Quiver is an app that is built for Whitetail fanatics. It’s a weather and tracking tool all combined into one easy-to-use app. In this episode, Brandon Gador, the Founder of Quiver, talks about his passion for hunting and his experience building mobile products perfect for the outdoorsman and hunters. Learn the best features of the app—from knowing the weather for your hunt to tracking everything you’ve experienced on the stand—and be ready to take on your next hunt.
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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
Discover Quiver Hunting App – Brandon Gador
We’re going to talk to Brandon Gador. He hails from West Bend, Wisconsin, but he spent most of his time in a technology business out in San Francisco. He travels back and forth to Wisconsin as much as possible to do duck hunting, fishing and chasing whitetails. Brandon’s got a great pedigree. He’s got a degree from the University of Wisconsin and he also got his Master’s from there. What he decided to do while sitting in a treestand is, “How can I make the hunting experience easier for everybody? How can I collect data? How can I help people understand what happened on October 18th of 2015 with a moon phase, it was overhead and waxing?” He’s that detail. At the end of the day, Quiver Hunting App was born. This app is for you and for me to log everything that happens when we’re up in a tree, in a ground blind or wherever we happen to be chasing whitetails. It gives us data that we can go back and mine.
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I’m heading to West Bend, Wisconsin. I’m with Brandon Gador. Brandon is the owner, operator, creator of the Quiver Hunting App. Brandon, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Bruce. I’m happy to be here.
He’s the Midwest guy that ended up in San Francisco. That’s where we’re going to start. How did a Midwest guy get to San Francisco?
I went to school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Coming out of college, a friend and I started a business and we were doing that for about two years. That was an amazing learning experience. I’ve learned more probably running that business for two years than I did in the actual business school. Ultimately, that tanked and I was looking for the next opportunity. A job opportunity opened up in San Francisco to continue to work in tech. It seemed like a good learning experience on the product management and marketing side. I took the leap of faith and moved out to San Francisco, not knowing what I was getting myself into. San Francisco wasn’t on the radar to start with, but I thought I can get out of Wisconsin for a little bit and check it out.
How’s the hunting environment in San Francisco?
It’s pretty non-existent. There are not a lot of hunters in the city. A funny story, I was preparing for my elk hunt. I was driving around and there’s an archery range in Golden Gate Park. There are lots of target shooters that shoot archery in the park, but it’s primarily recurved bow. There are a few compound guys that go in there to practice and you can tell they’re hunters. While I’m driving there, I usually have my elk calls in and I’m practicing my calls in the car. I was at a stoplight and all of a sudden, this woman next to me rolls down her window and she goes, “Excuse me, sir, is there a dog dying in your car?” I was like, “No, that’s me practicing my elk calls right now, sorry about that.” There are not a lot of hunters in there. Most people when they find out about it are curious about it because they’ve never been exposed to it before.
It’s an interesting thing. I’ve got a friend Sam Ayres, Living Country in the City. He lived in Hollywood and Vine. He get off his first elk hunt ever. He says all the time that it’s so hard. One thing he shared with me is that venison, elk or deer is the original organic food. With all this “friendly place” to say, “I eat organic. I’m gluten-free. I’m this and I’m that.” They said, “What’s up with you?” He says, “I’m entirely organic and I eat meat. I eat venison and elk.” They’re deer in the headlights after that.
One of the guys that I read a lot and follow, Steven Rinella, has the saying around venison diplomacy. I found that in the city. If people are curious or they want to learn more about it, I’ll bring a pound of elk burger or something to work and give it to them or other friends in the city that haven’t tried it, to open their eyes around hunting and sharing the harvest that way. I’ve had some pretty interesting conversations in the lunchroom at work when I bring my lunch, maybe it’s a venison chili or a stew of some sort. Someone’s asking me like, “What do you got?” I’m like, “Chili.” They’re like, “Is it a hamburger?” I’m like, “This would be elk meat.” That opens up to a whole different type of conversation. It definitely keeps it interesting.
When you wake up in the morning thinking elk hunting, you try and put a plan together, but as soon as you hear that first bugle, you're off to the races trying to try and find that critter. Share on XI can appreciate that. That’s for sure. Since you mentioned elk, what about elk hunting? What state do you go in and why do you find that so alluring?
