Ep 413. HuntProof

 

The App That’s Enhancing Duck Hunting

Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to Mojos Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Let me start today’s episode with this little story. So I’m at Delta Waterfowl convention and it was fun. It was busy. It was a good place to be on a hot day. And sitting across from me was a booth, and I don’t know, some kind of phone app, some kind of something, and one of my old associates, Sloan Brown, called me one time. He said, you’re old geezer now. He called me an old geezer. And, hey, truth of the matter is, I am kind of old geezer. And what do I need an app to go duck hunting for? And one day, we had a quiet moment. I walked across over there to introduce myself to today’s guest, Nathan Marks and Stephen Willie. And Nathan said, let me show you what this thing will do. And as he was working his phone, there was a TV monitor behind him, and it started showing me how this hunt proof app works. And about the third screen he hit, I said, whoa, where do I get it? And what does it cost? I’m in, and here’s where I’m at with it, guys. People have asked me, well, how many ducks do you kill in a year? How many times do you hunt a year? How many ducks does char dog pick up? That I can kind of answer because I keep records of my dog since 1994, but I don’t keep track of really exactly how many days I hunt. I keep track of how many days I’m home. Subtract that from 365. That’s how many days I’m on the field. And this year, I’m going to find out because I have the HuntProof app, and it’s the best $30 I have spent in duck hunting in forever. It’s the best app I’ve ever bought. Guys, how are you all today? Where you all sitting today?

Stephen Willie: Great, man. Thanks for having us. I’m in Waterloo, Illinois, about 15 minutes from St. Louis.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s good duck country up there, isn’t it?

Stephen Willie: Yeah, it’s not bad. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to most of it, but it’s not bad.

Beginnings in Duck Hunting

And I only hunt waterfowl, maybe some doves here and there. 

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Here’s where I want to start with you two guys. I want to go back, I want to learn who you are as a person and a duck hunter. And I love to ask this question, tell me about growing up duck hunt. When and where did you get into duck hunting? You all take turn.

Stephen Willie: Nathan, you want to start?

Nathan Marks: Yeah, sure. So I’m Nathan. I’m down in Southern Illinois. My stomping grounds, we’re in Du Quoin. So about 45 minutes north of Marion, which is the Tim grounds area. Crab Orchard National Wildlife Refuge. I didn’t start hunting, so nobody in my family really hunted. And I started hunting on my own. And I only hunt waterfowl, maybe some doves here and there. Like, I really just haven’t gotten anything else. And when I started, I had a buddy in high school that basically just kind of asked me, you interested in going hunting? I don’t know nothing about it, and borrowed a gun and did all. I mean, I’d already taken my hunting safety course and stuff, but just never did go hunt. And basically, I think I was 14 or 15. I probably was 15, and we went on a hunt, and I enjoyed it, and next thing it was all I could think about. I shot my first Gadwall and then there was a period of time there where I guess you could call me an outlaw there for a little while. We all have that phase in our life where the only thing that mattered was shooting birds. And, I did a lot of jump shooting got real sucked into it. And then it got to a point when I got my license, I could go on my own. And that’s all I worried about, was going and shooting ducks and geese. Everybody else was chasing deer in our area. We got some pretty big deer, and it has not enticed me one little bit.

Ramsey Russell: You all do have some big deer up there.

Stephen Willie: We do. With me –

Ramsey Russell: What –

Stephen Willie: I’m sorry go ahead

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, go ahead. I can ask you. What’s your story?

Stephen Willie: With me, I grew up hunting with my dad. We almost exclusively hunted ducks and squirrels. And around in college, we were co owners of a big slough down here that used to produce not so much lately. But around college, I got really into deer hunting, and that’s all I did. That’s all I thought about was bow hunting. And then I started a full-time job, and I got out of hunting for a while, maybe 4 or 5 years. And I work in front of a computer all day. I do Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization. And then when you spend all day in a digital world, it’s nice to do something tangible. And so I got back into it. I got a brand new bow, started deer hunting again. Got into turkey hunting, and then that graduated into duck hunting. I’ve got to travel a little bit now to do it, but getting back into it, I like it because it’s all not necessarily like, I’m going to go out. Obviously I like the meat, I like having fun, I like the experience. But it’s like a lot of it is because when you’re hunting it’s the only thing you’re thinking of. You’re not distracted by, I got to do this at work, I got my kid, I got to pick up this, I got to do this. You have that one singular thought.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: And so being in a full time job in front of a computer. It’s nice to get out there and only think about doing that one thing outside, and so, I’ve been pretty heavy into it for the past ten years, but since I came to that kind of revelation, it’s almost all I think about.

Ramsey Russell: That probably a lot of listeners can relate to that. Nathan, you grew up down in Tim ground stomping area, that’s Tim grounds country, big Canada goose country. How important are Canada geese to you as a waterfowler?

Nathan Marks: It’s really frustrating right now. We just don’t get them like we used to. We’ve really transitioned over to speckle bellies a lot.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Nathan Marks: If you go back and look at-

Ramsey Russell: I didn’t realize they overwintered enough up in that part of world to really have been serious. So, hunting implications.

Nathan Marks: So, they’re 90% of what we’re shooting. If you go look at my hunt proof app for the last three years, you might see 15 Canada geese on there, and you’re going to see, anywhere between 30 and 50, 60 specks. They’re just not here. And if you do get them, it’s a farm pond. Shoot, once one and done type situation. The population just isn’t here anymore. But, I mean, I got a lot of memories of the first few years of when I was hunting, and we did have the geese. My grandparents have a farm on the edge of town. And back when we could walk out there with a couple dozen shells, laying a layout blind, that was right when the layout blinds got popular, and here they come over the tree line coming out from our fairgrounds and hit the big river flute call a few times, and here they come. Lock them wings up, and it was go time.

Ramsey Russell: White fronts are a heck of a consolation for fewer Canada geese. I mean, you got to like hunting those birds.

Nathan Marks: Oh, yeah. I really enjoy the specks. I feel like they communicate well. I like calling at them and, you get this conversation going with them. They really frustrate me with the vertical. They seem to work vertical right over the top of you and sit there and pick you out like crazy. But at the same time, I don’t hate it. It’s definitely enjoyable. For sure.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How did you two guys meet? How did you all meet?

Nathan Marks: Me and Stephen went to school together, so we’re the exact same age. Same classes. We’ve known each other forever. Its almost 40 years-

Ramsey Russell: When’d you all start hunting together?

Stephen Willie: High school right? We went out to my farm with that. Was that high school?

Nathan Marks: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: We’ve only probably hunted together three or four times.

Nathan Marks: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: Not a whole lot. Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: Well, tell me this. Do you all keep journals? Are you all the guys that keep hunting journals?

Stephen Willie: I did, for everything, but I lost it. About every three weeks, I’d get real excited and dedicated down to, I killed this squirrel in this tree, and then I was like, I won’t lose this one, and then I did. So digitally, obviously I use the app, but it did go in spurts.

