Columbia startup hunting app hits 1 millionth download

In a nondescript office building in Middleburg Place off Forest Drive, a team of young software developers has revolutionized the way hunters hunt and brokers sell large tracts of land.

In 2013, the team, led by Columbia native and University of South Carolina graduate Lanford Holloway, launched Huntstand, a large land tract mapping smartphone application that allows hunter to log game sightings and bedding and feeding areas using 40 icons for different land attributes.

Recently it passed 1 million downloads, has 850,000 active users and has topped the sporting app charts on Google Play and Apple app stores.

The company caught the eye of the South Carolina Research Authority which, among other investors, extended the startup a $200,000 S.C. launch grant.

“We’re being used by hunters in just about every country in the world, except for a couple in sub-Saharan Africa,” said Holloway, 33, an avid hunter who came up with the rudiments of the site in 2009. “It’s gone viral. People see it and they share it with their friends.”

The hunting app also includes comprehensive weather forecasts for up to five days, from wind direction to temperature to solunar (sun and moon) tables. The most popular feature is wind direction forecasting, a graphical interface that indicates in which direction a hunter’s scent will be blown – vital to any hunters.

Also, it delivers that information by download so forecasts can be accessed without phone service, an important feature when hunting in deep woods or remote areas.

“A lot of people are using it because it’s got really good weather features,” said Holloway, who attended Emory University as an undergrad majoring in history and political science, then received a master’s degree in international business administration from USC’s Moore School of Business.

But an eight-person team – which includes vice president of sales and marketing Blake Baxley, 29, who received his master’s in sports management from USC, and chief technology officer Jimmy Cleveland, 33, who earned his doctorate from the school in computer science – didn’t stop there.

The group also tailored the handheld mapping technology they developed to help sell property. Lots of property.

Brokers use the app to give virtual tours of large tracts of land, and to provide them access to extensive amounts of property data.

“Not only have we built the best hunting app in the world,” Holloway, the company’s chief executive, said, “now we’ve built the best mapping software, period.”

To date their TerraStride Pro property app has thousands of listings in every state. Combined, these listings have a market value of more than $4 billion.

“That’s not our money,” said Holloway, laughing. “We sell the app for a flat rate.”

HuntStand makes money by selling ad space and upgrades. The app and most of its features are free. But it provides 10 free “clicks” for more detailed parcel data a month. But, a user can purchase an unlimited number of parcel clicks for $11.99 per year.

And, if you find the ads annoying, the company will hide them for $5.99 a year.

TerraStride Pro is a business-to-business application and costs $499 per year per account for access to the company’s main mapping platform. The company charges an additional $149 per year to access individual states through its national database of property ownership information.

It has many other features, such as the Advanced Parcel Search Tool, that’s not offered by other mapping platforms, Holloway said.

“While hunting/land management and large tract land sales may appear to be fairly different market verticals, we are finding that there is a large amount of crossover,” Holloway said. “We have positioned ourselves at the crossroads of these two very large and well capitalized markets.”

Holloway said he was tempted to move the company to more lucrative fundraising areas, such as Silicon Valley. But he has been able to garner the interest of local investors and would like to keep the company in Columbia.

“This is home,” he said. “And I want to grow the company here and keep it here.”

It has been rewarding to be a part of a process that creates tools that improve people’s lives and help them solve problems, Holloway said.

“This has been an incredibly fun, but complicated and multifaceted project,” he said. “It’s very fulfilling.”

This story was originally published December 17, 2016 at 8:42 PM with the headline "Columbia startup hunting app hits 1 millionth download."