I grew up whitetail hunting with my dad. Primarily, the only type of hunting I was exposed to was sitting in the treestand and setting up for a whitetail to walk by. I’ve always loved the mountains. I have spent a lot of time skiing, backpacking and hiking in the mountains. Elk hunting, I always had this allure of where do these elks live? As a kid, I remember my dad leaving for elk hunting trips. That being something I’ve always wanted to do. When I moved out West, I finally started to make some money. Before I could never afford to go elk hunting but I started to save up. Several years ago my dad and I went on our first elk hunt. I immediately, after that first morning, was like, “This is something I’ve got to do every year.” I’m hooked.
There’s nothing like hiking around on the mountain trying to find elk. It combines all the things that I love, and it’s such an incredible workout as well. We started in Colorado, just outside of Meeker. The first three years were rifle hunts and then the last two years where archery hunts. We started out as rifles, but I knew right away and I always wanted to get out there with the bow. We’re working towards that. Every year we’ve been around Meeker except 2018. We didn’t draw and we were down in the Durango area. There’s a unit up by Meeker that we went in that needs about one preference point in the White River National Forest. We went down to an over the counter unit outside of Durango, but then we were back up in the White River National Forest.
For those who don’t know White River National Forest has the largest elk herd in the world. It has thousands of elk and White River is a huge national forest that’s available to you. Does it get crowded? Yes, within two miles of the trailhead. After that, you are on your own. That’s why I like it. I hunted Unit 42. I saw some elk. One of our friends Justin Johnson from Commit Outdoors took a very nice six-point bull. There’s nothing like hearing an elk bugle in my opinion.
Someone was funky with the rut and elk weren’t talking much. I was a little bum coming out because I didn’t hear that many bugles, but this past year, it was unbelievable. There’s a quote from Mike Tyson, “Everyone has a plan until I punch them.” The same is true when you wake up in the morning thinking elk hunting, you try to put a plan together, but as soon as you hear that first bugle, you’re off to the races to try and find that critter. To follow up on that too, we had some good encounters this past year. One where we were calling in and my dad had brought in this 6×6 about 40 yards from him and I could see it. It’s like one of those classic stories where you started to see the antlers rise up over the ridge before you see the actual bull. This bull got within 40 yards of my dad and then ripped this massive bugle at them. The wind had shifted, so he started trotting the other way, but my heart was pounding so hard that I couldn’t tell if that was the elk running or if that was my heart starting to race.
I know a lot of people hunt whitetails, especially archers. I’ve come to Colorado. Every time we got into elk, but just the experience, I hunt for myself. I don’t team hunt, maybe I should, but that’s how I like to do it. It’s an amazing experience, adventure to have a bull elk within 40 yards screaming at you. You can’t believe the primal scream. It gets your attention.
I tell my friends too. They’re like, “I want to go, but it costs too much money.” I’m like, “If you put away a certain amount of dollars every month and you slowly build up that kitty fund, you’ll be able to go.” That’s what I do. The price has changed every year and the out-of-state tag is expensive, but if you save up for it throughout the year, it’s definitely a doable hunt.
Let’s switch it back to Quiver Hunting App, we’re going to talk about whitetail hunting. I want to talk about the app because it’s very interesting. All the technology that’s available and there are a lot of other apps out there. My good friend runs HuntData. There are maps, pins and all its capabilities. I used it at sheep hunting and it was a great tool. That’s what I want people to know from you about the tools available, specifically Quiver Hunting App because if you’re not embracing technology, you have to.
You hit the nail on the head there as far as building a tool. I mentioned that I have these jobs that I moved out to San Francisco for. I’ve always had this itch around trying to build a product for the outdoorsman, whether it be hunting and fishing. In previous years I built social networks or pseudo-social networks for hunters and fishermen. Those didn’t pan out because there are some already great social networks out there and it’s tough to start one of those from the beginning. What I was thinking about what I wanted to build for mobile, we wanted to focus on building something that was a utility to hunters. Something that would become useful for them and that would help them with their hunts.
That’s what Quiver is. I run and bike a lot as well and I use apps like Strava or MapMyRun. I was sitting there like, “It would be interesting if we had a similar tool that allows the user to easily track their hunts so that they can build up a story or a timeline of their season.” We started to riff on that idea some more around what other types of information would be useful, knowing that the hardcore hunters are already taking notes out there. If you read any blog posts out there or study whitetail hunting or even elk hunting. A lot of the guys will say that the diligent notetakers and the ones that can go back and reference those notes over the years are the ones that are more and more successful each year.