Ramsey Russell: Why do you think you kept a journal? What was it about? I wish I had, but I never did. What do you think it was about that?

Stephen Willie: Honestly, for my kids. Every turkey I have killed, or I have the fun, I’ve got it labeled. I had it cited back to whatever journal I was using. I’ve always thought it would be neat. If my dad had something like that or my grandpa or if I could get a hold of something like that. We have a slough down southern Illinois, and I had an old cabin. It was about 100 years old. And all along that cabin, there was check marks, little tally marks, and, they’d come in and my grandpa and my uncles and my cousins and whoever, and they tallied up, and they were all through there. That cabin got torn down. It got flooded and it got torn down, I don’t know, maybe 20 years ago, and we lost all that, and that was a bummer, man, because that wood told a story. And I always thought it would be cool. If I had something that my kids could go in and look at, maybe they don’t, hopefully, they do care, like, oh, dad did this. Dad killed out on this day, dad didn’t kill out on this day, but something like this happened. So it wasn’t necessarily for me. It was all to have a little bit of provenance, as my kids get older and they’re interested in something like that, they might think it’s neat.

Ramsey Russell: That’s interesting. My grandfather didn’t keep a journal, but his whole hunting and fishing life is all distilled neatly in a tiny little magnetic page photo album. And he might have written the location and the year in handwriting underneath that picture. He might have, he might not have. And it’s just, these grainy 110 little rolls back in the day that you advance winded and took. That’s his whole hunting life, it’s that right there, and I’ll spend a lot of time sometimes with it in my lap, just looking through the pictures of my dad and my uncle when they were little boys or of him when he was a young man. I just imagined, he was younger than I am now when this picture was taken. It creates this imagination. But man, would I love to just gone back. Sometimes you go to some of these camps and lodges around, and I was in a camp in Utah, for example, that they had a logbook going back to pre migratory bird treaty act, and a guest book, and it was just interesting sitting down and looking at it when it wasn’t detailed like a book. It wasn’t like even a long instagram post. It was just who, what, when and where. But it’s interesting to go back and take a look at that, and I started, for some reason, back in 1994, just keeping a journal, it’s a tiny little orange survey book with a lot of lines and columns documenting the retrieves, my dogs made. And it’s funny, the closer I get to the end of it and page wise, that now I’m down to two entries per line, no space spared. I have to put on my glasses to read the entries, but at the same time, just for posterity for me, I never shared, I never let anybody look at it. It’s just tucked away like a diary. But, what I’ll find myself doing is somewhere along the way, I’ll be sitting in a hotel room or in my recliner at home, and I wonder. I’ll look at the date, and I’ll go back and flip through the years around that same time, back through the different dogs, back through Char last year, or Coop the chicken dog, before her Delta the black lab, before her Briar the springer, before her and just flip back and see where we were and, what the numbers look like, retrieves look like, and I will make a note, a long blind retrieve or some particular hard handle. People have asked me how many ducks your dog pick up, and it’s not about the numbers to share, it’s not a bragging. How many my dog picks up, it’s a personal thing between me and her that I like to go back and look at. But, not written in those, in those entries are, the 300 yard swim or the time you were picking up and she just disappeared because she remembered a duck that had sailed 3 hours ago and came back with it. All that stuff is not represented by just numbers. And at the end of the day, the thing about numbers is if it becomes a numbers game, it becomes a bragging, and that’s not it, man. A great retriever makes a hunt more efficient. Picks those birds up, gets them out of the way, gets back in place, gets out of the way, doesn’t whine, doesn’t do nothing, doesn’t distract from the hunt, just adds to it. And that’s really their purpose. So anyway, now that I’m later in life, I wish I had taken a little more time to write who, what, when and where, the dates and everything else. A journal, just for myself to go back and look at one day as I get further into old geezerdom. So you kept a journal, Nathan, what about you? Did you keep any notes or records.

Nathan Marks: I don’t know, probably three or four years in, I’d have been maybe 18, 19 years old. I started buying some write on wet paper, these little hunt journals. They’re like little spiral notebooks.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve seen them.

Nathan Marks: And they got some criteria in there where, it’ll have a weather and you color it in or circle it right in what the weather was and what ducks you shot or whatever, deer, turkey, whatever, and I bet I had three of them filled out and, throw it in a sock drawer and you might find it later. I remember finding one three or four years later and sitting and looking through it and that was probably the conception of the hunt proof app, as I saw it and I was like, I wish I did this better, I wish I would have put more time in what I wrote and-

Ramsey Russell: Handwriting can be a pain in the butt, though.

A Passion for Waterfowl Hunting and Decoy Carving

I actually started carving my own decoys when I went to college. I was carving decoys in my dorm room with a knife, and I actually got relatively good. I’ve got a couple first place and species and at a West Lake decoy competition. And I got sucked into that pretty hard.

Nathan Marks: Oh, yes, absolutely. And the thing is, I didn’t hunt anything else. I wanted a way that waterfowl season was 365 days a year. So, actually about that time, I took up decoy carving. I actually started carving my own decoys when I went to college. I was carving decoys in my dorm room with a knife, and I actually got relatively good. I’ve got a couple first place and species and at a West Lake decoy competition. And I got sucked into that pretty hard. It was a way that duck season was all year long. Just as soon as I got a decoy done, I’d make another one and, that was the same thing. I wanted to be able to, at any time of the year, pull that journal out and say, it’s not hunt season, it’s middle of summer, but I can relive those memories, and I got a funny story, back to the Canada geese. Me and my brother were 6, 8 inches of snow on the ground, which never happens anymore around here either. But we walked out there behind the farmhouse, my grandparents farm and threw some wind socks out. And back then it was just a brown trash bag, had 50 windsocks that I bought probably a week before that from herders. We laid down in the snow. We literally dug down in the snow and just laid there. Wind was blowing, it was starting to spit snow again and, we’re kind of looking at each other like, how stupid are we for doing this? and all of a sudden here came a 6 pack of geese and, hit that flute call, and here they come, just 4ft off the ground, barely making it to us, crawling up. And I gave him the gun. In my mind I was thinking we didn’t have a chance in the world to shoot a goose, and he pulled up and popped two right then and there. I’ll never forget that, and I wrote that in the journal, but at the same time, you can relive that when it’s 110 in the summer, sweating your butt off. Okay, this is where we were at, what we are doing.

