me at my picture on there why am i not if i'm being used right how come what do i get right you know then i was just like because then and then it evolved into you know so then it'd be super small i don't even know how much no money hardly but uh finally i think i was uh i i went to i started to play this camo game because the camo companies had the money you know basically way more than a boat company or an accessory company they you know those guys make a lot of money and it's not even they don't have to manufacture they're selling the the pattern so they're you know it's just right they definitely have have more to to um i guess i don't sponsor people or whatever so i went through and i just said i looked at my impressions per thousand so i'd add up like i write for this magazine this is this many people i post this or and like this was might have even been right at the advent of Facebook, but I could keep track of where I was reaching people, how many people I was reaching and how much I was proposing. They pay me. And then it would be, you're going to pay this much per thousand impressions through me. And it was a big number by adding all that up because it's awesome. TV show is just, I had all the numbers for the viewers. So I made it really easy for a marketer to be like, wow that's he's getting out there you know so i'm signed a deal for like 125 000 five-year deal with i can't just real tree or mossy oak but i'm just like i'm making a hundred thousand it didn't matter this over five years sure it was just like that was kind of validated at that time yep so that took over 20 years right and so i think the point there to bring that into a modern context is what you're talking about, like the CPM, like impressions per thousand. That was a very mathematical way to substantiate someone's distribution value as a marketer themselves for my thing as a brand person. That is still a component. I think now that's just like table stakes. If you don't have a lot of distribution, that's like, I'll seed you some gear. And I want to invest in people on the come up personally. And so I'm actually in the middle of negotiating a couple of deals right now with younger creatives that are on their own rise. Because the thing that I find most interesting is I want to align with people that are very hungry and trying to build the life that they want to live. And if I can help facilitate that, that scratches my own itch. And I get to the extreme joy, and I do mean that, the joy of shepherding a budget wherein I can help do that for people. It's like you're out there doing the thing, trying to build your presence and like do what we're talking about right now. Can I – is this even real? Yeah. Is this possible? It's a dream. It's great. I can see you on the internet, call you and be like, Hey dude, what's up? Tell me your story. What are you trying to do? And if you just engage with me in a way that's like super honest, and I think that you're talented and most of what I'm looking at is, do you represent capital H hunting? It's like how I frame it. Like I work in this space because I'm really afraid that hunting can be legislated out of existence before I'm dead. And so working at a brand is my attempt to grab the biggest megaphones that I can to be like, hey, this deserves to exist. And I want to work with people that all feel the same way. So if you're on that team, I'm with you. That's what I do. Selling stuff is just like the mechanism by which I do that. Right. So do you really love it? Do you have a passion for it? Are you dedicated? Do you represent Capital H Hunting in a way that is morally and ethically defensible to a non-hunting voting public? Are you stewarding your small corner of the Internet in a way that's net positive for the lifestyle that we all love? That's what I'm really after. And just because we're a smaller company, I can't go out and sign people like you. I don't have the budget for what you would demand. I'm interested in younger creators, guys on the come up, people that are like, dude, I'm on the cusp. I'm trying to figure this out. Because those guys are dogs, like motivated. They're grinding for it. And it's like aligning with people that are hungry, it's net positive for the both of us. And so in any negotiation stuff that I do, it's like, what are the incentives and how can we align them? Because I'm going to ask things of you and you should ask things of me. So this should be a fair and equitable deal here. I look for scenarios where everybody can win because we're not a huge brand where it's like, yeah, I can just write you a check and let you do whatever you do and trust that it's going to be good for me. Yeah. I don't have that type of firepower. Right. Different, bigger brands. It's like I lived in that world before. that's totally a thing and appropriate for other brands at different phases of the game i like really need it to work yeah where i'm at now and so i'm very choosy um and so so much of like as a creator as a hunter of who's like the game is content and media right now right yeah you should spend a lot of time like picking your horse because you want to do everything you can to keep your integrity intact and what i said earlier guys that just show for a paycheck it's like i'm not interested in that i also think that most customers they're just like they know yeah that what you're telling me about this thing uh trustworthy is the stretch because yeah this is a business exchange and that's fine i'm happy for you but your credibility is is not you but like yeah i understand is lessened because it's like you have a contract and this is what you have to do and like i get it i get it cool but guys that are like no i want to use your stuff is there something that we can't do here that's what i'm after yeah because most of the people that i'm engaging with right now in like active conversations today are people that choose to shoot ultra view on their own that buy it with their own money because they've decided that it's the best thing for them and then if there's an alignment that can be had with ultra view to like double down and do some cool stuff and you help me tell stories and share some of your footage, and I'll send you on a hunt, and we'll do this again. Everybody's cool because then it's like, we're doing it. This is what we're after. It's collaborative, yeah. It's totally possible. Yeah, definitely. It takes a while. This game is so relational, and you would know this better than anybody. The joke that I tell any young person that's like, how do I work in the hunting industry? I tell them one-on-one, there are seven people that work in this space, and two of us are in this conversation right now Your reputation is everything Your credibility your trustworthiness like if I shake your hand that means something I operate that way and I value people that operate that way. People that jump ship and pop around and do all the things, it's just like there's a time and a place to change jerseys because people grow, businesses change, like all the things. like using yourself as an example, like Under Armour to Origin, now to stick it. They're like, there's plenty of good reasons for that. Yeah. It makes sense. You have a responsibility to storytell those changes to your audience in a way that's palatable and keeps your integrity intact. And for my chair, I think you've done a good job. Thank you. I know that it's difficult at times. Yeah, it's hard. But for people that are earlier trying to figure that out, It's like you should choose a horse that you think you can have some real longevity with. Yeah. Because if you are just out there for like grabbing money because you're trying to get out of your nine to five to do the thing to buy yourself the time wherein if you're like zero on the P&L at the end of the year, you're doing good right now. if you're just like cash grabbing to try to make that happen but it's short-sighted you don't really want to be using this thing but that was the opportunity that i had at the time i think that over enough changes you lose credibility yeah so you should choose a horse that has a long runway that you align with out of core values level it's like i want to do that I support them. I believe the same thing that they believe, and I want to be on this team. Those are the things that just make sense. And as a marketer, when people operate that way with a high level of integrity and transparency to their audience, those are the guys that when they say something, actionable results follow. So if you can map your business endeavors as a hunting person working with brands in such a fashion that when a normal dude watches your media and he's just like, I got no bullshit sensors pinging right now, just do that. Yeah. it's it's so simple to say it's very difficult to navigate yeah for sure yeah it's uh the business part because like i said i just have always just loved bowhunting so that business part was always hard for me yeah further down the road i get i've been jaded i've been uh i mean it's business you So it's like I don't want it to be business, but it is business. So what am I going to do? The changes I've had to make, and people, they can say just about money. One example would be definitely about money. It was Under Armour, a big company, and my contract was up. I knew how many of the shoes with my name on it they sold. I did the math. I'm just like they had Steph Curry signed for $500 million. He sold like 1,200 pair of his shoes. I sold their projecting 20 or 30,000 pair of mine. So I'm like, I don't need 500 million, but I want 800,000 a year. Because I knew the money was there. Way more than they were paying me. They said no. I'm like, cool. Okay, I'm gone. And because it's like, I felt like I was busting my ass for 17 years. And I'm producing. We are moving product. so because they say well oh we'll sign you to a lower deal but you're going to get royalties like i'm getting five percent don't act like you're doing me a favor you're getting 95 of the royalties so that was just and that's just business but then you go and like you know just recently had a bow company offer me 450 000 a year which is more than hoyt pays me but i didn't i didn't do it because if I'm going to switch, if I'm going to switch, it better be like, all I care about is to be the best bow hunter I can be. Yeah. Loyalties beyond or second to that, but I just want to be the best at what I love to do. And that's bow hunting. If some bow made me 30% better, I'd be like, I don't care what I got to do. I want to shoot that bow. Right. This is all I care about. Yeah. I don't. But Hoyt has been loyal. They're not paying me what that other company