What this has transformed into is a mobile hunting journal where you can fire up the app and it allows you to track your hunt. There are three pieces to the app. The first part is it functions like a weather app. The weather information that we give you is specific to hunters. On the home screens, you’ll see wind speed, wind direction, sunrise, sunset, barometric pressure and the current weather. You can add different locations as your home screens. That way, let’s say you’re trying to plan a hunt for that night, you know your different stand locations or what wind directions are the best. You can quickly open up the app and slide through the different home screens and get a quick gauge on, “Where’s the best spot for me to go tonight?” That’s what’s on the surface around is the weather data.
On the tracking side, like you would track a run and this is where the inspiration came from the app like Strava, which is a running app, but you start tracking your hunt. Once you get up into your stand or you’re in your blind, this app is geared towards whitetail hunters. It’s more of the hunter that’s not going to be moving around a ton of the mountains or anything but more towards whitetail guys. You start tracking your hunt and it starts a timer. From there, we make it easy to log different events that happen throughout your hunt. You can log different deer sightings, whether that’s a doe or a buck. You can take notes in the app. You can add a photo. You can record when shots are taken.
While you’re tracking the hunt, then it’s looking at the timeline of your hunt. You can see when you started so you get a good idea of when you were out there and at different times when you’ve recorded activity. Once you’re done, you end the hunt in the app. You have a completed view of what that hunt was. The interesting thing there is then you can go back, review and you can see, “I hunted in this stand, I went out at 3:30. We had a west wind coming in at five miles an hour and the deer started moving at about 5:15.” You created a nice timeline of all these individual hunts that allow you to go back and analyze so that you can hunt smarter in future sits.
Does your weather portion give you a forecast? Everybody knows you hunt the frontend and the backend of a cold front coming through or any Delta that’s twenty degrees different. Barometric pressure drops and we got a prep moving through range. I know it doesn’t matter. In my opinion, it’s the Delta between temperature and then the barometric pressure.
We don’t do any future reporting. That’s something we would want to bring into the app where we give you more data in the future so that you could start to see those trends happening. What we have seen is the exact evidence of what you’re saying there, Bruce, around these Deltas. One thing that’s pretty neat and something that we want to expand on in the future is taking the data that we’re collecting in aggregate. That’s an important part for users to know that all their data, everything is very private. We don’t share that with anybody and we only look at in aggregate. We’ll be able to go back and measure. We know a cold front moved through.
We had dropping barometer heading into the storm and then it was rising afterward. We look at actual activity logged in the app to support these types of theories out there. We have an interesting blog post that does support that notion around these changing weather conditions where we look at the average deer seen per hunts leading into this storm front. The post four days after the storm, and we see about a 60% increase in the average amount of deer seen per hunt. It’s neat to be able to back up these types of theories that we have around why deer move with the actual data that we see in the app.
This is getting back to a tool. Forget about the technology. It’s a tool to help you become a better hunter on your 40, 180 whatever you have acres. I know everybody knows a treestand, knows the best wind, knows all that, but how many out there keep the journal and say, “I went into the stand at 3:15. The deer are moving at 5:00. The moon was underfoot overhead?” You start throwing all this stuff in there and it’s hard to remember. It’s like fishing. I use to fish a lot. I could tell from the tides and the moon and all that stuff, and I had a journal. I’d say, “Here’s the solar time,” we would hit fish within a couple of minutes of all that data.
We wanted to create a simple tool. It’s not like some soup up technology piece. It’s a journaling app where you can log your hunts and then log the different activity, but then we pull in all the weather information for you so that’s it’s all right there in one app.
The diligent note-taking hunters who can go back and reference those notes over the years are the ones that are more successful each year. Share on XWhat does it cost?
It’s free.
Do you sell on advertising? What’s your business model for the cashflow?
