The Best Hunting Club isn't a Club at All

Sam Seeton

03/29/2023

Share

If you hunt or fish, chances are you’ve scoured online forums to find productive outdoor opportunities. You might have even scrolled through your fair share of Facebook groups or dove into Craigslist wormholes trying to find a productive property that offered some elbow room. After some frustration and a general lack of clear answers, your search may have led you to the final question: Should I invest in a hunting club?

The reason the hunting club hang-up isn’t easily answered is because there truly hasn’t been a perfect answer for most sportsmen. That is, until some nerdy ranchers from the Colorado School of Mines constructed a practical solution for outdoor enthusiasts.

I want to discuss why a traditional club isn’t the answer for most people and how the world’s largest Do-It-Yourself private hunting access app is changing the way people access private land adventures.

Let’s first dissect the reasons why traditional clubs are a less than ideal for most people. The initial glaring issue is the cost and barrier to entry. Most clubs require initiation fees and absurd annual fees that can range from $1,000 to $10K, depending on the price and exclusivity. Sure, for some people this can be the most economic choice if they don’t have a demanding job, family requirements, or if they have more money and time than they know what to do with… But let’s be honest, if that’s you, you probably just bought your own hobby ranch. Anyways, if you can’t hunt or fish several times a week, that upfront cost is going to be a hard pill to swallow.

The next issue with hunting clubs is land. Let’s take waterfowl for example. Even the largest of clubs only have leases in a few counties. What happens when a front pushes the birds through and clears out significant populations? You’re stuck sitting on your hands with no good properties to hunt.

Speaking of club land, how do they – nearly every club out there – get access to that land?

They lease it.

Unfortunately, a club lease opens so many cans of worms. To start, the club owner has to dish out a bunch of money up front and incurred significant financial exposure. From a business perspective, I applaud the risk tolerance and initiative BUT now the club is in a “money first” mindset. Not only do they want to get out of the red as fast as possible, but once they do, they are making all the money (not the landowner) and want to do anything they can to maximize that. Again, nothing wrong with that. We love our capitalist system, but conservation and hunter success doesn’t fit in this envelope. Financially, the club owner is incentivized to overhunt properties to allow more members paying to increase their profit margins.

Finally, even if you don’t care about upfront costs, being restricted to the small, leased lands, and inability to manage quality and conservation, you are still stuck within the scope of that club. In other words, you will likely only be able to hunt waterfowl, or fly fish, or hunt deer, or whatever that club land is designated for. Even worse, the landowner, who is often struggling to farm or ranch the land enough to just make ends meet, now has tons of people on their land and are unable to make any extra cashflow since they sold their rights to the lease holder.

See how this gets complicated fast and how dumping your money into a club becomes a losing recreational and financial battle? Well, lucky for you, there is a solution. And all it took was some fancy engineering degrees, a team of biologists, and generations of frustrated sportsmen and landowners who finally got sick of the status quo. So, let’s talk about the alternative that thousands are turning to each year – Infinite Outdoors.

As you have probably guessed, all the points above are completely alleviated through Infinite Outdoors. Before I get into specifics, let’s summarize what and who Infinite Outdoors (IO) is. Essentially, IO is a digital app and mapping platform built to directly facilitate short-term booking of private properties between hunters and the farmers and/or ranchers that own them. With a landowner acreage base larger than the state of Rhode Island, nearly every possible hunting and fishing adventure in the lower 48 is available in the palm of your hand.

Now, let's discuss our solutions to the hunting club conundrum. First, we addressed that pesky yearly fee and need to hunt constantly to make your money worth it. With IO, the yearly fee is only the price of a box of decent ammo – $39.99 – from which a portion is donated to a conservation group of your choosing. You can even pay a monthly rate with IO, costing you less than a draft beer at most places at just $4.99. Pretty easy to make that worth it, right? Well, we didn’t stop there.IO also gives its users access to all of the public land data in the US, 3D mapping on IOS, and discounts on fellow outdoor companies. We are proud partners with the supplement company MTN OPS, as well as camo and game call companies Forloh, Born and Raised, Call CO, and Colorado Custom Calls, just to name a few. If you’re still a salt dog, we still care about you. That’s why the public land data in our app is totally free to everyone who downloads our app.

Now that you are out of reasons not to get the app, and you’re ready to hunt private land, you can just pay the landowner a very reasonable fee for the day and have exclusive access. Here are a few examples to define reasonable: Dove hunt over 1,000 acres with just you and your group – that’ll run you less than $50/gun for the day plus a small reservation fee. Duck hunt in Colorado for $79/gun from your own well-rested blind, or shoot a whitetail in Oklahoma for $150/day from a pre-set stand.

Now let’s talk about areas of access. Hunting clubs are restricted to a small area of land. IO, however, has more acres listed than some states have public land in their entirety. Birds not in your area? Drive a few hours and, guess what, you’ll find another IO property to hunt. Plus, you can scout from public roads for things like waterfowl, so you can find the “X” or hot spot and THEN book it. None of this “well I paid my membership, guess I will waste a week in the blind till the birds return." IO now spans 8 states and is adding thousands of acres a day. We are at nearly 1,000,000 acres in 2.5 years of business. So you better get excited for the next 2.5 years.

This next point is what makes the magic happen – IO NEVER leases land. You, the hunter, are the one day-leasing right from the landowner. To frame the significance of this, both the CEO and CTO of Infinite grew up on ranches, and several other management members were raised in similar settings. IO was born out of necessity and frustration with the club-lease style, and we will never be some Silicon Valley, silver-spoon group looking to monetize the hunting industry. IO seeks to do the opposite, to put the power back in the landowners hand to allow more affordable hunting to more people in more areas. It’s their land to do as they please – no more outfitters and clubs locking out the average joe to the joys of private land access.

By cutting out the middleman of the lease holder, the landowner can now make more money while hunting the property less and for a lower price. This does prompt two questions:

1) won’t the landowner just overhunt it now?

2) If you cut out the middle man, then how does IO make it worth their time to develop millions worth of tech and management?

First, we don’t let all landowners list on IO. It MUST be a quality property, and they HAVE to work with one of our biologists to set harvest quotas, rest days, and pricing. IO sets a cap on access days, and the landowner is then free utilize their land at any capacity below that threshold and control their availability. Negotiating for conservation and opportunity is easy when they make more than the old hunting club way. To explain, when IO's relatively small team centralized management functions to a state-of-the-art app, the management became cheaper and easier than any one landowner could ever do on their own. Once we finally proved this to thousands of hunters and hundreds of landowners, IO could finally reap what it sewed.

On a final note, IO has something for everyone – big game, upland game, small game, turkey, fishing, waterfowl, mapping, discounts, etc. No club can begin to offer all of that.

So, if you are a working person that values translating your hard-earned money into quality days in the field, then a yearly club likely isn’t your best option. Look to Infinite Outdoors to get more bang for your buck and not limit your options this next season! Tight lines and full freezers, my friends.