offered me. I'm not Hoyt. Because you like it. I believe in it. And that's why people trust you. Yeah. And it's just like, and then I do get frustrated sometimes with the marketing too, because I want to get your thoughts on this, but how, you know, with the bow launches and this and that, I've always thought that, you know, we should, Western should have its own bow launch because the bow is out here. we had different needs than a guy in a tree stand um why can't we have our own bow launch different times of year because you everybody wants to sell it used to be the ata show but like why can't we sell in the spring to get ready for western hunting the east coast guys could get their bow a little later different marketing strategies because different intentions and you're in the mountains long shots you're in a tree stand but so i get frustrated with marketing But I do, you know, I don't know if Hoyt, I mean, they did this, the 90-pound bow, a separate launch. And it, you know, obviously the intent probably was to boost sales out of the normal bow launch, right? So it's like two launches, kind of what I was talking about. But they finally did a good job of like this AX90. It's like how many people are going to actually buy those? Not very many. But, man, that brand's out there. I'm talking about it because I'm pumped, you know. so it's my contents there so it's like whether they buy that bow or not they're seeing a lot of hoit which and i it's not like i'm tagging hoit every time i'm just shooting into new bow talking about how accurate and badass it is to shoot a 90 pound bow and finally you can buy one too even though you're probably not going to but it's that story right you know so so we got that we got a story to tell now because without the without the hook or something fun to talk about what are we doing yeah and that's a challenge with constant content it's like you can't you said sometimes things don't hit and that's true but we can't just put up shit content no so it all has to be very intentional yeah give me your thoughts on all that rambling yeah i would say all coming back to if you say something do i believe you now i'm in this arena my bullshit filter is very finely tuned to the normal person. Like they don't have the inside beta that guys like you and I have. And so the threshold for does this pass the sniff test is a lot less. That being said, I think that how you engage with brands and choose when to go here versus there, it's, it's, you're trying to do right by your own reputation. That has always been clear to me about you. I respect that a lot because I know a lot of guys that aren't that way. This isn't like to blow smoke up your ass. I just think that the way that you've conducted yourself is just the best way to do it. Because this other company that offered you a bunch more money, you don't like their product as much, so it's not that difficult. No, it was good. It just wasn't a huge advantage. You know, it's like if it's close, it's not making me better. Yeah. But yeah. I also think that there is a earlier, there's like a burden of choice. And then later, kind of like late stage career where you're at now with this, it's not a burden of choice. It's a the the opportunity cost is much different. And so to steal a phrase from like Chris Williamson, people should model the rise, not the result. Right. Anybody that's early career that's like watching your stuff, it's like, how do I do what Cam does? You can't do what Cam does because you haven't been doing it for 30 plus years. They should go back and read your books from 25 years ago and understand that you were doing it for a lovely game for a very long time. That's what established your credibility and what built your platform and what gives you the authenticity and the leg to stand on that is now like that's the biggest asset in your quiver is that like the story of you when did you leave your job it was a couple years ago three years ago insane to me and i know like joe's one talks you out of it right yeah it's just like tried for one i i heard that and i always just been like you know i'm in the space and like i know roughly like what guys get paid you keeping your job for as long as you did makes you dangerous because you don't have to say yes to everything else because you're like i do this yeah all this hunting stuff is for fun because i love it early career creatives the thing that i tell them is keep your day job because it gives you optionality yeah uh i started as a photographer and so like i built this network of early career creative professionals and i used to do this online show where i would field questions like tell people what to do it's actually how i met james is like i just get my jollies out of like helping other people do the thing they want to do yeah i would like go be a firefighter that's like tactical advice do that quit your 50 hour a week corporate job go be a firefighter well why do you do that because you're like 48 on 72 off yeah lots of time you have time which is what you need. You need time more than you need money. So if you can do the financial calculus of live below your means to buy yourself time to hunt or get in the hills with a camera or do whatever it is that you need to do to try to bet on your own future, you need time more than you need money. And I tell people all the time, like, get a day job that covers your expenses, that leaves you enough time to scratch your itch, do the creative thing, hunt a lot. Firefighter is just like a really pristine example of that. I think that not knowing you, but just knowing some of how this conversation goes, you staying in your professional career for as long as you did gave you a lot of optionality, I would imagine. Because it's like everything else is icing. Your cake is solid. And this icing over here looks really enticing, but it has an opportunity cost. If I say yes to that, what does it actually cost me? That's a luxury position. If you give up your main thing too soon because for good reasons, I'm hungry. I believe you, Craig, the time is really what I need, and I still have this job, and I don't have enough time. If you give it up too soon, then you have to start saying yes because rents do. It forces you into decision-making patterns that you otherwise might not choose because you have to. That is a different way to play the game. I think it's net negative. I think you should stay in your stable situation, and I use stable loosely because, as we've now documented, I get fired a lot. It's not as stable as you want to think. But you should stay in it for as long as you can so that you can operate with a freedom to choose some of these, like, brand deals and associations. And I want to work with them and not them. The right fit. Because it gives you the choice. So all that being said, dude, it's like, man, it's totally possible to do this. and I think the litmus test like projecting into the future now and we'll circle back kind of to where we started with this whole AI thing I'm super bullish on stuff that I can see with my eyes and be like that's real and I know that it's real stuff that feels fabricated if we talk two years from now I really believe that this will be true if it smells a little bit like ai i'm out yeah because it's like it's it's going to accelerate at a wild pace don't you think i think there's going to be a divide this is what this is what i'm getting at okay it's like i want to go to the blue ocean yeah i'm going anti that stuff and as a as a super active example of this ultra view historically has done a lot of like 3d blender modeling and presentation of our hard goods because it's a it's a really good way to show something in 3d animation and space to explain to me like how does this thing function and i can do it in a computer in a way that's arguably sometimes better to explain it to you as a customer I've killed that at UltraView. All the stuff on our website, real photographs. Like on our PDPs, product display pages, like when you go to the slider two page, that's a photograph of an actual site. It's not a 3D blender model. Love it. My creative team fights me on that because they're like, dude, it would just be easier to do the 3D models. And I'm like, definitely easier. two years from now if it's a 3D model in the hunt space people are going to be like that's fake yeah show me the real thing and I need to know that it's real one of my favorite like marketing things is I know what it is because of the way that it is just make it exist in the real world and then show it to me don't do this computer bullshit don't fake it behind the CPUs And I think that everyone projecting into the future, like, if you just make it tangible, make it exist in the real world, tell a story that's human, no chips in the mix, people will be like, my nostalgia is pinging because the world used to be that way. In our industry especially, we love that stuff. We're about tradition. We love the way that it used to be. We talked about that's a cheek in the marketing armor, but it is like a superpower also because we like authentic. And I know how you see all sorts of shit on Instagram, but you see these girls talking and they're saying what a man really wants. I'm like, wait, this is AI? And then it's like, looks good, says all the right stuff, but it's like, it's not real. So then you see the same girl or whatever. You're like, no, I don't get it. It's not even real. it's like we so that's just a weird example of like for me is like this total whatever toxic redneck diff shit i still don't like i don't want fake yeah so and i think guys like us that are just so in this space because it's our world that's an indicator of where things are going to go like we're sensing something now that everybody else is going to sense in a couple of years yeah probably yeah yeah it's it's interesting um so you gave me credit for sticking with my job i'll just say this because i see a lot of these young guys that are like quitting their job and going all in early it feels very early and then i see them if there's pressure to produce now because if you quit a little early those sponsorships weren't quite where they needed to be to pay for you to hunt all for three months and go to other states and pay your bills and then you have a tough season you're done so the the reason why i stuck with well first of all it was the best job i ever had so i'm like how can i quit i'm you know a dipshit i can't quit i'm superintendent here it's taking me forever to be here it's like and i love the guys but also i just didn't have confidence i didn't believe in myself and you know i said i told joe i wish i believed in me as much as you do because