Anytime I tell someone that we’ve published 240+ episodes over the last six years, their initial reaction is usually, “Wow, that’s a lot.”

It’s often followed by, “What else is there to talk about in the outdoor industry?” Fair question. If we ever reach the end, we’ll let you know.

But the sheer volume of content hasn’t gone unnoticed by us either. Somewhere along the way, Backcountry Marketing became more than a collection of podcast episodes. It became an archive of how people across the outdoor industry have thought about brand, marketing, creativity, community, media, growth, and a whole lot more. The problem is that most of those ideas are buried inside hundreds of hours of conversation.

So we built a better way to access them, introducing The Archive.

Instead of digging through hundreds of episodes or trying to remember which guest talked about a particular subject three years ago, you can search the transcripts and find relevant ideas, advice, and conversations in seconds

Try The Archive here.

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What can I ask it?

Pretty much anything you might want to explore within the conversations we’ve published.

You could ask:

• What have guests said about building a distinctive brand?
• What are the biggest mistakes outdoor brands make with organic content?
• Who has talked about community building?
• What have marketers said about balancing brand and performance?
• What conversations have we had about ambassadors versus influencers?
• What have guests said about measuring brand marketing?

The useful part isn’t just finding an episode. The Archive can help surface ideas from different guests and conversations across six years of the show. Think of it less like searching a podcast and more like having 240+ conversations with outdoor marketers sitting at your desk.

How does it work?

The Archive uses AI to search and answer questions, but its responses are grounded exclusively in transcripts from published Backcountry Marketing episodes. It isn’t searching the broader internet to come up with an answer.

Like any AI tool, it can occasionally misunderstand a question or miss something, so we’ve also made it easy to trace ideas back to the original conversations.

Does it cost anything to use?

Everyone gets one free search per day. If you’d like to use The Archive beyond that, you can sign up with your email for unlimited access.

There is, however, a real cost on our end. Every search costs Port Side roughly six cents to run. We’ve bootstrapped the podcast from day one and have invested tens of thousands of dollars into producing and publishing these conversations, so we’ve also set up a way to support the project through Buy Me a Coffee.

If you use The Archive regularly, we simply ask that you contributing enough to help cover your usage. Or, if you’ve gotten value from the podcast over the years and just want to support what we’re building, we certainly won’t complain. We’re treating this as an experiment and if people find enough value in The Archive to help us cover the cost of keeping it running, we’ll keep building it.

We hope this tool feels like a natural extension of our mission at the Backcountry Marketing Podcast and Port Side: to remind marketers that marketing doesn’t have to suck, and that respecting your audience is the name of the game because, at the end of the day as much as geek out about marketing, they don’t care about any of it.