Gear Wednesday: Discover The Hunter Sight with Bryce Stone

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Gear Wednesday: Discover The Hunter Sight with Bryce Stone

I have Bryce Stone. We are going to be talking about The Hunter Sight. Bryce is from the Houston area. He’s been hunting for over 30 years and like a lot of you out there, apps are big and digital is big. He looked at his properties and what he was thinking and people were talking to him and said, “I’m going to create something that’s going to help people manage their properties.” Bryce, welcome to the show and I’m excited to get started on our talk about The Hunter Sight.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me on. I’m excited to be a part of your show.

Let’s get some backstory on why you started this.

I live in Houston. I don’t get to hunt as much as I would love to. I could do it every day. I hunt a lot of smaller properties that are about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from where I live. I wanted a platform where I could keep up with all my hunting activities at each property and where I could scout and plan from the house and figure out the best stand on a property I should hunt each day. I also like to grow food plots. I put out supplementation and I’m putting out some minerals in 2019. I thought it would be cool to keep records and track all of that. The main idea started with trail cameras and trying to pinpoint the best stand to hunt based on my trail camera footage.

Most of the trail cameras have a date and timestamp. I would go through and look at that but I felt like I was missing something. It was sporadic here and there. I couldn’t really pinpoint a pattern and I didn’t know what the historical weather was two weeks ago, a month ago when these pictures were taken. I wanted to create a platform that could be a tool for hunters like me where you can rip your photos up into folders. Say you’re going after a particular animal or a buck. You could take your game camera and name it whatever you want, organize those pictures of that animal in a folder. The Hunter Sight will basically show you the frequency that animal was at your camera based on the time of day, the wind direction and the moon phase. You can use those three criteria to figure out when you should hunt, what state in you should hunt or what property you should hunt and give you the best chance. If you’re like me, you only get so many hunts a year between family and work and you want to maximize your chances of success. The Hunter Sight started from that and when I dove into it being obsessed like I am with hunting, I wanted to add all these extra other features as well.

With that background, who’s this for? Is this for somebody with 40 acres, 1,000 of acres? What’s the application best suited for?

The acreage amount really doesn’t matter. The benefits are for a private land hunter, though a public land hunter could utilize the game trend feature I’ve described. Most of the features are geared for someone hunting private land or at least hunting the same land over and over where they know the boundaries. This is not a phone app. It’s not a satellite mapping GPS device. We do utilize satellite mapping but it is more for organizing, planning and scouting of land that you’re already familiar with. It’s not a GPS.

Let’s get the 50,000-foot level and in each section give us some features and benefits and advantage of that section of the app.

I’ll log into a demo account. If anyone wants to check this out themselves, it’s [email protected] is the username and the password is DEMO12345678.

Folks, feel free to jump on and use it. How would somebody get ahold of you if they’re interested in purchasing the product?

You can purchase the product online or if you have additional questions, you can email me at [email protected] or [email protected]. The packages are also online if you want to purchase. There is also a fourteen-day free trial version. If you sign up for that, you do have to wait for the fourteen days to end before you can sign up for a package. You have access to all the features with that trial, except you can only upload ten game camera pictures. That is the hold on that but at least, it allows you to see how it’s used. This is the main page of the demo account I created. Yours could look different. You can change the picture background of whatever you want. You can change this icon up in your account page. These properties, this is your individual account that is for you to manage your properties. You can have unlimited properties. You would simply click at a property and give it a name and create a property. You see big old ranches and these six icons are how you manage your property. These are the tools you can use. To get started, you would click the map.

Let’s go back to the main page because you had some trail camera pictures. Let’s talk about that.

This is the main page. You can write notes for yourself. If you have work to be done coming up and you want to write a list of a to-do list, you can keep that or observations in the field, you can put that in your notes. This Hunt Club invite is people that you have invited and that have invited you to join their group management. The shared photos, these are all pictures that have been shared to this hunt club, The Hunter Sight Test. When you’re part of a group club, pictures that you share and people that share pictures with you will pop up below for you to look at. The Hunter Sight demo, the game photos that I described, we’ll click on that first. It’s this middle icon. Your cameras are added on your satellite map and you would choose your camera. There are three cameras on this property, you select a folder. This is deer miscellaneous test folder. It’s got random pictures. It’s even got raccoons, squirrels and everything else.