Ramsey Russell: I think iPhones and androids, these phones we’re carrying in our pocket as a camera has done more for me. I remember me just scrolling back through pictures. I’ll stumble across pictures, days, moments I forgot. All I got to do is see that picture and remember, that’s the day so and so fell in, or that’s the day so and so dog made that 400 yard retrieve across the Bang field or something, that’s the day it was so cold, my eyelashes froze together. you can see those pictures, remember it. But I’m not a journaler per say. I don’t keep a diary like we’ve talked about, and I guess that’s why you all came out with this app, just a little diary, a little journal. But as I started looking at it, you started showing me the features, it pulled me right in. I’m thinking, I’m not going to get writer’s cramp doing this. It does all the weather automatically. I add the details I want or don’t want, and it makes these nice summaries. It keeps up, so it does do a journal, but that’s not the end all, be all of this app. When you swap screens, you started showing me some of the predictive features. That’s when I’m like, all right, I’m in, take my money. That’s when it really evolved beyond something I’d ever seen or considered for duck hunting. Especially back in the day when I traveled less and spent more of every waking moment sitting at a camp in Mississippi, staring at the map on the wall and with one eye and the weather channel with the next and figuring out where I was going to go.

Nathan Marks: Yeah.

Predicting Duck Movement

Well, so we have the migration predictor, which is basically an algorithm that we created. 

Ramsey Russell: That takes the math out, it takes the guesswork out. Describe that intuitive feature you’ve got. What do you call it? A predictive feature.

Nathan Marks: Well, so we have the migration predictor, which is basically an algorithm that we created. We went and looked at some scientific studies from some universities on what weather parameters cause birds to migrate. So, winds aloft, clear skies, north winds, that kind of thing. There’s significant weather criteria that birds tend to use to create migration. And when those criteria are present, it’s going to give you a score. And that score is zero to ten score. Now, that is saying that the atmospheric criteria that we have picked is present doesn’t necessarily mean, you’re going to see the migration. It’s just saying that the time is right, it’s ripe for the picking here. It would be a good day to be spending a little extra time in the blind. If you’re going out, if you’re calling in sick to work, you might want to go on a Thursday instead of Friday. So that’s the predictive part. But then we also have the search feature. And the search feature is to me, the bread and butter. This is where the idea came from, was-

Ramsey Russell: And that’s what I’m talking about, Nathan. That search feature. That, to me, is what I was like. That is something else.

Nathan Marks: So the thing is, we, as hunters, we hunt so much, and like you said, if you don’t write it down, and even if you do, how do you remember all that. You remember certain things that happened and how you may be set up or what the weather was like, and you remember it as a memory, but it’s not like, you just forget so much. So, in my mind, I thought, how do you use all these past hunts? So in your instance, hundreds of hunts, how to use that information to make yourself better. So the idea was, if you log all these hunts in here in the app, then you can go in and search by any of those specific criteria that you want to. So you can search based on weather, so any hunt that matches tomorrow’s weather. If I’m on a Friday, just got off work, I’m getting ready to go scout. I can type in tomorrow’s weather, Saturday morning’s weather, and then I can search it by that weather, and I can see if 10 or 15 different locations that I hunted before pop up. I can see if there is a trend WMA or a state park or some location? Let’s say if you’re on your property down in Mississippi, and let’s say you could even search by your Mississippi property only and then type that weather in, and it’s going to come back and let’s say it comes back with 15 hunts that match this weather within the plus or minus variation of temperature, plus or minus variation of wind, speed and all that stuff, then you start looking at all those hunts and you’re going to look and see, where were they? And out of those 15, you might find 9 that were this certain blind on this certain waterhole. So now that tells me, there’s a tendency to do well in that blind on this weather pattern. Now, some of those hunts might just be in there as zeros or ones and twos and some of them might be bangers. So if it’s a really good hunt, you can even search by the weather criteria in five or six or ten ducks or however you want to do it. So you can just search by total hunts, you can search by how many birds you actually shot, you can really do the criteria by any way you want to you. I like to search by a bigger variation just by weather, and then I’ll just niche it down. If it kicks me back 25, 30 hunts, then I can go back and filter it a little tighter and bring myself back to maybe 10 or 15. Just depends what I’m trying to do.

Taking the Guesswork Out of Hunting

 We all know enough about data saying, the more data entries we have, the better it’s going to be.

Ramsey Russell: That’s what’s so practical about this app. It takes a lot of the guesswork out.

Nathan Marks: Absolutely. So, one of the ways I like to use it is, where we’re at, if I want to go to Pyramid Park State park and then I have Wren Lake Wildlife management area, one’s east, one’s west, and they’re 45 minutes from each other. Well, if I get off work, I don’t have time to do both. I can’t scout both ways. So if that comes into that situation, what I’m going to do is I’m going to run through the app real quick for tomorrow’s weather and if my past hunts show success at one park or the another, predominantly, I’m going to pick that direction and that’s where I’m going to head and go scout. We all know enough about data saying, the more data entries we have, the better it’s going to be.

Ramsey Russell: Oh, yeah.

Nathan Marks: So when you start getting 150, 200, 300 hunts, I’ve only been using the app for basically three seasons and, when we get to 500, 600, 700 hunts, I can’t imagine what kind of cool stuff is going to kick out.

Ramsey Russell: That’s unbelievable. Okay, so how long is the app existed? How long has hunt proof existed? When did you all launch it?

Stephen Willie: We hard launched at squad fest last year.

Ramsey Russell: Really?

Stephen Willie: Yeah. It had been on the App Store for about a year before, but it was beta testing. We were reaching out to people, hey check this out. Basically, stress testing the app. One app to get broke and a lot of it was just us messing with it. If you look at my hunt log, there’s a lot of fake stuff in there, and it’s throwing everything off and driving me nuts. But we’re just testing for that whole year and a half. Just inserting something, seeing if it breaks, inserting something else, this is a win, this is really cool, let’s add on to this. I think that the first, we’re out here guys, would be, I guess, right before squad fest last year.

Ramsey Russell: Okay, how was it received there at squad fest? That’s a lot of hardcore hunters going to that thing.

Stephen Willie: Very good.

Appealing to the Younger Hunter Demographic

Ramsey Russell: Nathan is a younger demographic. It seems to be a younger demographic.

Nathan Marks: Yes, yes.

Ramsey Russell: I mean, just consider this, I was 21 years old when I turned on my first computer, but because a college professor said, look, dude, if you’re going to go to school here, you can’t hand write any more papers. You have to type them. I hate to tell you, but you have to type them, so let me show you. I turn on a computer. But, I mean, these kids today, you all grew up with this stuff. It’s second nature. So it went through the roof when you all launched there at squad fest, isn’t it?

Stephen Willie: It did. We had a really good turnout. We had a bunch of downloads, met a lot of people in the industry. It was a confidence booster to us. Up until that point, we didn’t know, right? It was buddies. It was people that we were reaching out to on instagram. We didn’t think this is cool. We think, we would use this, there’s nothing like this, and seeing the reception, seeing the genuine interest in people that would stop by the booth or would talk to us, and Nathan will tell you the same thing. Maybe we got something, and then that was the turning point. Then we went to Delta, and this year, just-

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, we met you all.

