How onX Built a Portfolio of Apps to Grow ARR by 10x
with Brandon Gador — Product Growth Lead
onX grew ARR 10x with a portfolio of vertical apps across hunting, fishing, and off-road. Brandon Gador on scaling a growth team across many products at once.
In this episode
- 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.