Typically, you would want to organize and pattern a specific animal when doing this. These are the pictures that are uploaded. You can share to a hunt club you belong to like The Hunter Sight Tests. It’s part of the group and it’s in this dropdown. I can share that picture. I can edit the picture and change the date and time if the timestamp is wrong and of course, I can delete them. When you’re going to add a photo, you would click to add a photo. You can upload an SD card and group all your photos up. I’ll throw some random pictures so you can see how it works. If I want to adjust the dates on this, say the month was wrong, I can change it right there. Adjust the date for all photos and we’re looking up the historical weather.

Basically, it puts them into your file folder and could you sort by date?

You can’t sort by date. They automatically upload by date. When you want to actually use this for hunting or planning your hunts, you would click down to game trends, select the camera, select the folder you have organized and you can select the date range that you want to do. Maybe you have 200 pictures of a buck from May to October but you really only want to pattern September and October pictures. You don’t care what he was doing in May, June, July or August. You would select this from and to date and it will show your patterns based on time of day, wind direction and moon phase. You can easily see when he was most frequent at that game camera.

The idea is you get the frequency, then you get wind direction, time of day and moon phase.

Most of this one has been a waning crescent moon in the blue 37% of the pictures. You can select your date range for your pictures but this is a tool for you to utilize. Basically, you’re organizing your pictures into a folder of what you want to pattern, whether it is deer in general, a specific buck, a turkey or a hog. Whatever it may be that you’ve got these trail cam pictures of and you’re wanting to figure out when that animal is most common at your camera, other than that date and timestamp that you can see when you’re looking through your pictures. This does that for you. It will break it down by the time of day in three-hour increments, the wind direction and moon phase.

When you’re using this, we also have a seven-day weather forecast. When you’re sitting at home and you’re trying to plan your upcoming hunt a few days out and you’re going through your game cameras and your game trends, you can look through and see, “We have a Southeast wind coming up when I’m going to get to go hunt. I should check my game trends and figure out if there is a pattern with the south or southeast wind and maybe that’s the standing area I should hunt.” All of this is basically tools. This isn’t going to kill an animal for you but it can definitely help you. This weather, it will give you the barometric pressure, the wind speed, and direction, chance of rain, sunset, sunrise and of course, the temperatures.

If you keep up with nutrition like food plots, supplementation or mineral sites, this is also great for you because for instance, here are food plots. If you want to add your food plot record that you planted, you could put a summer mix, put the day you planted, how many pounds per acre, size of the food plot, fertilizer, amount of fertilizer and how successful you think this was. You can enter a number when you’re doing this record and you can always go back and edit these records and change. You can write additional notes. Here’s an example, a fall mix. I broke it down. Oats, 25 pounds an acre, rye, 15 pounds an acre and clover, 10 pounds. You can actually see all that. Here’s the rating I gave it. Fertilized, none and the size.

You can share these records. Simply click the little arrow share button and any hunt club you belong to would be in this dropdown list. There is only one hunt club that I’m a part of with this membership and it’s The Hunter Sight Tests. I can share that record. I can edit. If I need to fix something, I mistyped or something was wrong, I can change it and of course, I can delete these records. You can do that for food plots, supplementation, which would be like protein feeders or if you put out alfalfa hay or if you do cottonseed. It can be whatever you want. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in a feeder, it’s marking a location or where you’re putting out food. Here are the records. You give your feeder a name, what you put in it, how many pounds, the date and any additional notes like, “Repair damaged fence panel, unclog the protein, repair a leg. You can share these again with the hunt club. You can edit these if there’s a mistake or you can delete them. This is what a record would look like for supplementation. Your feeder, you add to your satellite map, which is this icon. There are three feeders on this so you can choose it, put in whatever field it is, however many pounds.

You can do that for minerals. You can put if it was a trace mineral, salt or whatever mineral you’re using. You can list it by pounds or if it was a big block, write additional notes in the date you applied it. Here’s what these records would look like. You can share them, you can edit or delete. That’s how that works. The fear trend is a side deal. If you’re wanting to track how much protein you’re putting out, this can do it. You can choose a feeder, choose a year and it will show you January through December, how many pounds, like in April a 1,000 pounds and then it shows in a bar graph. It easily displays.

