Exactly three years ago today, on the 4th of June in 2020,  Poul and I took a day off from work to purchase a new gun. At that point in time, we were well into the pandemic and had been working day and night for months on an analytics project for one of the leading car manufacturers in the world. As part of that solution, we had designed and implemented a BigML-based advanced machine learning system. That new piece of technology was capable of building thousands of anomaly detectors in parallel and running them in real-time to automatically detect welding defects in the assembly line. We had just wrapped up one of the project milestones, which meant we could afford a little timeout to recharge our batteries.

Poul and I had been plinking together for almost 10 years at the ARPC in Shedd, Oregon. Sometimes we met regularly on the first Friday of every month and other times simply played it by ear. Whenever we had visitors from Europe, we liked to spend some time at the range to show them the fun they are missing back in their countries. Lately, we had been too busy with work, leaving too little time to enjoy shooting.

That particular day, however, our side trip to buy a gun took longer than planned. We needed to visit multiple local gun stores to find our target merchandise.  We quickly noticed three things that day. There were a scarce number of guns for sale. There was almost no ammo and whatever little available was selling at prices nearly worth their weight in gold.  Despite these deterrents there was an incredibly long queue in the background check system, with thousands of people waiting to get their background checks completed.

As we sat outside one of the gun stores, Poul mentioned that he was trying to come up with a cool use-case for BigML’s upcoming image processing release. He was thinking about using it to score targets visually, a reinvigoration of a pet project of his from many years ago. I quickly saw this as an opportunity to apply our collective experience, accumulated over the past decade building the BigML software platform and launching enterprise-grade machine learning solutions, to our mutual pastime of shooting. Why not apply a similar data-driven and systematic approach to sports shooting? It sure looked like the firearms industry was lagging behind technologically, not leveraging machine learning at all which could advance the performance of guns, ammo, or marksmanship.

Between gun stores, we began brainstorming the possibilities. Wouldn’t it totally rock if we could use computer vision to monitor a target and score it in real-time without needing to walk downrange every time? What if we could get the system to crunch the numbers to perform shot group analysis automatically? What if the system could help with zeroing a rifle and automatically tell us how to adjust elevation and windage? What if all our shots were recorded in the same convenient place accessible from many connected devices that are indispensable to our lives?  Perhaps we could even create a model to predict a shooter’s performance during a future session. Heck, we could even go further than targets and start monitoring the shooter in order to detect skill deficiencies and blindspots that haunt millions of firearm owners. What if all that greatness worked on commodity hardware like your average smartphone? A seemingly bottomless well of cool ideas that we would love to see implemented in a future category-defining mobile app for the 21st century firearm owners got our creative juices flowing.

Even though we didn’t make much of it then, in hindsight, that day was clearly the moment when our two passions were merging together: Guns N’Machine Learning!

Over the next two months, as the pandemic ensued, Poul and I found ourselves taking more frequent trips to the ARPC, giving us more time to evolve our epiphany about the perfect companion application for the shooting community. Soon enough, we came to the realization that this was not a pie-in-the-sky dream of two hobbyists but something very much within our reach — if only we put our minds into it as a serious project. In the following three years, we did exactly that with the help of a growing team!

In August 2020, we founded AccuShoot, Inc. During the summer, we had convinced our board of directors at BigML, Inc that AccuShoot was a challenging yet commercially promising opportunity worth pursuing and a number of close friends who eagerly invested $500,000 in our dream.

Soon after, we quickly started prototyping a number of early ideas: detecting impacts on paper targets, detecting impacts on metal targets, detecting guns, analyzing grips, monitoring a shooter’s pose, and more. Once we had the first prototypes, we decided to go ahead and analyze the state-of-the-art approaches in firearms training. For years, we had heard about Thunder Ranch and the fabulous classes offered by Clint and Heidi Smith there. We found a great excuse to take one of their classes and registered for Urban Rifle 2020. That class definitely changed our lives. During the class, we shared our AccuShoot vision with Jack Daniel and he helped us arrange a demo for Clint and Heidi. On the third day of class, we ended up at their house demoing our first prototypes. Heidi, Clint, and Jack gave us very positive feedback and told us that if we really managed to build a real-world product along the lines of the early prototypes that would mean nothing short of revolutionizing the industry.  

As an IP-driven team, we also chugged along filing six patent applications underpinning AccuShoot’s novel shot detection technology.

We continued taking more classes at Thunder Ranch and making more Thunder Buddies along the way. We regularly shared AccuShoot’s advances with Heidi, Clint and Jack. During some of those classes we tested the latest versions, which helped further evolve and perfect AccuShoot based on expert advice. Over the last two years, our path criss-crossed with a number of professional firearms instructors in different states and found out that they were enthusiastically sharing our disruptive vision. Since then, we have been intently building a very distinguished group of Strategic Advisors. They have been buttressing team AccuShoot’s efforts with decades of professional experience in marksmanship and firearms coaching. You will hear more about their stories in upcoming blog posts.

Fast-forward to 2023, on the 30th of April, Apple finally approved our app submission. It took us 305 internal iterations to get to that moment amounting to more than two versions per week for the last two years straight. So a little part of our vision is now a real product available to everyone around the world to try out as a fresh take on an age-old industry. 

We are already working on an Android version that will be available in a few months. In addition to the mobile versions, AccuShoot comes with a web application that provides more advanced features that will become part of the mobile versions step by step. We will be describing all of those capabilities in great detail in the future posts on our blog. 

Here we are, exactly three years to the date of that pandemic day scramble visiting gun stores in Oregon. After countless trips to shooting ranges testing the earlier versions and making consistent progress in growing our team and hitting our project milestones, at this stage, we believe that AccuShoot is offering an unparalleled number of useful features for avid shooters and beginners alike. And that’s not even counting the roadmap items that are going to surface in a steady stream for the months to come.

Are you interested in being part of our journey to lead law abiding citizens, law enforcement and military members to marksmanship mastery? If you have an iPhone, download the AccuShoot app from the App Store today and purchase a subscription with Apple Pay. You can also make your purchase on the AccuShoot website by providing a valid credit card. Subscriptions cost either $15/month or $150/year depending on your preference. We also encourage all of you to visit our regulation crowdfunding offering hosted on Netcapital and see if it makes sense for you to own a piece of the AccuShoot revolution as it unfolds.

One way or another, we hope you to welcome all of you to the AccuShoot early adopter community very soon!