Before we get into it: this is episode 500.
Not of one show, but of the two I host. 439 episodes of For The Long Run, which I launched back in 2019, plus 61 episodes of Long Run Labs, which is just over a year old. Add them up and this conversation with Alex is number 500.
Alex is the kind of person this show exists for: someone who has quietly touched a lot of the endurance and outdoor world without ever being the loudest voice in the room, and who thinks in systems, communities, and the long game.
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Who: Alex Maier, President of Onwater
Where: The mouth of the Columbia River Gorge, southwest Washington
Day job: Building the operating system for water-based recreation, home to the Onwater Fish and Paddleways apps. Before this: nearly five years at Nike, regional work with Porsche and Audi, and a stint at onX. Thirteen years as a professional photographer before any of it.
Alex is a self-described generalist, and he means it as a compliment. He grew up an only child in Corbett, Oregon, the kind of small town where the nearest neighbor was two miles away and his parents handed him a machete and some bailing twine at seven and said have fun. He spent 13 years as a professional photographer, learned to run a business and build his own websites along the way, and then strung together a career most people would do anything for one chapter of: nearly five years at Nike, regional work with Porsche and Audi, a stint at onX, and for the last three years, President of Onwater, the company building the operating system for water-based recreation, home to the Onwater Fish and Paddleways apps.
He’s a gear head, a curious dabbler, and a genuinely sharp operator. Here’s what stuck with me.
Alex’s take on the generalist-versus-specialist debate is the best version I’ve heard: it isn’t about being a jack of all trades, it’s about curiosity over mastery. When something is new to him, he goes deep and becomes the temporary specialist, then moves on. He credited some of that wiring to neurodivergence, which landed for me. I have ADHD, and the way AI has let me build the infrastructure my brain can’t hold (the dashboards, the systems, the context it remembers so I don’t have to) has been one of the biggest professional unlocks of my career. Alex framed it perfectly: embrace how you’re wired, then use the tools to amplify it rather than fight it.
Alex runs Onwater on a product-led growth thesis, and he broke it into two halves worth stealing:
Internal: how the product itself, absent of any marketing, gets one user to bring in the next. Network effects and virality: you spot a fish, you drop a pin, you send it to your buddies, and now they’re downloading the app. Think onX in an elk camp, or Asana spreading through a company one team at a time.
External: how using the product builds enough affinity that you’re compelled to tell someone about it. Jon, you have to use this water bottle.
His guidance to the founders he mentors: if you’ve truly built something innovative, invest in product-led growth and network effects before you reach for a big brand campaign. Marketing-led growth has its place. His example was Dude Wipes, an established product differentiated by persona and messaging. But the order matters.
If there was a thesis running underneath the whole conversation, it was this: the voice of the customer is the soul of everything a company does. And the most tactical thing Alex shared was how Onwater handles creators and beta testers.
Before anyone promotes their product, Alex brings them behind the curtain: product feedback first, promotion second. It sharpens the point of view, strips out internal bias, and gives the creator real buy-in. I’ve lived the flip side of this: I ran a seeding and product feedback campaign with Amazfit where two rounds of creator feedback came back nearly identical to what the product team had been telling leadership for months. They just finally had the data to back the opinion. Alex’s antidote to the loudest-voice-in-the-room problem is the best I’ve heard: when someone has conviction, don’t argue. Say “great, go test it, and bring the data back.” They either prove it, disprove it, or reveal they were full of hot air.
This is where the conversation got bigger than business. Alex is passionate about the gatekeeping baked into outdoor sports: the fly shop that won’t give you the time of day if you don’t look the part, the whitewater crowd side-eyeing the wrong brand on your PFD. His point, borrowed from a mentor on the American Fly Fishing Trade Association board: every barrier to entry, whether physical, mental, racial, or socioeconomic, means fewer people falling in love with a place. And people who fall in love with a place are the ones who protect it. Fewer gate-openers means fewer stewards, less conservation, less access for the next person in.
We wandered into politics from there, and Alex’s framing on finding common ground across user groups and party lines was a masterclass in redirection: what must be true for both of us to be happy? Clean, accessible water, it turns out, is a pretty good place to start. Or as I put it, badly: bridges, not walls. Just no dams. The fish don’t like dams.