That way, if you’re wanting to manage how much this is costing you or what your deer likes, you can compare your feeders. There are three feeders on the property. This is the total amount. You can select a time range to compare actually how much consumption you’ve had at each one. You can compare different brands of protein or different types and see what your deer likes. I know some states don’t allow this. It’s another tool for those that do that. The harvest section, far bottom left icon, this is how you can record all your kills on the property. When you enter in, you can click to upload your grip-and-grin picture, choose what animal was. If it’s not one of these listed, choose other and type it in.

If you’re one of those that keep up with the age structure of your animals, we have it listed from one and a half to eight and a half years old. You put the date and the time you harvested. If you have your stands located on your satellite map, you can choose that. When you add your record, they pop up. We automatically add the weather for you when you put your date and time in. Based on your property location, we look up that historical weather. You can share these with the hunt club. You can edit if you need to change something or delete them. If you are one of those that are really wanting to keep up with the age structure of your bucks or your buck-to-doe ratio of what you’ve killed, you can go to harvest trends. Based on your records, we’ll supply you with this information. You can do all years or individual years. We’ll show you from one and a half to eight and a half years old the number of bucks harvested at that age structure and the percent of your total and then we display it in a bar graph.

We also show in a pie chart your bucks versus does killed. You can do it by individual years or all years. All these tools you can use are private. Only you can see this. When you log in, this is your account. You can create unlimited properties. Keep track of all this information. If you’re on a lease or you’re an outfitter or habitat consultant, deer game management consultant, a game ranch or you have a group of buddies, family or neighbors, and you would like to share information, plan or improve your overall hunting for the area and create a club. You would create a club, you can give it a name, give it a description if you want. You can’t duplicate names. On The Hunter Sight, there will only be one club name that is named that there can’t be duplicates. It’s that easy to create it.

We’ll go to one already created that’s populated. The Hunter Sight Test, this club group, I didn’t create this group. I am not the admin of this group. By that, the look is a little bit different when you create a club versus when you’re a member. From a member perspective, there are notes. You’re not allowed to type any of these notes. The admin of the group puts these notes. The admin can make other members admins as well so they’re not the only one and the admin can delete members of the group. As a member, if I want to leave the group myself, I can click leave hunting club permanently. It will ask me if I’m sure because that is leaving forever. You can be invited again if you accidentally do it. They send you another invite and accept.

Is this what we’re going to use for Deer Hunting Institute?

Yes, your name will be right up instead of The Hunter Sight Test. It will be the Deer Hunting Institute or whatever you want to name it. This club map, you can utilize or not for the situation. You don’t have to use all these features. They’re just tools for you to use. You could separate them. If you’re on a lease with guys and you want to break down everybody’s little hunting area, you could color code it to make it easier to see. Like this is Doug’s place, Bill’s place, Robert’s hunting areas, Steve’s.

How many acres would that represent?

It’s 1,525 and 2,147. There are the markers. The acres are right there. If you want to see them, you can click it or take them off.

That’s a pretty big property.

This is a huge property and this is a test property. I wish I had some land this size to hunt. I mainly hunt 20 acres to 60-acre size properties. Edit if you want to erase something on the map that was a mistake or you can modify.

Let’s go through the icons.

To add those to the map, for a feeder for instance, we’ll click that and we click on the map where we want to place it. We can write notes like, “Upper Northwest corner overlooking food plot.” We can call this the fall feeder or whatever you want to name it. You have feeders, you can put deer sightings. Your game cameras are ultra-important because this is how you get them to be on your dropdown list to choose a game camera. You have to have them on the map. Like your feeders, you’re stands and your game cameras, you want to put on the map. You don’t necessarily have to draw your boundaries out of your property. You need to zoom over the area of where these are and place them because I’m getting the GPS coordinates for that so I can look up the historical weather. Place the game camera, we can name it.

Game cameras, feeders, what else should we have? Deer sightings?

We have food plots, water, your full wheeler, a custom.

How about bedding areas? Do you have bedding areas?

I don’t. That would have to be a custom. I have tree stands, minerals, ground blinds, tree rubs, scrapes, ground blinds, fruit trees, box blinds and campsites. There are fourteen or fifteen of these. We don’t have the bedding areas. You could put the sighting as your bedding area. That’s probably what I would use.

Could you add another icon?

You could put the custom icon as your bedding. I can always add a bedding icon as well later. That wouldn’t be an issue.

What’s my North-South direction? How is it situated?

