How onX Built a Portfolio of Apps to Grow ARR by 10x

Brandon Gador is the Product Growth Lead at onX, where he has spent the last 2+ years helping to scale and evolve the company’s growth team to support vertical-specific apps across hunting, fishing, offroading, and backcountry. Prior to onX, Brandon spent 10+ years in product roles at multiple FinTech businesses including Gusto, Lending Club, and Intuit. He is an avid hunter and outdoor enthusiast and a proud (though misguided) Green Bay Packers fan.

Key Takeaways:

• Since raising its $20M Series A in 2018, onX has grown ARR >10x, expanded its team >300%, and diversified its product offering beyond hunting with additional apps for offroading, backcountry, and fishing.
• onX’s growth has largely been driven through organic word of mouth among its highly passionate user base, which the company has amplified through partnerships with online influencers and ambassadors in the outdoor space.
• As the company has scaled, onX’s growth team focused first on accelerating its experimentation velocity and then on fine-tuning strategy to increase its A/B test hit rate and impact per experiment, all of which has driven compounding growth.
• While supporting four vertical-specific apps creates additional challenges, it has allowed onX to better tailor its UX specifically for hunters, offroaders, backcountry enthusiasts, and fishermen, all of whom have different feature needs.
• While AllTrails and onX are often compared to one another, they target different customers with different strategies - AllTrails has built a freemium experience for casual hikers with an SEO-driven growth strategy, whereas onX is focused on a more passionate and sophisticated group of outdoor enthusiasts that relies on word of mouth to drive growth and a hard paywall to maximize monetization.

Brandon Gador:

• Website: https://www.onxmaps.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandongador/
• X: https://x.com/brandongador

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

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