I just did not believe I had what it take. I mean, I wanted a TV show forever. I saw Waddell, Road Trips. I think me and Greg talked about this. But I wanted to be like that. I just didn't have it. I just didn't feel like I wasn't that guy. So I'm like, I'm just going to have to work every day and then hunt when I can. But I had good benefits, so I had a lot of time off. I'd been there for 26 years. So it wasn't like it was like this grand scheme plan. I was intentional and like, this is how you do this. My business model. No, I just didn't believe in myself. And that, that again is a rise versus result paradigm because you get the survivorship bias of the guys that bet on themselves and won. Yeah. And they're like, this is possible. I know you could do this. Right. And you probably can. Like I'm a believer, like swing for the fence. Go for it. Like fall on your face. You'll figure it out. It's totally fine. I think there's a strategic way to do it wherein you lessen some of that financial pressure to perform in a way that you could lose the momentum you have if you don't perform. Yeah. And Boeheim is hard, dude. It's extremely hard. It is hard to produce. We do not talk about that enough. It is like I get my ass kicked in some way all season, many times. And so to produce, to get a big bull on the ground is hard. It's extremely hard. It's extremely hard. Yeah, and to play this game, the hunting purist in me doesn't like what I'm about to say. If you want to make money in the hunting industry as a personality, you've got to kill a lot. Yeah. Like table stakes, you have to. it does to some degree bastardize is a strong word right whatever's less than that but it's like we're commercializing a thing that was never meant to be commercialized it can be done correctly and i really do believe that i think a lot of guys up and are net negative yeah and i don't like it right because it's going back to like why do i do this is guys that are out there doing the wrong thing portraying capital h hunting in a way that's not palatable to a non hunting voting public you guys are gonna kill it for all of us definitely you should be a lot more conscious about how you do this and i have like dude i i'm a mediocre bow hunter myself at best i love it i am like in the process of trying to get much better at it i saw some good animals on your page dude i try hard yeah success well thank you uh there's a there's 10x more failures but it's like a I think everybody has a responsibility to present hunting in a way that is net positive for the future of the lifestyle of the sport and the resource if you're not doing something to further the continued excellence of the North American model of wildlife conservation you're not in the game because if you do something stupid you could really hurt this for all of us. So be conscious of what you're doing. I have at different points in my career publicly picked fights because I just believe that in my core. And I'll cite an example and I'll be vague on purpose. There's a guy that shot a 200-plus inch mule deer in Utah and shot him in the face. and there's an arrow in that buck's face and he posted it on the internet. I eviscerated that guy to the degree that I could on the internet. I'm like, you're not thinking. You're a dopamine addict. This is bad for us. You have to take this down. I'm going to get mad right now. This was years ago. I don't even remember the dude's name. I don't either. Stuff like that, that's not acceptable. And what the non-hunting public really wants to know is will hunters police their own ranks? And I think that there is the vibe in the industry is like, if you're a hunter, then we're always on the same team. No. Yeah. Wrong. We have to hold each other accountable. and because of the way that culture is and a political environment and the way that decisions get made like the thing that we all love is vulnerable yeah definitely and it's everybody's individual responsibility to represent it in a way that is morally and ethically and scientifically defensible and so you should take great care to steward your own personal megaphone in the best way possible because this is not a stagnant endeavor. Hunting is either growing or retracting. Yeah. And it's been doing a lot of retracting. Yeah. This dangerous fan worries me and I don't like it. And so like this entire conversation, I want to work with people that think some version of what I've just described, which I totally admit and understand is a personal journey. right i didn't think this way 20 years ago when i was eight years old walking around with a 10-22 shooting anything that had breath in its lungs because i was a kid and like shooting stuff's cool this was not on my radar yeah you grow into it yeah and it becomes like a a personal code of conduct that is just like man i just i really want to do it right and it gets sticky when you're do i feel this as a as a vp at a hunting company like i'm in films and i go on paid hunts to do the thing and like i've got to perform and if i spend money to go do a thing and the content doesn't pan out like i've just burned money and it we didn't get the business value out of the thing that we just wrote checks for yeah i feel a responsibility to perform which butts up against like what I want hunting to actually be and that's a personal tension to be managed but if you're gonna say that like I'm a person in this space whether you're on the brand side or the personality side it's like that's a thing that you're gonna have to wrestle with to figure out how you want to navigate that entire conversation it's a weight yeah it's tough it's uh you know And also, like, to your point, but 20 years ago, because I was killing stuff, I'm putting it up 20 years ago, but we were only reaching hunters. You know, social media goes everywhere now. So the people who get hunting, they're not going to be bothered by, I mean, I don't like to see the arrow in the face. I just, that's just not, it's just what doesn't help anything. And it's just, it makes us look, I don't even know what. But back in the day, you didn't have to worry about what the non-hunters thought. It was we were preaching to hunters from hunters. We're all on the same page. It's changed so much now that I remember back years ago, I, you know, probably talk shit about Ben O'Brien for talking about gripping grins. And I'm like, I don't give a fuck what people think. I'm happy I killed this buck. I'm going to smile. And then as I got bigger and bigger, like as far as following goes and reaching more people, I'm like, God, these non-hunters just don't get the smiling. with the kill they just don't get it and actually i was doing that at a different place in my life where i wasn't i'm older now i'm i feel like i'm more respectful i'm like the kills they've always meant a lot but they're like there's more reverence to me now at this age than i when i was a kid i would just kill and i wouldn't think about anything it wouldn't even matter now i really think about that life I took. So, so much so I don't put a smiling grip and grin photos because it's not truly how I feel when I kill. When I kill, I, I feel like I did what, what I do and that's what I do. But, and I understand that there's blood on my hands and the animal died because of me, but it's not like that. I'm, it's fun. You know what I mean? It's like, it's just part of what I do part of the journey that's how I'm that's what I'm going to eat all year and so I've really thought about how what I do is presented and not just to hunters but to everybody and I just want to be proud of what we do but and I know people look at my stuff and they can be very critical of it which is fine I invite that I'm a public public figure but I don't have sponsorships on my hunting videos. I don't want to deny anything. I'm like, when it comes to animals dying, because I don't want people ever saying, well, you're killing for money. Right. So I don't like, I just, there's like a definitely defining line for me. And that's not saying anybody else needs to do that. People put ads on that. That's your personal ethic. That's me. That's just me just seeing the landscape and seeing how the nonpublic affects what we love when it comes to the voting. And if I'm the most visible hunter out there, I have to be really conscious about how people who aren't like us are looking at what I do. And so I'm just really on the storytelling and then not making the money off of it. That's an easy one. But I think it's important to me to not do that. well it's encouraging to me to hear you say that because i do think that you're one of the largest platforms in our space um and that the photo with your animal is one moment in time that is not representative of all of the effort and time and sacrifice and everything that went into the respectful pursuit of that animal so that you and that animal leave the mountain neither one of you and shame. That's something that I care a lot about. It's naive for us to sit here and be like, everybody should think that way. No, it's not going to happen. I do want to push people in that direction to the degree that I can. You know there's people out there talking about, these guys sound gay. Who cares? We kill. You know what I mean? It's just like, you know there's a segment of our brothers who are talking shit. It's like the... Being a public figure in hunting is the quickest way to ruin hunting for yourself. The photo that we've just described a few minutes ago is totally fine. I don't know the backstory. Is that a second arrow? Is it necessary? Like that deer's going to get away? Yeah, I don't know. Stuff happens out there. You and I both know that. If that's what's required to close the deal, that's totally fine. Right. Don't post on the Internet. I think it was a shitty shot that just whatever, drop the buck, cool. Pull the f***ing arrow. Clean up the animal. Yeah. It's just like we owe it, you know, to the Internet. And that's a whole other discussion of, like, is that appropriate? But, hey, it exists, and we do. Newsflash, you owe it to the Internet. If you're going to be out there posting stuff, talking about hunting, you owe it to the Internet to tell the most real, truthful story in a way that's morally and ethically defensible. Yeah. Because anything other than that is net negative for the thing that we love. And I am accommodating of people's own personal journey in that, but I also am going to push people towards that realization in any way that I can. because, dude, I'm worried. I mean, have you seen the bill that's up right now here in Oregon? To outlaw hunting, fishing, and farming and ranching. It's called the Peace Act or something like to save all the animals. So that got enough signatures. 