There are a few different avenues that we want to test out. Initially, we built this product as MVP, which is a Minimum Viable Product. We wanted to understand the problem or the use case that we’re building for. Is that something that users would want to use? That’s the leap of faith you have to take with any new business idea or a new product you want to put out there. It’s understanding, are we solving a problem? With this app, in order to answer that first question around is this something that users are going to use, we wanted it to be free to at least start to collect that information. We’re coming into our third hunting season. We’ve tracked over 25,000 hunts. We have a 4.5-star rating in the App Store and we get a ton of amazing feedback from users. We can say that we’ve answered that first question around will people use it and is it a tool that they’ll find useful?
The next question we need to try to answer is how do we support this as a business? Because it’s been completely bootstrapped and it’s an investment over time to build it. There are a couple of different ways we’re going to try and solve that. One idea we want to test out is a freemium model where the app is still free but users can sign up for paid features. One thing we’re thinking about around testing is would users be interested in receiving alerts specific to them, specific to their geo and potentially when are good times to hunt. Knowing that we’re seeing the weather pattern come in. Knowing that we’ve seen hunters in that area starting to log more activity in their hunts when they want to get an alert around that when they pay for a feature like that. We don’t know but that’s one hypothesis we have and something we want to test.
The other angle is through sponsorships. For anyone that’s used the app or if you checked it out, you’ll know that the imagery in it and the design of it was important to us. We wanted to build a beautiful app that was easy to use. If you go in there, you’ll see some amazing imagery and home screen shots. We’re working with Legendary Whitetails. We’re going to feature Legendary Whitetails imagery in the app. One thing we didn’t want to do is put in annoying ads or pop up ads that people see in apps because that kills the user experience and it’s annoying to the user. We wanted to weave in a brand’s content, so that was seamless into the experience and not intrusive. You’ll see this and very shortly, we should be rolling it out with Legendary Whitetails content. It’s a way for them to extend their brand and so they can reach hunters in the treestand. For us, it’s a way to support future development.
If you don’t know AJ Gall. He’s at Legendary Whitetails. He heads up their community division. He runs their blog. He’s got a great forecast. If you go to LegendaryWhitetails.com/community, you’re going to find AJ. Check him out. He’s been on the show a couple of times. He did some specific things for me regarding the rut and we did an eBook with him. They’re good people and they’re Wisconsin based, home-grown and all living to the whitetail lifestyle with clothing and everything else combined.
Some exciting stuff we’ve done with AJ is using our data. They have a data-driven rut post where we look at our data. Looking at the same metrics around average deer seen and trying to see how that changes throughout the month of October, November and December. We talk about based on the data when did those averages years have spiked and then put predictions out there for each state. That’s another collaboration piece that we work on with them using our data. I can share features of the app. In the app, it’s showing my current location, but then you could add other locations in the app. There are some dummy locations I’ve added. If you had different stands in different parts of the area that you hunt, you could throw it in there and see the different wind. Moon phases are there. This works like a weather app where you can go across different locations. We’re working on with Legendary Whitetails. You can see the imagery in the back. We’re going to bring some of their content in and some of their images so we can extend the Legendary Whitetails brand in the app. That way it doesn’t feel like an intrusive ad within the experience.
Can you hit “Start hunt?”
We had turkey hunts. You can track whitetail hunts, deer hunts or turkey hunts. People are using this app for all sorts of reasons, pig hunts. We have a lot of fishermen using this app for their fishing. We’ve been asked a lot to build a very similar app for fishing and build out that capability, which we love to do. We’re a little tight on our resources so we’re focusing on whitetails. I’m going to choose where I am. Pick your location and you can name the hunt. From there, you start to hunt. You see the key weather data up at the top round, current conditions, sunrise, sunset, which is super helpful when you’re worried about shooting times, moon phase and barometric pressure.
From there, these are all the different events that you can track in the app. The deer seen if it was a buck or a doe. Photos, shot, taking notes and then if you’re lucky enough, deer down. The user can go in and pop in and have this content throughout their hunt and they build out a timeline. There’s a log that we saw a buck that gets added and it creates this timeline that I was talking about of the entire hunt. What’s neat about it is you can see a summary of your entire season. How many hunts have you done so far, how many hours have you been out there, how many deer have you seen? You can slice and dice that by the year. It’s interesting for guys to be able to go back and see how much time they spend in the stand the past season and compare that to the previous season. All the previous hunts are there. You can tap into one of those and see what happened there. That’s the nuts and bolts of the app.
