AM as a Moat: How Annihilator Created a Competitive Advantage in Broadhead Manufacturing

And so we get this thing, and it's plastic.

And so we even printed the threads and everything on it so that I could see it on an arrow.

We could make sure the scale's correct.

And I'm looking at this.

I'm like, "Dude, this thing's badass." Like, it just looks wicked.

Like, I would not wanna be shot with a plastic version of that, right?

[laughs]

And obviously Micah showed it.

Micah lived in California at the time.

I lived in Idaho, so we were pretty far apart.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, but he, he hunted up in Idaho.

And the problem that we ran into is now how do you go from plastic to metal and go spend the dollars that is required to really go test the thing to see if it's got legs? 'Cause that's not a cheap decision to make, right?

Yeah.

It's one thing to spend a couple grand and go through a process of R&D to kinda print something.

Nowadays, we could 3D print something in our homes, right? I didn't have that at that time, right? Uh, and that was just kinda rising.

And so we thought about it long and hard, and we went to the hardware store.

We tried to make our own version of the Annihilator and-

Sure

... failed royally with just, like, parts we could buy.

And so we sat there and we're like, "How do we do this?" And we had no answers.

It was just you either pay 10 grand or whatever it was to go in to get these things made in metal, or you don't.

And I'm like, "Dude, that's a big chunk of money for something that you don't know flies or works," right? So it was like step up or go home, right? [laughs] So luckily there was another innovation that came to market during that year, and it was called the Instant Pot.

And it's a funny story, but it's, the Instant Pot had a very pivotable, pivotal, I guess, benefit to Annihilator.

Without it, I don't know if Annihilator would exist.