Stephen Willie: Then that just boosted us even more. Let’s keep going, let’s make these investments, let’s put all these other updates out to capture those users or serve the user by, introducing more things that would be valuable to them. So, up and up until about a year and a half ago, we thought it was cool, but we didn’t know if anybody else. Fortunately, it’s been working out.

Ramsey Russell: It’s cool. But I’ll tell you right now, it’s old geezer approved. It’s really a cool thing. When you all started hunt proof out, what was the first incarnation of hunt proof out like? When I go through it now we’re fixing it, let’s go through what’s now and how it started is what I see right now. I go through and it tells me the name. Just a title. And then the next place is a little more specific, number 5 blind, and then we start going down. What habitat am I hunting? What plants are I’m hunting? What kind of decoys am I using? What kind of motion decoys? What kind of blinds? Where’s my blind located it. Boom! It fills out the weather for me automatically. I love that feature. It’s got a little map, and it monuments where on earth I’m sitting. I used it yesterday, I don’t know where to find this field around here, and I pulled it up and look, oh, we got to go five clicks that way and three clicks to the left. And so, it has got river stages. And there have been times in my life that was live or die on killing ducks was a river stage. It’s got a lot of the attributes. Is that how it started? Was the first incarnation was a little more simple?

Nathan Marks: So the thing is like what Stephen was saying was we were two years in the development before we had really a functionality that was something I even wanted to show anybody. Maybe ten people knew about it for almost two years. And we all believe in our own thing, so we all just sit there and work. Me and Steven are bouncing ideas back and forth, and even some of my hunt buddies are like, well, there might be other stuff kind of like that, or somebody’s tried that before. I’m like, but it’s not ducks, it’s deer hunting or whatever. But back to, your question. whenever we went to these events, like dive bombs, we had this overwhelming, like, that’s cool. We probably had like 300 and something people download that app that weekend and sign our paper. We got a little giveaway. We had one guy that said, well, I don’t have time for that. I just shoot ducks and walked off, and one guy, and it was just funny.

Ramsey Russell: It’s like getting kicked into cojones. Now, was he an old geezer?

Nathan Marks: No, not really.

Stephen Willie: I remember that guy.

Floodplain Hunting

A guy came and said, hey, you need to put what you’re hunting, what kind of food source you’re hunting. Yeah, that might be something someone wants to know. So back to your question, the original, the very first version was the GPS pinning location at the top, your title.

Nathan Marks: But at the same time, we had a lot of people give us like some fantastic feedback and they’re downloading the app and coming back the next day and going, hey, what about this? So, like that, the food source feature on the app was actually derived from squad fest. A guy came and said, hey, you need to put what you’re hunting, what kind of food source you’re hunting. Yeah, that might be something someone wants to know. So back to your question, the original, the very first version was the GPS pinning location at the top, your title. So your hunt title and your location or hunt site and then your site location. So it’d be like your WMA and then maybe what blind number. And then we had, I think at that time, 12 or 15 criteria. So it went from what kind of blind you were hunting? Was your hide quality good quality or not? Type of decoys? A water set or a dry land set, I think was a duck, or goose, or a combination. We had the decoy numbers on there, how many decoys you were setting? Then I think we had, lake and river stages on there already, but I’m not sure if that might have been later. But that was one of the things where, I don’t really hunt anywhere that has a water level situation, but I know the concept of when the rivers come out of the banks and they flood the oxbows and whatnot, that’s the limiting factor of whether or not you’re going to kill birds there. So if a guy hunt-logs a hunt with those water levels, that can be a searchable feature and they can say, I want to know all the places I can access because the water’s at this water level, and then everything else after that. We just started, adding criteria to it and adding the features, you start getting to the tracking species and-

Ramsey Russell: You all have got all 41 some odd species on there. One of the coolest things I did for three years, I got selected to do the, what’s the fish and wildlife called? Parts collections. And you take a wing off of each duck harvested or goose tail feathers and send it in, and at the end of the year, they would send me a summary and that was pretty dang cool. That’s how many mounters I killed in blue wings and gadwalls and shovelers and whatever. That was cool, and that right now is one of the coolest things is, the number of Ross geese, Snow geese, Blue geese, Cacklers, Blue Winged Teal, and one Specklebelly. That’s about it right now. But I’m just getting started, but it’s cool to say, and it shows what the average bag per hunt has been. I’m really appreciating that, somebody that doesn’t keep a journal and never had, I go back and look at how many retrieves has char dog made. That’s a really cool thing. And I just caught on. I didn’t think about it till about four or five months into it, but a lot of times I hunt with other people. I hunt with stormy, I hunt with pepper, I hunt with all these other great dogs around the country, around the world, and I can add the retrieves they made, too. And one of the coolest things is when I get done and I find myself since day one of using this app, not just taking a grip and grin and appending it in the app, but I take pictures of the habitat, picture of the field, picture of the people, other little pictures that I’m not going to post. I just take them to keep to myself to define that hunt. And it’s like I’m digging it. It’s a great idea. I assume a lot of your feedback comes from users, like Austin had suggested that, if I want to keep how many ducks I killed today, the three of us go out goose hunting. I could just put how many I shot, but my inclination is to put how many we shot because it’s a team effort, it’s a team sport. It’s a very communal effort.

Nathan Marks: Absolutely.

Ramsey Russell: It would be kind of cool to break it out one day and say, we shot this many. I shot this many. That’s cool. I mean, it just-

Nathan Marks: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: It’s endless. The ideas you come up with of how this could be customized and enhanced and featured to make it. Because duck hunting and waterfowl hunting in general is a very personal sport. We all get a little something different out of it.

Nathan Marks: Yeah, I think we really wanted to, in the very beginning, back to, development of it, was what defines the hunt, like the search feature. What is the controlling factor on your hunts and success? You got to have the ducks. Why do you get the ducks? Because of the weather, predominantly. So that was my big thing, the searchability through the weather. And is that controlling our hunts? but then as we start getting feedback, it’s like what criteria do people want to listen to or remember? Like you’re saying, when it comes to the numbers thing, it’s like the hunt itself. How many did you kill? Or what species for that hunt, whether it’s 3 guys or 10 or just by yourself. I don’t really care how many that I pulled the trigger on, because if everybody else kills out, and I don’t, I’m fine with it. I had a heck of a time, and especially now that I’m running my dog, I’m really enjoying, I want to watch the dog work and run my dog. But at the same time, to have both those features would be fantastic. I totally agree at the end of the season, we collective, me and my buddies killed this or my bow killed this, but I actually shot this, and I think anything is so doable. Like you said the sky’s the limit on what we can do. It just depends on how far in the weeds we want to go into this, on data collection, on, what people want to put in it and how do we keep doing more without convoluting the user experience? Because we don’t want to get so much in there that a person’s like, this is taking me 30 minutes to do instead of 10 or 5, and they just basically kind of don’t pull it out and use it, so we have to have a fine line there because someone like me or you who really care about a lot of these details, the other guy might just want to log the hunt and know how many ducks he killed at the end of the year, which he can skip through all that. So, he can just pick which criteria he doesn’t want to use and that’s a big win.