200,000, I don't know, I can't remember how many it got. So if you don't think that what we put out there is going to be used against us, Yeah. I mean, that arrow in the face of the deer, if those people, there's a big segment of population that's going to vote on this. If this comes up and this is an opportunity for the public to vote, a picture like that is going to. Do you remember when PETA ran the intelligence operation with the frame that all the hunters started putting on their photos on Instagram? Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you think that, like, smart people that are not on our team aren't out to get us, boy, I got some stuff to tell you. Yeah. Like, be cognizant. Think about it. Like, you have a responsibility to take it a couple levels down and understand the landscape that we play in. And if that bill is actually happening in Oregon, a couple of thoughts. One, that's so, so dumb. Yeah. to y'all got to carve Portland out of Oregon. Yeah. That's also like you can't own pets. How is that even? And this got the signatures, dude. On what grounds can you not own a pet? Because pets can be free. Because they're sentient beings and you're like giving them a couch to sleep on is not good for your dog? Come on, man. But the point is there's people who we can make that more. I don't think that if that ever passes, that's obviously crazy. But there's probably more people than we would think that are on board with that. Well, you and I would have said that the legislation to take grizzlies off the hunting list in British Columbia was terrible. And look at what happened. Yeah. It's the people in Vancouver, you know, that are voting for the big cities, just like you said, Portland, but that have no clue. So and we can bitch about it, but it's real, guys. this is real so what you're putting out there is influencing the public perception of hunting absolutely it is and all i'm saying is think about it before you press send maybe think about it a couple times yeah not just one like wait a day but that that is um into the psychology of the world that we live in within the hunt space like that gripper and photo is the one that does numbers on instagram oh for sure that would give me the most likes yeah and you and i would both be naive to sit here and say that that doesn't make us feel good when it starts pinging because that program is designed by extremely smart people they know how it works to do this in here is doing what it's intended to do 100 and we're playing the game yeah and it's We can act like we're better than it. We're not. I'm not. Definitely not. No, but I just have been more conscious. I know a classic grip and grin is going to crush, but at what cost? Yeah. Everybody that is engaging with this material right now is like you're at your own spot and you're understanding. And if you're like a small, unknown person, you're listening to this and be like, guys. Yeah. My friends and family, I got 200 followers. Yeah. Yeah. Dude, one screenshot from the wrong person came over. And it doesn't matter how many followers you have. No. It's getting out there. That's the point. It's like send the photo in the group chat. Yeah. To the boys that get it, that know that hunting can sometimes go sideways. Yeah. And it's just like, guys, this one didn't go so hot, but like I closed the deal. I did the best I could. Like this is the result. in a text message, that's totally appropriate because I know who my audience is. Yes, definitely. To the wide open internet, no context. Dude, come on, man. People would be more upset about that than the Epstein files. That's how crazy it is. There we go. I thought you posted about that too. Nothing. I can't. I'd lose my hope in humanity sometimes, and then I'd lose self-control, and then I post stuff because I'm irritated but whatever. Was it the old Roman it's bread and competition in the Coliseum? It's theater. Bread and circus. Yeah, they're just distracting us with stupid shit. I was going to say did you want to say who the up-and-comers are that are kicking ass? Or is that going to fuck up your negotiations? I can't say all of them because I don't have them all signed yet. I'm just curious because I like seeing who's doing it right. I'm curious about who's doing it right in your opinion. Sure. So I'll take a second to talk about Chris, who's a piece of our business. He's obviously much more established than some of the people that I'm vaguely referencing prior. But Chris sits on our team as a strategic director of the hunting category. he's kind of like the face of the hunt side of ultra view he's extremely important to our company and represents us very well i use he has a really great um he's he's tapped in to that whole world and so we talked i'm like hey who's who's you from seven eight years ago okay um and so i'm i'm talking to a couple of those people um one i'll give you one example he's gonna freak out when he listens to this show uh which is exactly what i'd want him to do because he's very humble okay there's a kid in texas named willie waldrop who is going to be doing some stuff for us he's kind of like one of chris's early proteges he's still in college um he has a very unique family circumstance and has an opportunity to do a lot of hunting. He's extremely humble. Must be nice. Right. I see that. But like he, he's got a YouTube channel that's like, I don't even think he's, he's not over 50,000 subs yet. He's like just an up and comer that's like respectful, that loves bow hunting, is hunting a lot and doing it the right way. And so, you know, he's, he's in a good situation. He hunts a lot. he does it in a way that I think is representative of where I would want to see Bo Hunt and go and so he'll be like on our crew that's great and how old is he he said he's in college yeah he's like a junior oh like 20 21 perfect um there's a few more that I'm in like active conversations with um some of them are being targeted by other brands I'm probably not going of name dropping on your show because i want to close those deals first yeah um but yeah man i'm out there looking for people just doing it the right way yeah that's it just like do you love it the way that i love it not that i love it not that i'm right but just like yeah i'm gonna be the one out of a line yeah it's just like are we on the same page yeah i like that that's what i'm after have you been in the bow rack down here before i haven't no okay yeah i mean i'll cruise by there today yeah wayne's the best and his son is actually a really good bow hunter who makes films and he's doing a pretty good job uh nathan indicop but yeah i was just you know i keep track of these young guys because i love the passion i love these kids who just want to be in the mountains non-stop and uh so i i think it reminds me of of me and roy and wayne when we were coming up And so I just, I want to be reassured that I'm not, that who's from, I hate when people say they're doing it the right way. Because who the f*** am I? It's not my job to say somebody does it the right way. Because people could have looked at what I did and said I wasn't doing it the right way. But I like watching kids who seem respectful and just love to hunt and love what we do and have reverence for the country and the animals. And, yeah, so that's why I was just curious hearing people. There's a lot of good kids out there doing the thing. I love it. I use kids loosely. Yeah, I know. You're a kid to me. Man. But, no, I am optimistic about the future, like, torchbearers of our space. Good. Yeah. Actually, I'm interested in this from your perspective. how do you think about like legacy within the space and like your personal responsibility and reputation within the hunt industry i just want to continue to be the most hated i don't know yeah i don't know i just i don't want to f**k up um you mean my how how i'm perceived or like how do you think about it like this last 20 minutes of just like we've all got responsibility. Yeah, I don't. I mean, I think about I can screw up what we're doing and hurt, you know, what we all love. And that's all I think about. I just don't want to do that. And I'm, you know, I'm human. I'm infallible. I'm, you know, I'm never going to go poach anything, but I make mistakes. I mean, I'm like, I'm just a normal human. I just don't, I never want to do anything that's ever going to hurt what we love and what we cherish and what we're trying to protect. And we talk about the voters and we talk about how we're being portrayed by the not. I just never want to put anything out there that's ever going to be used against us. And so that's the only pressure I feel. And it's not like I've got to wrestle with myself to make good decisions. I'm always making good decisions, but I just never want to hurt what we love. And so that's pretty much all I think about. I think that's a good, for all the young guys, like that's a good model, is you're sitting here in the position that you do, which has been hard-earned over decades, saying that like, I'm trying to be pretty cognizant about this. That's something that should be, like, I assume that you were that way to begin with. The same attitude? Yeah. um to begin how i was just a dipshit dude i don't even know if i thought about anything it's it's it's but it's natural as young men to like yeah be a little bit rambunctious and press the boundaries everybody like matures and learns from mistakes and all that but i would say that i was drinking and and getting in wrecks uh drunk so i wasn't like i can't really say i've made good decisions anywhere. I'm just saying I'm different now. Right. Well, you learned, you learned the lessons from, from some consequences that came. Yeah. I just was stupid, but yeah. Um, I, I definitely do think about just our responsibility is, you know, as we're figures in this industry, um, whether we deserve it or not, that's for somebody else to decide. But the fact is we're reaching people and the messaging has to be correct if we're going to protect what we love. Yeah, I get that. