2020 Vision: Our CEO Looks Back at Last Year

Exactly four years ago, me and a few buddies were meeting on nights and weekends, scribbling on post-it notes, and constantly texting and calling back and forth about an idea. Out of that early grind, we launched this company called GoWild™ with just $500.

To promote the app in the early days, I shipped GoWild stickers, shirts & hats out of a spare bedroom at my house. I've hand stamped thousands of boxes & envelopes with the GoWild logo. I wrote letters to every single person thanking them for their support of our small business. I did this for years, and our team still includes a note with all GoWild swag purchased. 

2020 brought challenges that, quite frankly, we are glad to put behind us. Early in the year was tough. Scary even. 

But despite the turmoil of 2020, something interesting happened. Our community kept growing, the quality of the interactions kept increasing, and we launched GoWild Direct, a new way to shop for gear directly through GoWild. With GoWild Direct, we donate a percentage of your purchase to Raise ‘Em Outdoors to help kids learn to hunt, fish and camp. 

By the end of the year, our community had grown more than 60 percent. Not only that, GoWild was just named GearJunkie’s 2021 best social media app for hunting, an honor we are grateful for. 

The acknowledgement calls out just how diehard our community is, something I found out recently went I posted onto the platform. In the post, I mentioned the letters I’ve sent to our customers and fans, and how important the audience was. One member, Al Dennison, commented back with a photo showing every single letter we had written Al since 2017, for nearly 20 total letters. 

He kept them all. 

My heart warmed when reading the comment. The others commented that they had done the same. GoWild is not a tech giant, or some cool “app.” It’s a community, or even better, it’s family. 

Al Dennison's collection of GoWild notes.

As we kick off a new year and put to bed one that has been hard on us all, I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you for being a part of this journey. Don’t ever think you’re just a username on our platform. Your involvement and engagement is helping other new anglers, hunters and budding outdoorsmen and women learn. It’s a place where influencers with thousands of followers don’t matter, it’s how many individuals you can truly influence to get better at the outdoor pursuits they chase. 

As I’ve said since the beginning, we’re all stronger together. Stay wild, and happy new year, 

Brad Luttrell
Cofounder, CEO
GoWild