A Personalized Hunting Experience

And so it’s a very personalized experience that I can’t believe I’m using a waterfowl app. But I love it. Hunt proof is a pretty cool thing. 

Ramsey Russell: That’s a big win. And one thing that you’ve got like a little window that I can write a paragraph. I can write a story, and if somebody has been told a lot of my posts on Instagram may be too long. I write very little in that window. I write just the details, the people, something memorable, something, it may just be 1 word, that I can later go back refer to. Does that make sense? And so it’s a very personalized experience that I can’t believe I’m using a waterfowl app. But I love it. Hunt proof is a pretty cool thing. It’s funny how I watched your demonstration, I downloaded the app, I went back over to my booth, and several clients I told about it came over. You showed them. Boom, they downloaded it too. Some old guys like me, some young guys. I really don’t know why everybody wouldn’t do it. And talk about the difference in the standard download versus the premium upgrade. The premium upgrade is $30. And that’s what I got. It’s $30. You can’t buy a 5 can roll of snuff for $30. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff you can’t buy for $30 and something like this, I can buy for $30 a year and forget about. What’s the distinctions between those two applications?

Nathan Marks: So the major variation is, so your free version on the migration predictor is only going to be three days. You’ll have today, tomorrow, and the next day. So if you’re sitting at work on Monday trying to figure out what day you’re going to call in sick, we’re going to go hunting. You’re only going to get to look at three days, you’re not going to get that whole week. If you do the paid version, you’ll get a 14 day outlook on that. So you can see which days the weather is going to be prime for a bird movement. The other limitation is the photo upload. So, the free version, I think, is 5 photos and the premium is 15. Then you’re also going to have the dog tracking. So, if you run a dog and you want to keep track of how many hunts the dog has and retrieves for the dog, that’s part of the premium version.

Ramsey Russell: Okay. Yeah.

Nathan Marks: And then the speciation. You can log your hunts and keep track of how many birds you kill, just numbers wise on the free version. But to actually log the species, that’s a premium feature as well.

Ramsey Russell: That’s good stuff. We were talking before we mic’d up about some of the upgrades, like somebody that downloaded, when you all launched, some of the guys say, I forgot I downloaded that. And you all were still in a growing phase or develop, you all were still getting done. And what we talked about before we started recording was there’s a web page owner that at one time had literally two sub pages within get ducks.com. That’s now 3800. It’s a very daunting process. And as somebody that’s done the back end on that stuff, I don’t write the code, but I have to keep up with the details and the dead links. I look at that app thinking, what must it be like to do an app? First off, what are you all’s backgrounds, your professional backgrounds? And how the heck does that reconcile with being an app owner and these myriad details and beta testing and all the little hiccups and updates and things that can go wrong and things that go right. What is that like? What is you all’s background? And what is it like to be an app owner and deal with that?

Nathan Marks: So my background is, I am a carpenter of all things. That was whenever me and you talked on the phone, that was the same reaction you had the first time. I said, it totally doesn’t make any sense and honestly, that’s a testament to the why like you said, an old geezer can run it.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Nathan Marks: I wouldn’t consider myself an old geezer, but I’m not a big technology guy, Steven can attest to that. It’s a struggle trying to get me to send Google Drives and whatever else. Like, he’s got to walk me through half the stuff. But I think that’s why the app is user friendly, because I want it super simple. If I get frustrated, someone else is going to get frustrated with it. So my history, I’ve been a carpenter pretty much my whole life and worked in a factory for a few years, pure misery. But that was actually when I really knuckled down and conceived the idea of how this would supposedly work and couldn’t afford it at the time. But back to development, I think we’re over 80 different iterations of this upgrade. I think we’re well over 80 now. And it’s just a grind-

Ramsey Russell: 80 updates?

Nathan Marks: Yeah, and some of those might be, three months of development in between each one or five months between each one. It just depends on what we are putting in there. So it’s a process for sure. And that’s so frustrating for me because I’m a guy that’s used to throwing some nails and some boards or whatever, and you see that progress. And then with an app development, like you said, with a website, you don’t see that so much. You wait and wait until it shows up and then there’s a big bang.

Stephen Willie: So my background is in design and development, so I can code. While I’m not coding a lot of the actual app, we work with another developer for that. There’s that tension there, because Nathan just stay tuned like one more week and this will happen, I promise. But a lot of those iterations, like Nathan said, updates were user feedback. Initially, maybe 20 to 30 were us messing around with things. But the species list, sandhill cranes, we don’t hunt sand hill cranes around here. So we did not think to put them on there until we heard someone say, hey, you should put these on. Then from adding those species, being able to store your hunting license. So you’re going to Missouri, you’re going to Arkansas, you’re going to North Dakota, South Dakota. You can store all those digitally within the app. Pulling up state regulations. Hey, I’m going to hunt in Missouri with a guy I know out of St. Louis or this year. I’ve got no idea what the limits over there, I can go into the app hit Missouri, pulls all of the current rules and regulations, bag limits, etc. A lot of that’s been fun because it’s been like living and breathing in a sense, that we were able to, hey man, did you think about this? Oh, no, we didn’t think about this because we’ve been so blinders on trying to get this next release out. Then somebody on Instagram’s like, why don’t you do this? That’s super cool.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: And then I talked to Nathan about this, and then Nathan will think how to structure it, and then we’ll go in and implement it from there. But right now, we’re working on the international species list.

Ramsey Russell: So in order, you got 41 species. Along comes Ramsey Russell.

Stephen Willie: Yeah, so I got. I put this big sheet together, and I went through, and I found images, open public domain images, found details on them. Pulled the whole list from your site, and so we’ve been working on that for about two weeks, and it’ll be about a week of quality control. So you want to make any time that before we roll something out, we want to make sure that it didn’t break anything else in the app. That’s a poor user experience. With code a lot of it is shared, so as you make a change here, it may affect something here.

Ramsey Russell: That’s right.

Stephen Willie: So then we have to go through all the whole quality controller quality assurance phase to ensure that by the time that user upgrades or even downloads the app, they’re not seeing any of that.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: So from ideation to actual implementation of, like, a large app release, we’re looking at about probably two to three months. We’ve got a pretty big one right now. Outside of the international species, that’ll take about probably we’re hoping around 30 days, and to get that out, preseason before a lot of the US opens up. Yeah, it’s a lot of work. But again, like, a lot of it is that user feedback, if any listeners, obviously, you’ve given us a ton of feedback. Even before this podcast, we were talking, why didn’t we think about that? We’re going to have to update that. And they’re very easy updates. It just takes a little bit to test. So if anybody’s listening to this and they’ve been messing with the app and they’re like, oh, this would be a cool feature. Send it over to us. We would love to hear that on Instagram because odds are if it’s something that we can do and it’s something that would be usable and applicable to the rest of the user base, we’ll include it in the app.