Do you have GPS integrated?
It’s integrated in the sense of when you log your hunt, it automatically pulls in location, so it knows where that hunt is. We don’t have anything built out around mapping so that you can drill into a map and drop points, not yet.
There are people all over the country. I’m thinking there are a number of apps. That might be a worthwhile conversation. They use yours and you use theirs and you increase your database for very limited costs.
The thing is like HuntStand and some of the other apps out there, they focused on the property management, where your different stands in your property, using the map and drawing those lines out. Ours is much more a journaling app. It focuses on allowing you to collect your data for your different hunts that you have so you can build that database of your own hunts. It’s like what you were saying, you’re keeping notes of it over time.
Let’s go back to data mining. You might have a different term, but when you think about all the data that you’re collecting. Bruce’s data and he’s been hunting for a while. I’ve got a couple of hundred entries. You can go back and pull it all together and then say, “Bruce, here’s the report that cost $5.” When you think about your year-end hunt report, all of a sudden you’ve given them good data, which they’re going to pay for, but the app is free. You throw that in a notebook or you put it on the computer. Somehow you could build a separate thing for Bruce. If Bruce goes in there to his file, clicks on Bruce and there are all the data from the year and then a summation of it. I sort it out well.
That Tuesday, Friday, Sunday, Saturday, what were the conditions? I saw the most bucks. The most deer activity. I do care but I shoot them all. You take that and most deer seen and then you can split it up bucks and does. I can look at it close and go, “Why were those five days the best days of the whole season?” I hunted twenty days, but I have five prime time days. When you look at the data, barometric pressure, wind, and sun or whatever. You pull all that together, that’s going to make me a better hunter. Readers, I’d like to know your input. Brandon, what’s your email address or how do they get ahold of you to give some input?
It’s [email protected].
It's a constant chess match with these big, mature whitetails. You're always trying to put the pieces together and put a plan in place and make it happen. Share on XI’m here at [email protected]. We’d like to know from you because way back when, I used to work in Mountain Dew. I know a little bit of data correlated and pulled together and then given out to the company I work for, we made a lot of money doing that. It was seven figures type of money because people wanted to know when people came into the store, how much they bought. The statistics of everything they could, they suck it all in and they’d see their peak hours. They could do their campaigns just like AJ Gall over at Legendary Whitetail. After a while, they said, “This is what happened. We see a spike here.” That’s what it’s about to become a smart 365-day hunter. Throw the data in, don’t worry about it until January to plan for the next season in January, February, March. That’s my two cents. What are your thoughts?
I couldn’t agree more. I would relate it to what Jon is doing over at DeerLab around trail cam photos. They’re putting the trail cam photos, but then his product is getting you all these insights into when is the deer moving and what the conditions are there. It’s very similar to our side around your actual hunts. When you’re actually out there and what you’re seeing. You always think that you’re going to remember stuff when you’re out, you’re like, “I remember that those popped out of the Southeast corner of that cornfield at 5:15.” Ultimately, there’s so much stuff running around in your head, you forget that. This is a way to easily log that in your phone, and it’s stored there for you so that you can go back and reference it.
DeerLab, Jon Livingston out of Florida. He’s got a good system tool that takes all your trail cameras and correlates them and gives you back the information. You’re a Wisconsin boy and dad is a hunter. Let’s talk about that whitetail hunting tradition.
I live in San Francisco but I’m back in Wisconsin. Conveniently I have two friends getting married so I stretched that week out between the two weekends to stay back, get out and do some whitetail hunting. My mom’s birthday is right around the rut, so I was back home during that time. I try to make trips back whenever I can to get out in the whitetail woods and get that fixed. I’ve been able to get out in the stand for some early bow action.
Is this a public land or dad’s land?
In Wisconsin, it’s all private. I might try and get out into some public area around here, but right now I’m focusing on some private land. I’m heading back to California and then I’ll be getting out hopefully for some blacktail on some public land out there.
What’s the allure of whitetail hunting? You’re from Wisconsin. Talk about the tradition that your father has passed down.
