We recently invested in a company called Armanet. It’s a simple business. You have a gun-related product you want to advertise. You pay Armanet to run your ad across the sites that have signed up to use them (e.g. Pew Pew Tactical). When a user clicks on your ad, the site makes some money and Armanet keeps a cut. As the advertiser, you get dashboards with detailed analytics on ad performance, costs, and so on. Nice and tidy.
The notable thing about this is that on paper, there’s nothing notable about it — it’s exactly how online advertising works for all products. Well, all products except for a handful, including ones related to guns. As you know, those have been frozen out of a lot of the modern tech and finance tooling that other industries take for granted.
Three observations on that:
Frozen in amber. Simple rules can have surprisingly large downstream effects. For example, there’s a simple rule in buying guns online: you can’t (with minor exceptions) ship a gun straight to your house, you have to ship it to an FFL. That simple requirement has frozen gun retail in the 1990s. Think of it as a legal requirement that gun retail forgo the internet’s most useful advances. Same deal with the unwelcome status of gun-related products in modern advertising, social media, and financial tooling. Those function as requirements that guns have to be advertised/discussed/sold using only tools from 20 years ago. (This is spiritually similar to calls for freezing development of AI. More on that in “OSD 260: Frozen in amber”.)
Your bans are my opportunity. There’s an old version of this, and a new version. The old version is “Ok guns aren’t allowed on your social media platform? I’ll just make a platform where guns are allowed.” There are two challenges with that. First, network effects are powerful and spinning up a new platform is nearly impossible. The second is that it’s even harder when you’re hobbled by focusing on a small niche — you’re in a business where success hinges on huge traffic numbers. Taking your ball and going home doesn’t work.
The new approach is more likely to succeed. In this approach, you focus on a small niche but (a) pick a business where success even just within the niche will still mean success for the company, and (b) retain the ability to expand beyond the niche as you grow. To keep gun culture’s growth moving in the right direction, we need to work towards merging it into the mainstream. People have ostracized gun culture enough in the past — ostracizing ourselves moves things in the wrong direction.The tide is turning. Re ostracism, things are getting better on that front. The teams at companies like Armanet and others are sharp. They could easily be working in any other field. That they’re choosing to work on this is evidence of a trend we’ve seen over the past few years: the push to bring gun culture into the mainstream is working. That’s measured by gun ownership numbers, the fact that support for gun rights is growing fastest among young people, and our own impressions from meeting people in the industry. People in the industry are getting savvier, and they’re being joined by experts from other industries who are more and more open about the fact that they think gun ownership and gun rights are good, actually.
On that last point, if you’re a founder in the 2A space or something adjacent (whether the company is just starting out, mid-size, or mature and looking for liquidity), reach out. Let’s talk about what you need.
This week’s links
Twitter thread on Soviet bakelite mags
Cool history. Thanks to Discord sub @Desolator for the link.
What is the Citizen’s Field Network?
A work of fiction by Discord sub @Hoffnung.
Arbitrage opportunities from @kane
in the 2000s my university charged like $300 for summer storage BUT you could buy surplus FIM-29 Stinger launcher cases for $200 so i put my clothes and books in one, sunk it in the river by my dorm, and retrieved it fall semester
they’re hard to find now and i regret selling it
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Who owns it?
I couldn't find an "About Us" page on the website
Huh. From their website
> What is a programmatic ad platform?
I can't say any details, because I don't want to dox myself, but I work as a software engineer at a mainstream company whose business is exactly this, except mainstream not 2A. I work on internal stuff, so I have very little understanding or exposure to the programmatic advertising part of the company, but I did have to learn a bunch about it in onboarding. Neat!
I probably have a noncompete that stops me from jumping ship to another advertising company, but just for future reference: is Armanet hiring software engineers any time in the next year or two, and where's their company at? Are they super lean, pay-in-equity startup mode or can they afford market rate salaries? And how do they feel about green card sponsorship?
Thanks!