Ramsey Russell: We’re all waterfowl hunters, but there are a lot of upland bird hunters. If I swing through Montana and see some friends, it won’t be just sandhill cranes, morning doves. It’ll be sharp-tailed grouse, if I go up, I may be hunting Ruffed grouse this year up in British Columbia. What about the guys? And I know they’re a very diminutive bunch, but guys that hunt Clapper rails, King rails, gallinules, Coots, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff, that guys are hunting, and you can really put all that stuff on there in time. It’s just like we said earlier, the list is endless. One thing we haven’t talked about this app. We’ve talked about the journaling effect. We’ve talked about the metrics. We’ve talked about the predictive and the selection process of that kind of business. But one thing you mentioned earlier, Nathan, and I remember you showing me this app, is that I got a couple of friend requests since I joined, and it was you all. And it could be other people I hunt with at my camp. It could be camp members. It could be other friends, other international travelers, and there’s also a scouting feature on here. A lot of guys go out, I know guys that hunt Arkansas public, and 4 boats go 5 different directions and come back and hatch notes. They could be documenting what they’ve seen, where they saw it, using little nicknames, and then share it with them or camp members. You got a camp with 30 members in it. Well, you can share it with the whole camp, you can share it with your click, you can share it with who you wanted to. Maybe I can’t get off next Wednesday, but I saw a bunch of mallards over here, and I can share this. We can network and work. We can use the application that you all have developed to our collective advantage by working together. Now, my hundred observations or input data points are now 500 because I’m working with five other guys. It’s mind blowing when you really get to thinking about this kind of stuff. And it’s not that we’re saying share it on social media, tell the world, hell, no.

Nathan Marks: We’re saying, absolutely not.

Ramsey Russell: Keep it among ourselves. I’m going to show my buddies my hand of cards. They show me theirs. We’re all going to play together.

Nathan Marks: So let’s talk about, say, your property that you have in Mississippi, correct?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. Just a camp?

Nathan Marks: So let’s say you’re out traveling the world, killing all these other ducks, and you got three buddies back there just, hunting day in, day out, or every weekend. Let’s say they get 50 hunts that you were not able to be there. They can send you those hunts every day. So now when you do get to go back there, you can search those shared hunts. So, now you have that data. You have the data from all their hunts, even though you weren’t there. So now you have 50 more hunts that you can search from your property, and you can get those weather trends, where did you guys notoriously kill birds during these criteria. That’s the same concept like, if I’m a weekend warrior, but one of my buddies is able to hunt, he’s on second shift, so he could hunt really five, six days a week if he wants to. So if that’s the case, he can put all kinds of hunts logged in there compared to what I can do, and that is a win, in my opinion. It’s more data to search, and you can get, notes and you get all the weather parameters and all that stuff. The whole idea was that was a feature, you can share. So in the scouting feature, the same idea was you can share a scout to a buddy, hey, I saw some geese over here, ducks over here. Here’s location. I think currently, the scout feature is not searchable, but that’s one of the new updates we’re getting ready to push, is making that searchable to where you can do that same weather search based off a scout. So if you got all these scouts logged, then you turn around and say, what was the weather like when the geese or ducks were hitting that spot? And it was that the controlling factor of why the birds were in there, and that’s the thing is it’s just all about data collection, and how do we use that to make ourselves better? Like, I mean, we’re all out here trying to shoot, essentially shoot as many birds as possible or have the best time we can, and if we can be more efficient at what we’re doing, then why not?

Hunting Outfitters on the App

And I can see a lot of opportunity to share this and to their advantage to make themselves a better business.

Ramsey Russell: Absolutely. Talk about some of the outfitter features you all have considered or had conversations about. I’m not saying give away any sensitive information, but, for example, a lot of the outfitters I know, which is a bunch of outfitters up here throughout Canada, for example, they’ve got lots of scouts, and all the guides scout, and they network. They’ve got little group text or something going on, and they get back to the camp house and they sketch things out, and they enter GPS waypoints, and they do stuff and work as a team to deliver superior client experiences. I can see a lot of in the same way that I can share with camp members and friends and other social apps. I see a lot of potential for using this app in a private, professional capacity. This would be amazing, to show people share things and what my scouting is or what my hunt is because, a lot of the outfitters will call all their guides, and the more say, how’d you do? How’s it going? And I can see a lot of opportunity to share this and to their advantage to make themselves a better business.

Nathan Marks: Absolutely.

Stephen Willie: So we’re working on the wireframes right now. I believe, after our preseason releases, then we start entering into that. So how we have it so far, or how we begin, the coding and the design of it so far, is the outfitter has a portal. That portal will be either on an app or he can access it via a website. So, all of that portal and all of his guides and all of the scouts can then sync in all of their information, and it feeds into that macro outfitter portal. So, say you have guide, one guide one killed x amount of geese with x amount of clients without having to call at 11:00 at night or text in. Sometimes the numbers are a little bit sloppy. He syncs it in via the app. Now he gets not only those species, not only the numbers and, clients and whoever, but all of this other data, and that’s synced into the Outfitter portal. Now as that database grows, that outfitter can actually start making decisions on where to send people based on all of that criteria and get better success for those clients. So at that point, it’s almost like a software or a management system that syncs in with our app and that’s currently under development. We’re, like I said, we have this next preseason release, and we’re the Outfitter stages is next on our docket.

Ramsey Russell: I’ve got an outfitter buddy down in south Texas, runs an amazing blue winged teal hunt, and he’s also a huge baseball fan and, baseball statistics. He and one of his guys inputs a lot of spreadsheets, and the numbers don’t lie. The statistics don’t lie. And, I mean, you can build this into this app and then collectively use it among all these different outfitters. It’s cause the numbers don’t lie. And Nathan nailed it exactly right. When you get into statistics and numbers and probabilities and things that nature, the bigger the sample size, the more accurate, more powerful that science becomes. So over a duck hunting career, and if you’re working in a network or with an outfitter, you got more observations being entered. It’s just, it becomes fullproof, and to me it’s a very wicked technology and a great idea you all have come up with.

Stephen Willie: Thank you.

An App that Changes Hunting

I’m constantly searching the app when we will go to, like, delta and squad fest. I’m showing people how to do this search, and you get these hunts pop up. 

Ramsey Russell: How has it changed you all’s lives? So you come up with this idea? Some people invent decoys, gizmos, camo patterns. A lot of people want to make a living in the hunting industry. You all are a couple of duck hunters. You come up with this idea, we’re going to come up with this app. How’s it changed you all’s lives? How’s it changed your hunting? I’ll ask first.