The way you’re looking at it would be North and South is down and East and West.

Is that indicated? No compass?

No, there are GPS coordinates on the right-hand corner.

I’m thinking about the wind direction. I pop it up and I want to know, “Here’s where I’m going to hunt. Here’s North and South,” or I’m inviting a friend and saying, “You’re going to hunt in the lower southeast corner. Here’s where your stand is.” A compass would be applicable because then I know the wind direction.

We could, but if you’re looking at your weather and it’s telling you it’s the Southeast wind, then up is North and this is South.

I’d have to know that. That’s my only comment. I have to know that’s there.

Those are your markers. Here are your drawing tools. Do you want to add colors? If I want to erase it, I click eraser. I double click on it and it’s gone. When I’m done with everything, I want to make sure and click save. It will autosave after a period of time but always make sure and click save. You don’t want to put a bunch of work in and accidentally lose it and have to redo it. There are four different types of maps. We’re looking at topography map with imagery. Topography maps are good for all over the US but they aren’t good for Canada, Mexico or anywhere else in the world. For the satellite and the hybrid map, that’ll work anywhere in the world. People in Canada and Mexico can use this platform. They wouldn’t be able to use the topography maps. One other thing I should mention is you need to use Chrome, Safari, Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox as your internet browser. You can’t use Internet Explorer or your Samsung internet on your android phone. You would need to use your Chrome on your android phone to utilize this. The maps won’t work on those browsers.

If you’re part of a group and you have your club map and you’re laying out where everybody’s hunting, you might not necessarily want to put your stand or your feeders if you’re on a lease with a bunch of people but you can at least identify boundaries or where everybody is hunting. There’s a community forum so you can communicate with each other and find out, “Who’s going to the lease this weekend? Would you mind checking my stands and feeders, reply?” It’s easy to communicate with everyone. The admin of the group has the ability to edit or delete these messages. They’re in charge of keeping this in order.

If you want to create a new post, it’s that simple. This is a way for everybody to communicate. I know on some leases there are ten or twenty guys and three or four of them were good buddies and they text each other on their phone but they don’t necessarily communicate with Joe and Bob out of Louisiana and Arkansas that come up a few times out of the year. This way everybody can stay in contact and they’re all on the same page. You have game photos. You saw you can share game photos to a club. These are all shared photos of this club.

That’ll be beneficial because then you can take a census, how many bucks you have and you can start targeting bucks also.

You can use these game photos to figure all that out. You can come down and create this hit list. Through the use of the community forum, you can message each other and figure out what animals you want on your hit list and when you have these, make sure you can write notes.

If you want to call, if you want to have a hog weekend or whatever.

When you put your mouse over the picture, it will have the notes displayed, “Kill all pigs on site.” These are additional notes you can have with each one and you can delete them. If somebody’s killed the animal, take it off the hit list or if there’s a disagreement with this animal and it’s no longer be on the hit list, delete it. With nutrition, if you share your records with the group, this is really good for organizations or habitat managers, people that are trying to help others improve their land and conservation efforts. This feature can help them educate and help us all be better stewards. These records you can get pretty detailed as you saw.

Is that a different property?

Yes, right. This is the group property. These are all the records that have been shared with this group. The hunt club feature is basically for group management. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re hunting the same land. It can be a platform where you’re going in there with other hunters and you’re sharing information to grow, to learn and to be better.

If I was up there, the group would be my leases. Each lease would be a group. That’s my thought when you’re thinking about selling these, this could be a management tool for outfitters to keep track of everything they’re doing on that piece of property. They can look at it and know the numbers, know the dates and know everything. I like it because of that. There are a lot of apps out there. There are a lot of great apps that do a lot of things. This to me, is a management tool to help you manage your property. That’s why I wanted to dig deeper into this with Bryce. How much does this cost?

There are three packages. The general package that allows you to do everything you’ve seen is $24.99 plus tax for the year. If you want to upgrade, basically the upgraded package is $59.99 and with that package, you can upload 4,000 game photos and you have the ability to post your lease or outfit for all The Hunter Sight members to view. With the Safari package, you can upload 10,000 pictures with the ability to buy more pictures and post your lease or outfit to advertise.

How much is the Safari package?

$99.99 or $100 a year.

Where do they go to see that? If they’re interested, say, “I’m interested more in this,” what’s your website?

It’s TheHunterSight.com.