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. So this is a part everyone hates. You're going to hate it. I hate it. All the listeners are going to hate it. They need to like it. We all hate it. Why are we doing it? I don't know. I don't know. This is like. So speaking of the Epstein files. Why are we doing this? Okay, well, we told you there was going to be a f***ing marry kill, so I've got a good one for you. You have posted some reels that are a little bit maybe controversial with the broad headspace. Oh, yeah. Have you seen that one here? No. That's a good one. So your f***ing marry kill is single bevel, expandable, and fixed blade. Ooh. Yeah, we never talked about this. I didn't know you had a hot take on this. Okay, well, background before I give an answer. Okay. I have done a couple of reels that are in this framework of. Here's what I use. Does this work? It worked for a long time. Okay. Telling you who you are based on the brands you choose. Okay. So it's like a. Maybe I saw that. The broadhead went pretty gangbusters. Okay. It did real numbers. um and it's tongue in cheek it's meant to be funny but there's a lot of like consumer truths in there um and so uh i'll give one example which was like the most incendiary from that reel i started it with beast rodhead yeah it's a controversial for all the reasons that we know but the joke was like if you shoot Beast, you're on your third run of gray market test and you don't do your blood work. You've probably not shot anything with it. I'm not saying that it's not a good broadhead. I'm just saying that you probably haven't killed anything with it to know if it's a good broadhead. That's a good joke. I know that it's a good joke because Josh popped in the comments and he's like, that was funny. If you can't take a joke, that's different. And I like knocked, I did Grim Reaper G5 element, like the jack on the hide. Yeah. It's like, if you shoot the hide, it's like, we get it. You vape. And like, that was the joke because it just, it's green and it has the, it just looks like a vape tin cartridge. Right. I'm just making jokes. Yeah. That's hurtful. Well, you can get your panties in a bunch. It's fine. I've done a couple of videos like that. I did one about rifle scopes. I do a decent amount of shooting. Okay. And so it's like, it's the marketer in me. For me, it's an example to say, like, I know the customer psychology of all these brands. You're stereotyping perfectly. Yeah. And it's just fun for me. And they do numbers because people, like, get to hate on the thing that they don't like. And then they take it on the chin for whatever versions. Perfect. I was like, these are fun. Everyone wants me to do the apparel one. Okay. I haven't done it. so that's the setup okay so you said single bevel fixed and mechanical I would kill single bevel they're great I just don't need to deal with it personally deal with I don't looking for a blood trail all the extra tuning i hit this perfect where yeah it's just like if i was hunting if i was going to africa hunting dangerous game i would probably have a different answer definitely yeah different tool different job for sure for like white tails mule deer and elk that's pretty much all that i do signal bubbles can go somewhere like i i don't require them or i don't feel that i require it doesn't mean that i think that they're not a good thing but i would kill that um i'll do a one night stand with fixed blades and i would marry expandables which one what expandable so i i have never bought or shot a beast i have no personal vendetta against the beast fraud a lot of guys that i know seem to think that it's great and a lot of very qualified people seem to say that it's great. I presently shoot for whitetails I shoot the Grim Reaper Pro with the chisel tip not the two whitetail special but just the inch and a half whatever And for mule deer, I shoot the Grim Reaper Fatal Steel, so the smaller one but the full-steel feral. Okay. And fixed blades, I shot the bull that's on my page that you must have seen. I shot that with the Grim Reaper Micro Hades Pro. I'm kind of like a Grim Reaper Stan. I know that you are too. That being said, I've shot a ton of broadheads. Whitetail stuff specifically is just like, man, I want to tear the biggest hole possible in those things. So like big slap cut two-inch rages, like fantastic. Love that. Best blood trails I've ever got came from Rage Extremes, which is like a 2.3-inch freaking throwing an axe through. That's awesome. Um, that being said, dude, every broadhead works and every broadhead will fail. Yeah. I shot what would have been the biggest whitetail buck of my life back in November with that Grim Reaper expandable. And he took a step when I was like getting into my process. And I, it was like right at last light. I had a couple of minutes left. He was open and then he took a step and I didn't factor that in. I didn't see it, didn't notice, and I just squared him up in the shoulder, like right in the T. Lost that deer. No penetration probably, huh? None. Yeah. Never found the back half of my arrow. We did the drone recovery thing. Like all of it was in a state where that was legal. Yeah. Didn't turn him up. Didn't find the back half of my arrow. Blood trailed him for 900 yards the next day. Like I knew where he was on a different property. Look, I need to know how much arrow's in him. Like that's a huge piece of the cactus. Never found it. I've told that story a lot on Sunday what today's Thursday on Sunday that guy texted me a video finding his sheds really he's alive so he's good so that's like a huge weight off of me yeah every broadhead will fail it's like I actually want your opinion on this now that I've brought up this deer specifically i'm in this journey with bow hunting personally where that that buck is what pushed me over the edge i lost a iowa buck in 2022 and i shot i missed a public land bull in montana like a 370 class pull. Wow. It was like side hill, downhill, strong breeze, uphill, like 62 yards. And I was like buried on him. And that breeze just held my arrow. Like there was no dip. And I was like a shot at an animal. I was confident at the distance, but I've never taken like that shot in that kind of breeze. It's just like 10 inches over his back, clean mess. But I've had in the last handful of years a couple releases of an arrow that just didn't go my way for any number of reasons i understand that that's just a part of it it's gonna happen because the animal gets a say and the wind gets to say and it's bow hunting's hard i i love it so much and when it goes bad god eats me up yeah and i shot that buck back in November I feel differently now that I know these alive which is a very recent revelation but that but it just got in my crawl and I was like this is my fault this is my fault and I am not as good at this as I want to be and that's on me yeah so what am i going to do about it like that's the thing and i i have i have had hunts um where like my fitness was a limiting factor i could not get up the hill fast enough or my archery in this recent example it let me down and that hunt specifically would have been the biggest whites i've ever killed um like what would he score 170 probably like low 70s it's a big bug Prior to that, I thought I was shooting a different buck. I saw the biggest white tail I've ever seen in my entire life three hours before that. He crossed a bean field like 300 yards away from me for about six minutes, and I'm like in my binos looking at him. It would be like you're on the face of every magazine ever printed. And so this buck coming in that I ended up shooting, I thought it was the giant that I saw. and it was this fast. He's like coming in. Oh God, that fast. Yeah. Like do not look at him again. Right. So I, in my head, it's this turbo deer and I feel the pressure of being who I am and knowing what this, the fact that my professional career seeped into my brain during that moment. Yeah. Unacceptable. Yeah. We're humans. It's real. I hate, dude, I got rattled. It was like cold and windy. I had my hood up. So I go to get into my anchor. Changes things. I like forgot to pull my hood down. Yeah. And so I'm like jacking with my anchor point. That's when he took the step. My 31 yards, I hit him exactly where I wanted. I just thought his shoulder was open, not back. I wasn't in the game as much as I should have been to execute a good shot. That's my fault. Now, I'm grateful that he lived. but for the last couple of months it's just been tearing me up on the inside because I care a lot and I just came to this realization a couple months ago really in December because I have the opportunity to hunt a lot this year and some good tags just like I'm not as good at this as I want to be and that's on me so what am I going to do about it and I've like rededicated myself to my training and I'm I'm, you know, living in Georgia, it's like I have a Wyoming hunt this year that it's absolutely going to, the elevation is going to eat my lunch. But I'm out there starting in December doing like weighted rucks and doing the thing and I'm lifting three days a week and I'm taking my diet and fitness like a lot more seriously because it's like I'm not doing the thing that maps towards what I say. Right. It is no longer acceptable to me to have those things be disassociated. I'm going to put myself in as good a position as possible to have an opportunity as success to harvest an animal. And if it still doesn't happen, that's hunting, and it will always be that way. But for the part that I'm responsible for, I've got to do the work. And I've always approached hunting with a level of intentionality that I would describe previously as being serious about it. but I just kind of, in having conversations with a lot of people that are very serious, but I'm interested in your take on this. It's just like, dude, I was, I was talking about it, but I wasn't doing it. That's, that's a lot of people, a lot of people. We all know what we should be doing. Yeah. I think sometimes we get complacent or we get lucky on some, sometimes it works out. and it kind of gives us false confidence, you know, I mean, because normally you're going to make that shot at 31 yards almost every time, you know. And I'm sure you have many times, so you should be confident. But bowhunting has a way of teaching us hard lessons over and over again. And, yeah, you can be perfect. I've always said, you know, like on Target, you can be perfect. You mentioned, I think you mentioned 60Xs. I don't know what you said, or maybe, I don't know if we were talking about score. But anyway, you can be perfect on a target. You'll never be perfect hunting. My goal is to be perfect, and I train to be perfect, knowing that that's impossible. But, like, to your point, all you can do is the best you can do. The shoulder blade shot, you know, the easy answer would be like, oh, maybe that single bevel would have pushed through that shoulder. You know, we were kind of shitting on the single bevel. Maybe that would have worked, but maybe more poundage. Maybe, you know, I don't know what size your arrow was, maybe a smaller diameter arrow and a cutting tip and a break through their single bevel. But your setup will kill. I mean, so we're looking at all those different