Brad Luttrell

About Brad Luttrell

I’m Brad, a tech startup CEO in Kentucky. I was an award-winning writer, photographer and creative director, but I quit that secure career in advertising to chase my dream of building a community.

My journey to tech CEO is a bit unorthodox—I don’t have an MBA or even a business degree. I’ve never even been to Silicon Valley.

Instead, I’m focused on building Silicon Holler.

I’m from a family of coal miners in Appalachia, went to a public state university, have a degree in communications and got fired from my first job in social media.

Still, I ended up founding a tech startup that’s still hanging in there since 2017. The whole journey has become my strange résumé and re-affirmed my belief that great tech companies can be built anywhere.

While chasing my dream, I’ve re-invented my life, and put journalism and advertising in the rearview mirror. Most people I’ve met me in the last 5 years don’t know I ever was a journalist or in advertising. Instead, I often get asked about the founding of GoWild. It’s a lot of “how did you do X?”

That’s why I founded this blog / newsletter—Silicon Holler Founding Father. I wanted to share the answers to these questions. Enjoy.

About GoWild

I founded GoWild, a free social community helping outdoor enthusiasts improve their skills, discover gear & earn rewards. Our approach to community commerce has been featured in many of the top outdoor podcasts, Fox Business, Business Journals, Petersen's and more. The app has received praise from top mobile blogs like AndroidPolice.com and was GearJunkie's social app of the year in 2021.

Me and three other guys took $500 and an idea, and bootstrapped our way to a beta launch in 2017. Since then, we've raised some money, quit our 9 to 5s, and built a great team to scale our content commerce platform. Today my No. 1 focus as CEO is to craft the product vision, and to curate a culture that makes chasing that vision possible.

I've won some personal awards along the way, but nothing in my professional career makes me more proud than the team I've built with GoWild.

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