Anything else you want to show us?

You’ve seen all these records before. This harvest data, it’s the same thing. If you’re with a group of people, you can find what everybody’s killed with your lease members. They’re posted and shared in this hunt club. It looks like temperature and wind are cut off but you’ve got to come down and scroll over. The reason is that this notes section is so long that it pushed everything out over to the right. You have to scroll over. If you’re on a lease with guys and you want to manage the age structure of bucks, this is perfect using this harvest trends, which basically pulls off of your records that you’ve shared or added to the club. This shows your group. Your buck’s percentage, what the age structure was and your buck-to-doe ratio.

For $25 a year, each person can manage their own properties and they can create groups. You can create as many groups as you want and have as many properties as you want. The only hold back you have is the ability to upload game photos. With the $24.99 package, you can upload 1,000 game photos. If you’re running a bunch of cameras, you might have 200 or 300 pictures of this one particular buck and then 400 pictures of another buck. 1,000 pictures can take care of a lot of the hunters. If you’re an outfitter, you might want to upgrade to the outfitter safari package where you have 4,000 and 10,000 or more pictures. For the average guy like myself, a thousand pictures to use for game trends, basically that is all the game photos are. It’s for their ability to share with the hunt club, with the group and for you privately to figure out your patterns. Figure out the wind direction, time of day and moon phase that that buck has come in most frequent to that game camera.

What else have you got to share?

Lease listing, all members of The Hunter Sight are able to see lease postings. This is the information about the property that’s up for a lease and if you want to respond to it, you click on it and it gives the information of who to contact and you send them an email. This is my opinion or how I would feel about it. What I think this is great and separates this lease listing compared to other websites that strictly do this is, not only are you getting to do this for $24.99 a year but with the hunt club feature, if you are a lease or an outfit, you’re going to have your group management hunt club. If I am looking to join a lease or join an outfit to hunt, I could go to their website but how updated are those pictures? How recent is that information?

I could go to their hunt club, they invited me after I inquired about going to hunt and I joined their hunt club and I looked at their portfolio that we did. As a prospect, I can go to their group, I can sit and I can look at recent game photos they’ve uploaded. I can look at any nutrition records they want to share. I can look at who’s killed what lately, I can see a hit list of animals on the target and I can see and decide for myself, “I need to go hunt with that outfitter or I want to join that lease. They have the same ideas or principles I do.” It helps both parties to find a good fit.

This is what your account would look like. It gives you your name and support if you need to contact me with any questions. You can downgrade and upgrade packages. You can update your billing information, you can get out of auto renew with a click of a button. It tells you what your current subscription is, when you started when it ends and how much. This Refer a Friend, every member has their own referral code, which gives 10% off to whoever uses it in the coupon section. In return, by them using your code, you get an extra 1,000 photos to use for your game trends. It’s a win-win for both parties.

This is impressive and I like how you put it together. For Deer Hunting Institute, it’s going to be a great tool for my members. What promo code do we end up using? The Deer Hunting Institute will be coming online and we talked about getting a promo code. For a member of Deer Hunting Institute, what code would they use?

For 25% off, they can enter in DHI201925.

What if somebody’s an annual member? Do they pay up front?

We can do a 50% discount and that will be DHI201950.

Bryce and I are joining up to give you an opportunity to get this tool and use this tool at a significant discount. I want to thank Bryce for offering that to all Deer Hunting Institute members.

No problem. I’m here to help and try and make a positive difference. I really love the platform that you are coming out with and I’m excited to join up with you.

With that, we’re going to thank Bryce Stone from The Hunter Sight for sharing on Whitetail Rendezvous gear about his new app. Try it out for free. You get that fourteen-day free trial or get ahold of Bryce and say, “What about this? What about that?” One thing I’ve found with apps is once a person starts using it, he or she will say, “Have you thought about doing this? Have you thought about doing that?” Together we can make a tool even better. Thank you so much, Bryce, for being on the show. You’ve got a great product.

Thank you, Bruce.

Important Links:

• The Hunter Sight
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=XJocKEFEhYc
• https://TheHunterSight.com/
• https://www.Facebook.com/thehuntersight/
• https://LaPraim.com/case-study/the-hunter-sight
• https://www.LinkedIn.com/in/bryce-stone-4b4420a2/
• https://www.Instagram.com/thehuntersight/

About Bryce Stone