Nathan Marks: Well, one of the cool things was I was having text conversations with Ramsey Russell, and I didn’t expect that to happen. A year ago or two I wasn’t thinking that was happening, but honestly, in hunting one of the ways that I really enjoy, so I created this, me and Steven created this app, and I had this idea, and I found there was times where we’d go hunting and I’d even forget to use it. You’re throwing your decoys in the boat, and I found that the best one of the edits that we made was everything in this app is editable on the back end, past tense. So what I can do is, you decoys are set, your snacks are out, your guns loaded, your calls on, your check on your neck. You got five minutes for shooting hours, you can pull your phone out, double check your shooting time, and you can create your hunt log. Right then put everything that you think you need to put in there right now, and your hunt log is made for that day. Now, once your hunt’s done, you can go back in and edit how many birds the dog picked up. You can go in and put your notes in on who fell in and who forgot the toilet paper and all the fun things that happen in that hunt. And I think that system, for me, has worked out great, because now I’m not forgetting it. I’ve already made that initial entry, so now it’s kind of fresh in my brain. Right before we start picking up decoys or whatever, I’ll go through and put, all the details in. And I think that’s one of the things that’s how I’ve been using it. And then the searchability again. I’m constantly searching the app when we will go to, like, delta and squad fest. I’m showing people how to do this search, and you get these hunts pop up. And it’s so funny because I’ve almost memorized some of these hunts because I know when I click on that, I know what pictures are there. If it’s my boy holding up a goose cheese or if it’s one of my other buddies, stuff in his face with a snack cake, or whatever. And it’s just one of them things where I’m not really using it so much right now. I think I maybe have a total of, a hundred hunts in there. So when I’m searching for that data and where to go tomorrow and that kind of stuff, it’s not really about that yet for me, because I don’t think there’s enough hunts. But at the same time, those memories are just where I get the joy out of. It’s like, I can go back and show all these hunts with these pictures of who was with me, and we had a good buddy of ours that I hunted with a few times pass away last year, and I got pictures inside the app of hunts that we went on that, some good ones and some miserable ones and some great stories, but to me, the memories inside the app, that’s what it’s about.

Ramsey Russell: How about you, Steven?

Stephen Willie: I think it’s the ride, man. Like, going to Delta, meeting people, talking to people all day. Talk and having conversations with people on Instagram that are like minded. This revs me up. Like, talking about stuff like this. I could do this all day. So, like, going to Delta, going to squad fest, going to all these other expos, and I’m on cloud nine. I can’t believe, I know we’ve got something cool going on, but this is cool that we’re on the podcast with you, right? It’s just a lot of fun, because I love doing this stuff. One of my favorite parts of it is this happened a lot at Delta. Like, we interact with a lot of users on Instagram and social media. We had a few of these people, yeah, used you guys last season. I love it. It’s just some random guy, I was like, well, you did that’s awesome, right? We’ve got a very good user base, and it’s growing. We’ve had a really good few weeks as well, but it’s just fun, outside of the app or working on these updates and everything, it’s interacting with people that like to do stuff that you like to do, right? And like with Delta specifically where we met you, any, bottomlands, my favorite color, and that’s everywhere down there. So I was just like a kid walking around at all these booths talking to. I think it’s just the ride behind it, outside of even the utilitarian purposes of the app or using the app or developing the app, it’s just fun.

Ramsey Russell: I think you make up a good point. It’s all about the climb. When I was young and we started the process 20 years ago of getducks.com, it was all about finishing something or getting on top of something, and it began to settle in. There is no top of a mountain. It’s just the climb. I mean, you get to a summit and you look, we still got to climb if you want to. And that’s what I enjoy about it. And it’s been wonderful meeting guys like yourself. There’s a lot of people I meet in the booth and around and on social media and just throughout the whole life process that want to be involved in the outdoors. They want to make a career for themselves in the outdoors. And I just love, and I’m honored to have guys like yourself on a podcast that thought way outside the box and built something the world hadn’t seen yet. That just is so impressive to me. Here’s a question in follow up to the one I just asked. You both got regular jobs. I did, too, when I started this thing, how’s it changed your life in terms of you go to work like a real job as a carpenter or SEO for law firms, and then you come home and you still got a job, you got more job to do, and it’s hunt proof app. How’s it been getting used to that.

Stephen Willie: Allocating time once the kids go to sleep

Ramsey Russell: I remember those days.

Stephen Willie: That’s when everything. That’s when everything happens for me. So any social media reset schedule on that? Working on the user experience of the, the new release, working with Nathan, working with the developer. So, yeah, it’s just tacking those extra hours out at the end of the night.

Ramsey Russell: Nathan, what about you? You spent a lot of time at night, too. You come home from cutting straight lines and hammering straight nails and you come home.

Nathan Marks: My, I do get some downtime during the day that I can allocate a little bit to it. But in general, yeah, it’s the same thing as come home and try to get kids to bed or hand kids over to the wife and say, hey, I got to knock this out real quick. Even my wife, she has her own business, too, so grandparents got the kids, and you know how it is. You just do whatever you got to do to figure it out, and that’s part of the ride, too. If you’re not enjoying it and there’s days where you don’t enjoy it, I get that. But at the same time, if you’re not enjoying it, then there’s really no reason to do it. Whether it’s having conversations in a podcast with Ramsey Russell or, at Delta. We had a group of young guys come up, I’m not even sure how old, they are younger than me, and I showed them the dog and pony show on this app and they all loved it. And the first thing that dude started doing, talking to me about was their, their TikToks and their social media and everything. And his faith on Jesus and it was just pure enjoyment. You don’t get that. I’m not going to have that conversation just randomly, and that’s been a fun that’s part of the ride. Like Stephen said, these conversations with, doctor duck and all these guys in the industry, tell me what you think. Is this something that we got and do we have something or we don’t? we’re trying to figure things out and feel out. We get in a cave trying to come up with these developments and these upgrades and stuff, and we need validation sometimes. It’s pure joy whenever we get to have these conversations, people, and it doesn’t have to be any, social media guru. Just, some kid or some adult that says, me and my boy go hunting in our little slough, and that’s the only place we go. But we love the app because we can keep track of how many mallards we shot.

Stephen Willie: Yeah, absolutely.

Nathan Marks: That’s good enough for us.

Stephen Willie: And that kind of drives the momentum. Like talking about having full time jobs. I love my job. I love doing SEO, overwhelmingly blessed to have it. I get that break. Kids go to sleep, and then I get to go do something else really fun. That’s totally different. And then I get to go work on duck hunting stuff.

Ramsey Russell: But, Steven, not everybody’s cut out for that work schedule. It’s just the truth, the whole make America great again. America was built on entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs built America. That’s the american dream, is not hitting the Powerball. It’s having the freedom to be an entrepreneur. But being a business owner, an entrepreneur, especially startup business, it takes a lot of time and, some people think of a full week as 40 hours, man. You can work that by Wednesday if you’re not careful.