It’s the campfire stories. I live vicariously all year round through my friends that live back here still. The text messages definitely pick up during the fall when deer season is picking up. All my different friends have their different pieces of property that they’ve been managing and trying to set up for the season. It’s a constant chess match with these big mature whitetails and trying to put the pieces together, put a plan in place and make it happen. Elk hunting is one thing where you’re headed out to the mountains and you’re hiking. That’s a totally different ball game. With whitetail, it’s much more of a chess match. It’s something that in Wisconsin is a huge part of the culture. When I’m back home, I love to get back and do it and talk shop with all the guys back here.
Does your dad still whitetail hunt?
Yes, he does. He enjoys elk hunting as well. For some reason, he loves the late season bow hunt. Usually, once the snow starts falling and the temp drop is when he’ll start to get out more. I think that also is the fact that he’s quite an addict to golf as well. He golfs late into the season and then he’ll pick up the bow once the temp starts to drop and get out there.
We’re at the point of the show that you can give some shout-outs to people that make life interesting for you with deer and other stuff.
I love that you’re the first guy putting it out. A big reason why I’m a big supporter of them too is what they stand for. It’s much more than their brand. The communication and the work they do around conservation in public lands. Living in the West, the public land is a big part of the discussion. That’s what’s tricky about Wisconsin. There’s so much private land here to game around. Who do you know? Whose cousin land can you get on? Who do you have access from? Where out West, there’s so much opportunity for hunting on public lands. I feel like those guys are doing an amazing job spreading information and advocacy for public lands and making sure that those public lands stay there.
I was introduced first to Steven Rinella. He’s the guy that I’ve read his stuff for a long time and it’s exciting to see his show MeatEater take off. That is one of the great intros to hunting. At the end of the day, us hunters have a pretty small population out there. I would say the general population is interested or curious about hunting. If they are curious and they want to learn more about it, I generally point them in the direction of Steven Rinella and the MeatEater show that’s on Netflix. It’s a great way to start to understand what hunting is.
It’s not just what are some of the negative perspectives about it. His show can open up the eyes of the viewers on that. Lastly, I’d say the guys at Legendary Whitetails. AJ is a great guy. He’s been a huge supporter of Quiver from the beginning. When I initially told him about it, he was excited about the idea and he’s given us some great feedback along the way. This is the first season we’re going to be working with them. Helping with their brand and getting their brand into the app. I’m excited to test that out and see what it does for them.
We covered a lot of different information. If somebody wants to get ahold of you, Brandon, how do they do that?
The best way is through email at [email protected]. You can also hit us up on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, all the normal spots and we’ll get back to you. I also want to give a shout-out to my friend, Tim Sulzer, who’s been helping a lot on the marketing side with Quiver. He’s the guy that was interested in what we were doing. He reached out and wanted to help out.
Brandon from Quiver Hunting App. It’s been a pure joy.
Bruce, I want to say thank you for inviting me on the show. It was a blast. It was great chatting with you.
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I want to welcome a member of the QDMA family, Quality Dear Management. You’ve read Kip Adams, Lindsay Thomas, and others at QDMA. I wanted to bring in another member to help him share with you what it takes to be a QDMA regional manager. He’s in charge of Region 2 and you’ll know the exact states that they take care of. Corey Slater is one heck of a young man. He went to school at Kent State and he transferred after he met his girlfriend to Slippery Rock state in Pennsylvania. He decided after graduation as a teacher coach, that he wanted to head out to Iowa. That’s where he met Bill Winke and spent some time with him and learned a lot from him of Midwest Whitetail. He moved back to Pennsylvania for family and was checking out whitetail properties. He saw an ad for QDMA. As they say, the rest is history.
Important Links:
- Quiver Hunting App
- Living Country in the City
- HuntData
- Strava
- MapMyRun
- Legendary Whitetails
- LegendaryWhitetails.com/community
- HuntStand
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- DeerLab
- MeatEater
- Facebook – Quiver Hunting App
- Instagram – Quiver Hunting App
- Twitter – Quiver Hunting App
- QDMA
- Midwest Whitetail
About Brandon Gador
Brandon Gador – Founder of Quiver and jack-of-all-trades. He started Quiver to combine his experience building mobile products and his passion for hunting to create awesome products for today’s outdoorsman.
Deer Movement – Log deer movement to understand the effect of time and weather on game activity.
Field Notes
Field Notes – Record important events to get a complete picture of the day’s hunt.
Photos
Photos – Capture your most important moments to relive your hunt and share with friends.