Deep Dive: Camp Native

It’s been 2 weeks since I sent an email, and over 600 people have joined this newsletter since then. If you don’t remember who I am, I’m Scott Oldford, an investor and advisor who owns 40+ online businesses, and this newsletter is dedicated to giving a behind-the-scenes look.

I’ve gone camping a couple of times. I have no real passion for it; however, I have friends who love it.

I believe camping is perhaps one of the most recession-proof businesses there is. It doesn’t matter if things are up, down, or sideways; people are still going to be camping.

While the majority of my portfolio consists of businesses that are in software, education, or media and are in the business, entrepreneurship, or personal development space, I do reserve <10% of my investable capital for businesses that are in the lifestyle or personal interest space.

Basically, things I find interesting or that I personally believe in are a bit of a lottery. Either they won’t work and I’ll learn some stuff, or they’ll work well and I won’t know why until it works out.

Last year, I bought a software company that completes reservations for campgrounds and RV parks. The company by itself wasn’t much to write home about.

It had about $60,000 in revenue, the software was 9 years old, there was no moat, marketing sucked, and it looked old.

On paper, it wasn’t worth much, and considering I bought it for less than six figures over six months, It was certainly in the “fix it up” category.

However, as I took a look at this business, a few things caught my eye.

• Over 2,000 campsites were registered on the platform and completed bookings.

• Millions of dollars of bookings were completed, and over 60,000 campers used the system.

• The website was getting millions of visitors per year in the US and Canada.

Quickly… my Entrepreneurial mind saw instead of fixing up an interesting oppertunity…

I went ahead, did a little due diligence, and acquired the business. I figured that the worst-case scenario is that I will understand a little more about campgrounds and RV parks, which may be a great investment down the road. The best-case scenario is that something great happens.

I’m not 10 months into the journey of this acquisition, and I would expect I’ve got about another year before I know how it’s going to turn out.

From the start, we went ahead and hired a programming team to be able to completely change the functionality of the website. We redesigned it, and that is now live.

Before…

After…

Or you can visit and take a look here: www.campnative.com 

Outside of the visual change, the business itself, in about a year, will be completely different than it is today in terms of its model:

We’re moving to a new booking software that we’re building, and instead of charging a transaction fee, we’re moving to a fixed fee platform and an advertising-based platform. On top of this, our main form of revenue generation as we move forward will be more of a media company, relying on our recently launched Facebook Group, podcast, and Newsletter that are targeted at campers.

The play is simple: Have as many campers using our website as possible, with the highest number of campsites and RV parks, and then be able to be the middle man for lifestyle-based companies that want to advertise with hyper-local advertising and marketing.

So far, here’s what's worked:

1. Facebook Ads and Instagram are crushing it, and at the moment we are getting people to join our email list for $0.29 in America at scale. Next month, we are adding our first low-ticket product to be able to generate revenue on the front-end.

2. A majority of those people are joining our Facebook Group, which is building a community that is going to allow us to have more impressions.

3. Our email list is getting 50%+ open rates, and our click-through rates are in alignment with the rest of our media portfolio.

4. Organic traffic is steady after some massive problems at the beginning.

5. People are enjoying the new feature set and design, and it’s creating more bookings.

6. Community is being built on both sides, and the businesses we work with are noticing this in the early days.

7. While the current software is old, it’s working, and while it’s not a crazy AI version of software, it does it’s job.

8. We have a good, tiny team that has a background in this world running it, with limited fixed expenses for allowing us to grow and run the business, which includes giving the operator vested equity in the business for the future.

9. We understand the next iteration of the business model, our traffic sources, our marketing and sales strategy, and what is needed after a little while trying to figure that out.

Now… I don’t want to sugarcoat this… This has been a learning experience, and here are some of my lessons and more of the “truth” of building a business and flipping it (or taking it from the ashes to rebuild):

• Multiple hires did not fit and did not work out.

• The SEO of the website was completely mixed up when we purchased it and had to be completely re-done (and it’s still not fully fixed).

• It took us about three months to figure out what the business model was going to be.

• Making modifications to software you don’t know likely takes more effort than just rebuilding the entire thing.

• There are gremlins everywhere with a business like this, and it took us six months just to get the payment software to change our bank account.

• We still aren’t fully certain who will buy this business in the future or what the returns will look like on this model.

• Including the purchase price, we’ve invested about $200,000 into this business so far. I expect we’ll need to invest another $150,000 before our P&L is going to break even, and I don’t expect it to start profiting until at least the middle of next year.

• Support on this is an actual full-time job due to the booking function.

• While we’re re-building the booking system on the backend, I personally dislike SaaS, and while I own about 10 SaaS companies, in almost all those cases, I’m a minority owner.

• Due to the fact that this isn’t my main focus, things are slower than in other parts of the portfolio due to the smaller amount of money, resources, time, and economies of scale.

So you might ask, Why am I doing this?

There are two core reasons:

1. I believe that lifestyle businesses like these will continue to expand in the future and won’t go anywhere no matter how much AI takes over the world.

2. I want to see if it’s possible to take SaaS companies that weren’t able to create success, change their business model, add in SaaS (and potentially education), and have a winning formula.

If I can find even a string of success here, it means that I’m going to be able to purchase all the SaaS companies that will come up for sale over the next 3-5 years and turn them into profitable media and education businesses, or I’ll be able to invest more fully into lifestyle businesses that haven’t been ruined by online marketers that understand a 16-part sales page sequence 🙂 

Thus, as I believe in all portfolios, you want to have a percentage of your businesses that are experiments in a theory.

In this case, it’s testing two things at once.

I believe that within the next year I will know if it’s a viable theory. If not, I expect I’ll be able to sell it and make my money back, or at least it’ll make a great story for you to learn from 🙂 

Until next time…

- Scott