things you can do, but sometimes it's, and I've seen people say, you know, they like it was open then it closed sometimes that happens so fast and that animal is moving and that's why it doesn't penetrate you know maybe they hear that bow 31 yards is a longer shot out of a tree stand a animal if you had to stop it like a you know if alert if it stopped on its own that's different but a lot of this goes in and sometimes they can hear that arrow coming at 31 yards if they're alert and then they're taking that arrow of momentum a little bit as they go right that's why i always say people say well you can kill with 40 pounds i'm like you can kill with 40 pounds if it's wide open and it takes that arrow like a champ if it does anything that's why i'm always like 90 pounds i'm still pushing through there if that animal moves and i still i learned my lesson on a bull I killed. I don't know what bull it is, but I don't know. I know it's out in the shed, but I thought I had a single bevel head. I was shooting 90 pounds, same place you killed that big bull probably on your page, but it was coming in 10 yards, kind of quartering too. I'm like, I can pound right through that shoulder because I had false confidence that I had to set up. I could do it. Didn't do it. Didn't get in that shoulder. so it's like there's always going to be examples where it didn't work does work all we can do is like as you said control all the variables you can on that bull he uh i broke his shoulder and he went up and i got another shot real quick at 60 yards which is another you know the multi-pin on there i i don't know what the what the ultra um view is like but like i use the the single pin with the three fibers. I could just use that bottom pin. I knew I had to just heat of the moment, and that's why I got the bull killed. But yeah, so equipment plays in, animal reaction plays in, how you're stopping that animal. Yeah, the hood thing, that does change your anchor. I mean, you have a different anchor than I have, but a hood coming through does change that. And it just gives us, our brains, something else to think about, some neural pathway which is not helping us make a perfect shot right because you're thinking about that hood so all these little tiny things still make a difference you know and um i think how bad that failure hurt because it no matter how we want to talk about it it was a failure but that's how we get better. I mean, every bow hunter, as you know, has those type of, you know, I mean, if, if I could have all the bulls I screwed up on when I was young, this would, the room would be double the size, but, uh, that's just how it goes. And that's, that's the beauty of it too. You know, it's, you can't master this shit and, um, we have to be at our best and if you're at your best, then okay I can live with that and it doesn't make it easy because I never want to fail but it's really hard if I know I left cards on the table or I didn't do all I could then it's like that's what keeps you up at night I'm not saying I'm not up at night if I screw up but if you did all you can like you're doing now it's easier to live with for a little bit but yeah that's a hard I mean that sucks I mean, it happens. I'm just trying to put myself in a position where I control my own controllables and it happens less. I think that, to your point of bowhunting is very instructive if you allow it to be, I'm way into that. And I just want to be better at it because I love it. I know. And I'm on this, like, you know, even like discipline is one of your, like, core tenets of your whole brand. It's like, I think there are levels to that where it's like, I thought I was, I shoot a lot. And I'm in the space. And, like, I do the thing. Like, that's nowhere near enough. Yeah. and I've kind of like flipped this gear where it's just like if I didn't work in this space I would still hunt a lot and I wouldn't care about it any less and so I want to just do the work to put myself in the best position possible mostly in the space between my own ears well that awareness I mean most people can confuse confidence in regular life to confidence in everything and you can be the most successful in business and be a terrible hunter men have a hard time accepting that yeah you know and so the fact that you do you're you're great at what you do but you want to be great at bow hunting that's a whole different category you know and so i see people who you know and i've been like this like oh i could do that too if i had those opportunities I could do that too. She's like, are you sure you could? Maybe you can, but it's going to, it's part of that journey. You know, that, because I would see Chuck Adams and I'd read his articles and I'd be like, God, he killed 10 poppy young animals in one season. I can, I've only killed three in my whole life. You know what I mean? How does he do it? I could do that. Oh, then you're like, I could do that too. If I got to go on those, all this hunt. So I'm like, no, I couldn't have because I was just not ready to do that. But being aware of that, we're always, or I mean, men can be overconfident. Luckily, yeah, I mean, I have too. But I also knew I was a kid, so that helped. I just had to try to outwork that. All right, James, what else you got? Speaking about the launch of the Slider 2, So I'm curious from a creative standpoint, with that launch film, you tell kind of the back story of the company. How do you take that and going forward with Slider 3 or whatever the next product is and tell a good story that isn't based around just the story of the company? Yeah, so that Slider 3, which is already being worked on, will be like a product innovation story that if it is not materially better for an objective reason than Slider 2, we won't launch it. so will you take that world will show a failure of the two and be like what the why can't we and then no definitely not it's just like it's because that would work it would screw up the slider too but it helps yeah yeah yeah it's a one of the things that um we talk about a lot with um bruce is kind of our lead design engineer and then robert is is our other uh design engineer we we tinker on all of our products to an extreme degree. It kind of goes back to if we can revise a product and iterate on it now, if we can make it better in real time, let's just go ahead and do that. That's a different thing than we're trying to do something appreciably better in a different form factor or that offers a previously unoffered benefit. Yeah. It sounds like a tweak to improve. Right. It's like an overhaul. Right. And so the iterative nature of the bow hunting industry is always, like, really interesting to me. If we use bows as an example, I have always considered, like, right now, the significant jumps in bow technology. Like, what do we – I'm not an engineer. Like, I'm smooth-brained about math. I have no idea. But it's like, how much faster are we going to get it to go? How much 90 pounds? It seems like a lot before the riser is going to start to have product. Like, more than that, you know, guys turn them up to 100, and it's like you've got to start physically changing the form factor to get it to work using different components, and the addressable market for that is almost no one. It's just like, how much better can the bow get, really? And then I talk to engineers at bow companies, and they're like, well, what about this? It's like some crazy idea that I would have never considered. And so I've always thought that Bose is like, dude, you're butting up against the possibilities of physics right now. Like how much better, how much faster, how much lighter weight, what kind of pound, like how far is this going to go? Right. Versus sites is like there's a lot you can do with sites. and, you know, this past couple of year iteration of site development in the upper echelon of higher price competitive sites is like weight of the site itself kind of became like a battleground. It's just like make the site lightweight, which I think quite honestly did a lot of favors to SpotHog because they're like, we're not playing that game. Our thing's bulletproof. It's like it kind of separated them, so you're welcome. but everybody else we're just like oh we want the bow to be lightweight which is driven by the bow companies we want the whole package to be lighter weight well you can't probably can't say I just don't see any value in light I don't give a f*** I want a heavy bow that stays put for one shot I'm trying to shoot one perfect arrow yeah I think if I'm in the zone of western hunting where I'm hiking if I want to save weight in my whole system personally, I'm not trying to save it in my bow. I'll save it in my sleeping pad or how I pack my food or I choose this pack versus that pack. It's like, I agree, I want my bow to hold still. Yeah, my bow is heavy. And it's just like, if you're putting back bars, side bars, stabilizers, I mean your bow is going to heavy so yeah the weight of the side or the weight of the bow that's marketing that's really easy it's really whatever speed that's super easy but what are we achieving? Yeah it's interesting and it's like you've got a couple levers that you can pull to try to gauge people's you know tickle their fancy to get them to buy the new thing see what they're interested in yeah appeal to different people so for our you know Some people love the lightweight stuff. So I'm on board. I get it. Right. Some people want all the lightest stuff. It's an easily measurable thing to discuss. For sure. I am more in your case. I mean, I'm a 32-inch draw. I shoot a full-length .250 spine arrow. Dang. It's 540 grains. Whew. Just anatomically, that's what I'm working with. I'm not that concerned about six ounces coming out of my bow. Yeah. Because I can take six ounces out of my food packaging by vacuum sealing it differently, and it's like net-net, I'm still hiking the same weight up the hill. Yeah. No, but how we think about, like, Slider 3 development is, if it's not appreciably better than Slider 3, then we haven't iterated on the product to a high enough standard to launch a site that we're going to say is different. Now, Slider 3 will be functionally a different expression of our business posture because Slider 3 will be 100% made in the States. That's a story. Yep. So every product, what I have been saying about that initiative at our company is button two that I showed you is our first 100% made in the States product. We have a couple more this year that will also be 100% made in the States. Slider three, we'll get like we got some credit for the initiative on the button release. We'll get a little bit more on the next one, a little bit more on the next