Nathan Marks: Yeah-

Ramsey Russell: Because when you’ve got something you love to do and you’re building something, and it’s always going to need updates and growing and getting better and more personalization. And once you hit that summit, it’s time to build it better than that. It consumes you. It’s like a mistress. It’s going to consume you, but that’s what’s so great about it.

Stephen Willie: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: I just wonder if you all gotten used to it yet.

Stephen Willie: No, it’s like, even when you were talking about tagging buddies that you hunt with within that profile, my mind’s been racing as you guys during this podcast. How can we integrate that? How do we tag this? Will it be a tag based system where you can tag someone that you’re working, that pulls or that you’re working ducks with, and then it pulls you into that profile? So, it’s constantly going, like, how can we make it better?

Ramsey Russell: Yeah, it’s fun, I know it’s got a social feature that I can share pictures to my instagram through the apple, have you all ever considered having it to where I could? Your users would share it to your wall and almost build, like, a community in you all social media of just, hybrids or different species, I’d say something else I thought about that’s so useful for this is there are a lot of these contests going around. I know Safari Club International has a waterfowl and game bird contest. If I go out and shoot a species, I have to take a picture. Boom, I’ve got it right there, and I’ve got all the data and details and everything built right into this app. I can take a picture of my species and share it with them. It’s endless. The possibilities for this application.

Stephen Willie: Absolutely. So the social share feature, that’s another thing we haven’t thought about. Maybe we build, we integrate tagging us within the app.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: Or within Instagram.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Stephen Willie: So, like I said, that feedback. That’s how we’re going to grow the app.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah. I think it’s a cool thing. What blows my mind the most is the fact that I’ve now got an app, and I use it every morning. One last idea, and you all were talking about this, and I’m full of ideas. Look, I ain’t got it right-

Stephen Willie: Keep it going.

Ramsey Russell: Sometimes I may be shooting 30 minutes an hour into the hunt, I got to make my entry in my journal, and I’ve got to do it in the field. I’ve got to start the hunt in the field to get that. That waypoint where I want it on the map. Right?

Nathan Marks: Yeah.

Ramsey Russell: If I had an alarm. You’ve got the weather, you got the day ride. You got everything kind of plugged in already. I could just toggle a feature that says chime at shooting time. And so 30 minutes before shooting time anywhere in North America that I’m at, my phone chimes reminds me to turn it on and enter my thing. I thought, that’d be pretty handy. Think about the regular guy spends most of his career in his home state, most of his season in his home state. Makes a couple of trips a week here, two weeks there. What about a guy that’s traveling from the east coast, heck, I’m lucky to remember what time it is or what time zone, let alone what time shooting time is tomorrow morning. The further west you go, the further east you go, those times are changing drastically. It’s so many little simple things that over time can be added. That, to me as a hunt proof app user, that’s what’s so exciting is this app is going to continue to evolve. A lot of the apps I’ve got, I have to update them, but I don’t know what it did. You all I’m going to be able to physically see and touch and use and incorporate into my hunt every day. And that’s what excites me as a user.

Nathan Marks: One of the things that I’m been throwing around with Stephen is like a pre hunt checklist. Maybe even when you get pre leaving the house, do I got everything? or maybe it’s a trip checklist or maybe have both options, what are you packing for a trip? you’re heading out of state-

Ramsey Russell: You can have, a little notes feature. No notes features. It be built like notes. And I could just add it as a go.

Nathan Marks: You make your own list, and then you can check it off and do something. There’s a process to that. Okay, what works, what doesn’t work, get some feedback. I like this, didn’t like that might be a 4, 5, 6-month process trying to knock that out and say, now this is correct. We can roll with it. But does it make sense to spend the time to put it in there when, most guys really don’t want it? We can do so much, but at the same time, it depends how much, how deep in the weeds we want to go or not, as probably users, they-

Ramsey Russell: We the hunting community.

The Best $30 Spent on Hunting This Year

There’s so many advantages to using huntproof app. It’s so many advantages to using it, and it’s so easy, it’s so much easier than opening up my notes like I used to keep notes. 

Nathan Marks: Yeah, we want to put value in there. So I don’t want anyone to question, I bought this $30 app, and it’s a waste of money. Like, I don’t want anybody to ever say, I’m not getting my $30 out of it. And that’s the thing. We want to continue to over provide the value to everyone and say, like you said, best $30 I spent on my hunting gear in the last couple years.

Ramsey Russell: Wow, that’s a good way to end it, too, Nathan. I personally think that every duck hunter, especially the young guys getting started, the guys with young dogs, guys with their first dog, the old guys like myself, that did not keep a journal for so long. There’s so many advantages to using huntproof app. It’s so many advantages to using it, and it’s so easy, it’s so much easier than opening up my notes like I used to keep notes. Okay, I’m on a road trip and I’m going to add the dates and add the birds and add the stuff and it just add notes. And now I’ve got it all in this one handy app that’s doing a lot of stuff in the background, like keeping the weather and everything else up for me and then, and then making a forecast. I mean, it’s a full proof app, Hunt proof. Any closing remarks? Go ahead.

Nathan Marks: One of the things that I’ve got my heart set on, we’re going to figure it out. I don’t know exactly the details, but somewhere along the line, it might be another year or so before we can get there, but we will have some way somehow, where a user can extract a season, and get it some kind of a printed leather bound journal. So, like, you take the time to put all these digital entries in, but guys like you, guys like me would love to still have this pretty leather bound with pictures, with all the notes, everything all bound together, 2023 season hunt proof sitting on the shelf.

Ramsey Russell: Yeah.

Nathan Marks: And then, I can do my search features and I can do all the tech stuff in the phone, but at the same time, when you’re sitting around the fire at your cabin or your property and you’re showing your little kid or you’re showing, hey, this is the year that I started the hunt proof app. And here’s every page, has the hunt, has a picture or two, it has all the criteria, so and so fell in, floated as waiters, somebody left their gun at the truck, all that stuff. To me, I think that it’s going to happen. We just don’t know how and when, but it is going to happen.

Ramsey Russell: That’s going to be pretty cool. And I can print it off, put it on a bookshelf, and save it posterity. That’s when it’s going to be cool, or give it to my hunting buddies. I’m saying, could we hunt together? Yes. That would be cherished. Thank you all very much for taking the time to come on board tonight. I’ve enjoyed hearing your story. I’ve enjoyed hearing and learning more about hunt proof app. I keep calling the hunt proof app because that’s your website name, huntproof.app. But it is the hunt proof app, that’s true. Folks, thank you all for listening to this episode of Mojo’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast. Go to Huntproof app. Take my word for it. Skip the freebie. Go straight to $30. Can’t buy half a tank of gas for $30 no more. Trust me, you’ll be glad you got the app. See you next time.