We closed on AI, and Alex didn’t flinch from the tensions, including the ironic predicament of being a water recreation company in the age of water-hungry data centers (his reminder: check how many gallons go into a pair of jeans or a beef burger before you panic about your ChatGPT prompts). But the optimistic stuff was the good stuff. Onwater holds a patent on estimating a fish’s length, weight, and species from a photo, turning millions of anglers into a conservation data source that beats shocking rivers and floating fish to the surface. And their Angler and Paddler Intelligence features point you toward where to go and what to know without spot-burning the exact rock, fly, and time.
If you’ve followed the show, you know I’ve become slightly (ok, very) obsessed with what happens when you feed these models rich, personal context. I told Alex about handing Claude ten-plus years of my blood work, seven years of training logs, and my full Strava history, and the patterns it surfaced that I’d never seen. As Alex, and many others have put it, data is the new oil. The differentiator between models is collapsing toward the context and the data you bring to them. And for brands, that increasingly means earned media and PR are what shape how the models talk about you. (If you missed my episode with Michael from Centium AI on the 2,000-prompt outdoor study, go back and listen. It’s the perfect companion to this one.)
This episode of Long Run Labs is brought to you in partnership with Popfly, who have been supporting the show, and Second Nature, since earlier this year. So let me lead with that disclaimer, and then tell you why I actually care about them.
I met Maren at Outdoor Media Summit last fall (who else is headed to Asheville in September??) and Taylor, their CEO, at an event in Denver a few months later. Then I did the thing I always do before I’ll work with anyone: I got on the platform and used it myself, as a creator. I came away impressed with the infrastructure, and if you’ve listened to me for more than five minutes, you know infrastructure and measurement are the hill I’ll die on. Half the brand partnerships I see feel good but never get measured, and “the vibes are good” only carries a program so far. Popfly is one of the few tools I’ve found that’s actually built to set both sides up to succeed.
Alex put it better than I could, from the operator’s seat. Popfly, he said, “rooted it in authenticity” and picked its lane, becoming the specialists you actually want in your corner. What drew him in most: they don’t treat creators as a content factory or a time-bound transaction. They act as a matchmaker, and the goal is for a real relationship to blossom from there. Onwater brings Popfly creators into beta testing, into regional specialty-retail activations, into river cleanups and casting clinics, not just “here’s a couple hundred bucks, go post this.” With a roster of roughly 10,000 creators, it lets a small, scrappy marketing team punch far above its weight.
My own experience mirrors his: relationships that started as a transaction with a brand and a product I liked, then advanced off the platform into a direct relationship with the marketer. And one of them is joining me next week on Long Run Labs. That’s the whole point. Alex even caught the accidental tagline: Popfly building the thing right, for the long haul. For the long run. Couldn’t have said it better.
If you’re a brand or a creator in the outdoor and endurance space, check out Popfly.
Curiosity beats mastery for generalists. Go deep on the new thing, become the temporary specialist, then move on. Pair yourself with people who think differently and let the tools amplify how you’re wired.
Earn word of mouth before you buy awareness. If the product is actually innovative, build product-led growth and network effects first. Save the brand campaign for when the product and the network are already working.
Consumer insight is the soul, not a step. Bring creators and testers behind the curtain for feedback before you ever ask them to promote. It removes your bias and buys you their buy-in.
Beat the loudest voice with a test. Meet conviction with “great, go test it, and bring the data back.” Signal wins over volume.
Open gates, don’t guard them. Every barrier to entry means one fewer person who falls in love with a place, and one fewer steward to protect it.
LinkedIn is the easiest place to connect with Alex directly. And if you spend time on the water, check out the apps: Onwater Fish for fishing and Paddleways for paddling, both live in the App Store.
If Long Run Labs is where I dig into the business of endurance, the founders, operators, and brand builders behind the sport, For The Long Run is the flagship it grew out of. It’s been running since 2019, and it’s about one thing: the why underneath the miles. Why we start, why we keep going, and why this sport pulls us in the way it does. Conversations with Olympians, ultrarunners, coaches, and everyday athletes about motivation, big scary goals, training, injury, and the life around the running.
If you’re not sure where to jump in, I put together a page of the episodes I’d hand a friend:
Thanks for being here for 500 of these. Whether you found the show yesterday or you’ve been riding along since 2019, I’m grateful. Here’s to the next 500.
Jon Levitt is the host of For The Long Run, founder of the Long Run Labs Network (35+ shows, ~1M monthly downloads), and co-founder of The Huddle. This newsletter covers the business of creator partnerships, sponsorship strategy, and what the data actually shows, in addition to a weekly article from that week’s Long Run Labs Podcast.
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