one. We'll get the full brunt of the credit for doing what the market has said they value when we launched a slider three that's 100 percent made in the States. Okay. So that it's why we've started that kind of building public YouTube show of Road to USA made is like that episodic content will exist for. conceivably could be for the rest of the company's history. Yeah. But it'll pointedly exist up to and through Slider 3 launch because why I think that that's interesting is for guys that want to start a company or have a company in a completely adjacent industry that do offshore their products but are like, man, I'm kind of like a red-blooded patriot. I'd love to make this thing in the States. if you watch our show cutting hard goods which is totally different than like a textiles thing some stuff you can totally make in the states textiles is wildly difficult to make in the states there's a ton of good reasons for that but other people just like I'm a bow hunter but I own like a plumbing or fixturing company and I get my parts cut wherever but maybe my margins would be better and I would just feel better about my business. I could employ more local people if I bought two CNC machines and put them in my building. Like how would that change my business? Yeah. We're going to tell that story in our own way with our own products for a couple of years. And I just think that that's interesting to people that are bow hunting adjacent of like, you could change your business if you were to entertain this. And here's how we did it yeah it's not going to map one-to-one to how you might need to do it right but i'm going to prove to you that it's possible there's lessons in there 100 yeah yeah i like that and so slider three will be some expression of that and then we have like a laundry list of public requests of things that people want us to change so we're very plugged in to like i say it in the slider two video like there's signal and then there's noise like some public feedback is very like I'm hearing that a lot. And that is a thing that we can do, and people want it. So why wouldn't we solve that problem that they're putting their finger on? Other things is just like we use pins as an example. Everybody likes the pin that they like. The level of skew creep in pin offerings is wild from an operational manufacturing standpoint. Because if you just use 10s, 15s, and 19s, and then like I want a 19 up top but a 10 at the bottom, or I want two 19s and then three 10s, it's like the warehousing and number of items that we would have to carry to fulfill all those very specific requests, even if they're in standard colors, much less if we start to offer like, well, I'm colorblind, so blue works better for me. But operationally, dude, it's just like there are people that do boutique pin setups. You should just go to them if you have this race. That just doesn't make business sense. Yeah. We want to cater to the things that we hear a lot. And so, like, here's the thing. Adjustable vertical three pins where I can move two and three so that I can run it at 20, 30, 40 versus a three on a post. and it's like 20, 37, 51 or whatever it comes out based on your tape. Every other company has decided like 2025 was the year to tick that box. We don't presently offer an adjustable vertical three pin. We have a three vertical, but it's locked on whatever distance it is. Which is like, okay, I could easily take the position of like, well, you should just learn how to gap shoot and figure it out. But people are saying like, no, I want to do that. It's like, cool. I've heard that a lot. We're working on an adjustable. That's something I can totally say on camera. We're working like slider three. We'll very likely have an adjustable three pin vertical post. Great, because everybody has said that they want it. So there's some things that we hear that's like, yes, the volume on this specific conversation is loud enough. That's like our customer values. We're going to respond to that. Other things is like we have a concept. I'm going to be vague right now. colby is he's an engineer and he's nerd at his bet total nerd he's at his best when his brain has a level of margin where he can just like go into cad or into his office and be like all right total blue ocean right now if i could do something different what would i do and I've seen it a couple of times in the last 18 months of being there where he'll like come with a concept and I'm just like, how the hell did you come up with that boy? I don't know how he did that. And we have one that we're working on right now. There's nothing like it on the market right now. Not even close. It's a level of integration that would require a lot is the closest thing that I can say about this. But it's like, if you're into what this thing would offer, you're going to be way into it. Oh, sweet. And I'm just like, it offers like the decision tree of how do you decide between products A, B, and C. We want to make things that provide like easy on-ramps to choice. And there's a couple of levers that you can pull on that. Price is certainly one of them. but product innovation and something that solves a real problem that isn't being addressed by anybody else yeah is material and we we do not like i'm kind of within like my circles i'm kind of infamous for this i don't follow anybody in this space like on the internet like people Have you seen what Company X just put out? No, I didn't see it. I don't care. That's good. That doesn't make me better. It just means that I know that I'm susceptible to influence, and I can just turn that dial down. It's like what they're doing is inconsequential to what we're doing. Because we're not going to run our business as a reaction to what somebody else has done. Our plan is we're going to make the best thing that we know how to make, and we're going to tell a great story about it and we're going to build it in the states and we're going to price it in a way that we think is fair that allows us to run our business is good for the dealer support your local bow shop and then just like do it right I don't care what everybody else is doing because dude free market economy I believe in meritocracy if somebody wants to buy our competitors thing versus ours good they won that engagement fantastic I'm out there trying to stomp people's faces, and I want to win. I want people to choose us, and I want to make product that makes the choice easy. That puts a lot on us to make great stuff. We're trying very hard to make stuff that is just appreciably different and better for archers and bow hunters. So slider three is going to be an expression of that. It is still, like, in the works. It'll be better than Slider 2 is all I can tell you. Sounds good. Yeah, that's interesting. What else you got, James? Let's see you guys in the answer. You can find all of them. Oh, just to kind of give you guys the opportunity to retouch on this. But you guys are talking about like hate or keeping other hunters accountable. Cam, you and I have talked about kind of the infighting. So I just wanted maybe you guys can elaborate more on that. We're like keeping each other accountable, but unnecessary hate or infighting in the hunting community, you know, kind of breaking the hunting community up when we should be kind of trying to further our reach into non-hunters or anti-hunters to bring them onto our side? I'll just say, I mean, we're already a pretty small group. So, yeah, the infighting doesn't help. That's different than calling people or calling out things that are wrong. Right. That's different. And I'm not, like, blind allegiance to what people do. Um, but if you're just jealous or I don't, I'm a human too. So like I said, I'm, I have my own flaws, so I don't know why people lash out, but it's just not helpful. If it's, if it's, I don't know who decides what's warranted or not as far as hate or holding people. I don't know. I'm not that I'm not the counsel that decides that, but if it's just ego or jealousy that's weighing in on that that's not we're not helping anything no the only industry that i know that's worse than ours is the gun industry god they tear each other up bad bad bad bad i think don't i mean i now i've been doing the motocross thing there's it i think it's men yeah it's competitive men so So the acquisition of status has delivered tangible results to individuals for all of human history. Yes. it is baked in at a species level that we try to out-signal one another to gain status to attract a mate to gain resources to say in the totem pole of society that like my position is higher than you therefore i am better by these objective measures right in the hunting industry it's like i kill bigger shit than you i'm better than you yeah which is just like okay there's a ton of reasons for that maybe you're just like a way better hunter and that's awesome good for you maybe it's you get clutch invites to go to places where big critters live and that's big part of the calculus um the like you know public land versus private stuff is just like dude whatever the bull this on my page that's on private it's not the place that you thought it was oh it's not no that was in montana okay i killed that bull scouting i was a door knock i got permission on that okay well it was props it was terrible archery it was great scouting and patience is it 17 yards he's freaking ripped it news day perfect but like i killed that bull with scouts that was it like a i drew a tag i put in the work in the summer i found them that's perfect it wasn't the bull i thought i was shooting which is a whole different story um but it's been happening a few times now with the buck and the bull yeah yeah that's a problem i should pay a little more attention but the the status and like ego positioning within our space um dude it's not it's not unique to the hunting industry that's a human nature level thing and And it is, it's amplified because there's the bravado and the machismo and, like, I'm bigger, stronger, faster, and I kill bigger critters, and therefore I'm better and you should respect me more. There's so much just positioning for status in their face. It's just, it's kind of like a part of the deal. Some of it I think is fun. Some of it I think is stupid and too much. and then people get carried away and turn it into like way more than it needs to be that's net negative. I only shoot at my table with no shirt on to fuck with people. There's no reason. It's like pointless. But I know some people are going to be like, oh, I hate this guy. And that's fun. Yeah, you're allowed to have fun. It's social media. It can't all be business, can it? No, and it shouldn't be because the levity and the business and the seriousness and how you navigate all of it is just a part of the calculus. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good stuff. One thing, I'm about ready to go eat. I'm starving. But I wanted to say, is this just me? And I have to take ownership over this too. So I shot the flaming arrow at the Supercross. It's like, I think it's the most viewed reel they've ever put up. It's 5 million and some views. I'm like, why does my website, CameronHaines.com, who I paid somebody $3,000 a month to do, why is that video and picture not on the top of my website? Because all those people who were super cross saw me on live TV are like, wait, who's this guy? let me go so why and like oh in case you missed it here's the hottest thing that happened this week you know what i mean why is spot hog with the flame going up into the site and me still shooting the arrow or hoi flames all over the bow why why is that not being utilized by you by them by me by everybody it's just like so i i got i talked to kip you know from under armor and i'm like how obvious is this content to put up on my website why do i have to say this let me ask you this before i give you an opinion okay what's your website for uh cameronames.com it's mostly um we tell a little storytelling but mostly for merchandise yeah yeah so if i see you at super supercross and I don't know who you are and I Google your name, where do you want them to go? My website. Why do you want them to go to your website? Well, that's where they'll learn about my history. You can't like on social media, you have to do a little digging to figure out what this person is about. It's pretty much the story's spelled out on the website. Like, oh, here's who this guy is. Here's what he does. Oh, he's got a podcast. He's got the, it's all there. Right. But I want them to go there, not to see another website, to be like, oh, yeah, that is the guy who was the Flaming Arrow. So my opinion is that you warning a person who doesn't know you to go straight to your personal website is a big ask. Because if I don't know who you are, but I just heard you. Will they Google it, though? So they'll Google it. Yeah. And the nature of your life as it has panned out. If you Google Cam Hane, we should do this right now. That would be interesting to see. but it's like your Instagram's going to come up pretty high rank because you've got a ton of followers you're definitely it'd be my website you're definitely going to get so that's like an SEO thing like are you doing the right things on the backside of the internet to get your website to that's my website guy but then it's like you're gonna you're gonna rank very high on like YouTube links to Rogan episodes yeah yeah and stuff like that so getting someone to go to your personal site is like a longer funnel because that's like the deep dive. Like, please come learn about me. It's not the quickest way for somebody to learn about you. Is it social the quickest way? Okay, Instagram. So maybe I put it there, so maybe that's good enough. Our website did come up first, but I've also been to the website, so I don't know if that affects it. I mean, cookies on your search history, maybe, but I delete those every night. He has to. that's a that's a different problem i'm gonna talk about that off air so we don't we don't want to talk about what else ranks really high instagram when you're the next thing is instagram there is like a an ai you know breakdown of who cameron haynes is right the like at the top yeah yeah yeah yeah anyway i'm just like sometimes yeah i don't know i don't even know how to take best advantage of it maybe maybe we're doing it right well google ranking and search engine optimization is like a whole other side of marketing where you're trying to collect attention from the machine overlords and then it's just like okay what what do you want someone to do if they're on your website and by your own description It's like it's mostly an outlet to sell merch. Yeah, mostly. So someone that doesn't know you that is just like, who is this guy? Is your website the best place for them to go to that? Because let's say they do. Yeah. Google.com, Cameron Haynes, CameronHaynes.com. Okay. What's on your homepage? Your top of feed is probably like above the fold is like the language. What is it? What's your marquee one content block? Right now the first thing that pops up is the giveaway that we're currently doing. Oh, classic. So that's something that should be because it's like that's what I'm trying to drive call to action on the most specific thing. But your about page is like I've got to go a couple clicks and then read some paragraphs to do the thing to discover who you are. It's like that takes me 48 seconds, and I'm like I'm probably not going to give you that if I'm just a normal person. So you should just optimize your online traffic for the highest fidelity signal, which is probably Instagram. Because in the status thing, you've got like 1.8 million followers or whatever on Instagram. That's a huge signal of like, oh, this guy is like a guy. He's a thing. What is this about? Right, because anybody could have a website, I guess. 100%. Yeah, but if you have all those followers, there's a reason why. So this guy must do something. Let's figure it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, I got it. Yeah, that makes sense. That the highest signal to time ratio of least amount of time highest signal is what you're after to try to get somebody into your funnel. It's really good to try to get somebody on your website because if you're gathering, unlike James, if you're gathering cookies and retargeting data, then you can do all the backside of the Internet things for those people. But it is like you've got a seven-second window. Yeah, I know. What are you trying to say? It's tough. It's tough. It's competitive out there. A lot of people have an attention pulled from every direction. So, yeah, that makes sense. I do a good job of getting pissed, really pissed, for probably no good reason. What are you trying to accomplish with that? I don't know. Is this like a personal outlet to say something? Yeah. Well, you probably earned that, right? But whether or not it's positive or negative to your brand is a different discussion. Probably. You should do a live audit whether his employees, me, are scared. yeah no we don't want to get into that bullshit um dude this has been it's been a long how long this has been almost three hours holy shit wow it's good info we went for it yeah i love it i i'm i'm super appreciative of you coming all the way out here um i love hearing learning more about you here just that mindset just that marketing mindset it's just interesting um because it's like you We love what we do. We love bow hunting. And just having the connection to paint that picture from your perspective is really cool. I learned a lot today. Thank you. I learned a lot about you. And it's just great discussion. So I appreciate you. Yeah, man. Thank you for having me. Can I give you two guests that I'd love to see on your show? Oh, yeah. That'd be sweet. We were going to say somebody told me I should ask. I think Sean Ryan does this, right? Yeah, I like this. Yeah. So he does three guests, but our thing will be two. Okay. Well, I have two that I would say, one of them we mentioned already, Chris, you should have on your show. Yeah. Because it would be a cool double click. Like we talked for, I don't know, maybe 30 minutes in the middle of this about like, how do you do the thing? He's like the expression of the conversation that we had, which would be value additive to your whole program of like guys that are interested in what does this look like? And he's great. You guys would have a blast talking about that. Yeah. I just like how he doesn't have this huge personality, but he's very effective. He's real, man. He's just calm, knows his stuff, shares it, and that gives people confidence. And he's very quietly on the business side, absolute savage. Oh, good. He knows what's going on. That's not surprising. I mean, I've watched his trajectory. Yeah. And you can't have that success without understanding business. Right. Yeah, that's great. So you should have him on. And then the other one, a little bit left turn, but I think that you would love this. So let me just describe for a minute. It's a guy named Webb Smith from Columbus, Ohio. I am in kind of like an online think tank program that he runs for about 200 people. And it's all about optimization, like health span and lifespan. He is currently about 750 days into running at least a 10K per day to break the world record. That's awesome. It would be difficult for me to describe who he is. He was kind of like a serial entrepreneur. Now he does a bunch of different things. He was a head marketer at Rogue Fitness for a while. He founded a brand in lifestyle apparel and stuff way back. He'd done a ton of different stuff. And now he's advising national security companies and running this optimization program that a bunch of us are in that's very tight-knit and quiet. Me saying, I might get in trouble for describing this on your show, but I'm trying to put him on a little bit. One, because his fitness acumen is right in your wheelhouse. And how he's thinking about health span and lifespan and optimization of the meat suit and all the very scientific things. meets his, like, very fundamental, highly disciplined, extreme work ethic and recovering from serious injuries and doing this training. Like, dude is yoked, like, 6'2", 220, running a 10K a day. And, like, you guys would jam on the fitness side and the health thing. That sounds interesting. I think you guys would have, like, a super cool connection. And you get brought up in that chat probably, like, once a month. um it's a very like it's a worldwide connection of people in business and academia and like it's like huberman was talking about this and this is how it yeah comes into science like from the discipline angle um you know there's a couple inroads into this group with like special operations community and like extreme purveyors of fitness and discipline and like you get brought up in that context i think you guys would have a blast yeah oh let's yeah give me his contact we'll uh see if we can make it happen but no that sounds great yeah i appreciate that absolutely man and yeah chris for sure i mean he i met him over here at the bow rack i don't know a couple years ago but uh yeah a nice kid love to you know pick his brain on his thoughts on archery and bow hunting and just his whole journey so yeah let's do it but thank you craig yeah man appreciate it thank you appreciate it that was great talk