This is something I'm effectively relearning as we're about to launch [golfhackz] into the public ecosystem of golf performance, and it gets me thinking about all the lessons I learned while building Edufii, which eventually became CoachNow.

Fifteen years ago, we chose the name Edufii because we wanted it to be a combination of education and edification. Our aim was to work not only in sports but across all instructional industries: music, dance, sports, and so on.

We felt like education, not just in the traditional school system but especially once you left it, was completely broken, and that's why we named the company what we did.

To be clear, you also usually have to make up a word to get the .com, and that's where Edufii came from too. It was never a naming issue. People really grabbed onto it, and it became a verb in the early days.

Around that same time, in 2014 or 2015, I also coined the phrase "connectedcoaching." That one wasn't handed to me by an acquiring company. That one was ours from the start, and landing on it turned out to be a huge win, not just for the marketing we were doing then, but for content we're still creating today.

Fast forward to when we got acquired. I went on my first real vacation in years, only to come back and have the acquiring company tell me that people in Japan and other markets didn't know what Edufii meant or how to pronounce it.

They said we needed a simpler name, and they'd already landed on CoachNow. To be frank, since you're reading this, I never liked that name. I still don't.

Especially in promotional pieces, when we'd have to say something like that. It drove me and my team nuts. It's a name I'm still not a fan of to this day. But we landed on it outside of me, and kept building the brand anyway.

Here's the thing about building a brand: the name is one piece, but what matters more is what you stand for.

The easiest example I can give is this: from day one of Edufii and CoachNow, the word lesson was completely removed from all marketing and internal conversation. We don't believe in lessons. We believe in coaching. We believe in programs. Nothing we said involved the word lesson.

What's interesting is that once CoachNow got acquired by Golf Genius, that rule became very difficult to hold onto. From what I can see now, "lesson" has started creeping back into the marketing content, because brand and branding just aren't as important to some people as they are to others.

For what it's worth, CoachNow actually turned a lot of this into a formal design and style guide at coachnow.com/design. It's badly out of date at this point, and honestly I never loved every choice in there, it was built by a former designer of mine and some of it reflects taste more than strategy.

But the practice of building something like that in the first place, writing down your principles, your colors, your typography, the actual rules of how the brand should look and feel, is genuinely important. Worth a look if you've never put one together for your own company.

Part of that same exercise is deciding who you're actually building for, and just as important, who you're not.

Edufii was built for:

Edufii was not built for:

Trying to serve everybody is how you end up serving nobody well.

So now, as we're about to launch [golfhackz], we're in the middle of these ongoing conversations: what is this brand?

For some context, [golfhackz] started as a social channel I grew without a whole lot of effort or attention, never really knowing where it was going, just seeing how big the audience could get.

We're at about 200K followers across the different channels. But now that we're turning it into an actual company, we have to define what it is, what it isn't, where it's going, and who we are.

I can't get into all of that in this particular piece, but I do want to readdress the word "lesson." This is another place where we're drawing the same line. We're also not going to talk about tips.

We're going to talk about programming, coaching, and long-term development. Your ability to learn how to self-assess, how to become an independent golfer, that's what matters to us, not quick fixes, band-aids, "fix your swing in five easy tips," and all the rest. That's exactly where we're not going.

The work we still have left is fully naming the actual product we're selling. We've got ideas, and we're still working on naming the members of the paid membership itself. It's a little boring to call them students, a little boring to call them members, a little boring to say "join our paid group." When you're branding something, these are important decisions.

[golfhackz] started as a fun name, and honestly, part of the fun was the obvious joke. A hack is someone who's bad at the game, so there was always a little wink built into it from day one.

But internally, it's been refined into something with more intention behind it, and it comes down to the team actually building this thing.

I've got a technology background, so we're leaning into that world on purpose: tech design language, the overall matrix vibe, the idea of looking at the source code of your swing. Your programming. Debugging it. Playing with that language in a way that's more than just a clever pun.

That's not an accident either. I bring the technology viewpoint and the access to different tech that comes with years in software. Andrew Banner, my partner in this, brings the other half.

He's a highly technical coach, sharp at delivering remote coaching, breaking down swings, and laying out specific programming for people. Almost like he's handing them the cheat codes to get better.

So the name works on two levels now. It's still a wink at the game everybody's bad at sometimes. But it's also exactly what we're building: a place where your golf swing gets debugged like code, by two people who actually think in those terms.

This is a good early snapshot of that language actually showing up. The command-line style copy at the bottom, the bracketed [golfhackz] mark, the whole dark, green-on-black feel.

You always have the option to launch first and refine the brand as you go. If you've made it this far into this piece, this is the part I really want you to own: you don't have to have everything perfect before you launch.

We've evolved and adjusted through a handful of internal experiments already, and regardless of where we land on getting this brand exactly right, we're launching anyway.

One last thing I want to leave you with, because it comes up more than almost anything else when I talk about this: when you're defining a brand, it helps to choose an enemy.

One of my favorite examples is a company called MUD/WTR. It's a mushroom coffee alternative. Across all their marketing, at least the one what sold me, the enemy was traditional coffee.

So as you're building your own brand, look at the entire ecosystem around you and define an enemy. You don't always have to call them out by name, but it'll sharpen exactly how you position yourself against everyone else in the market.

We’re less than a month away from launching. We don’t have everything dialed in 100% yet but are actively working toward it but whether we get there or not we’ll launch.

We’ll launch knowing that what it looks like today also won’t be what it looks like a year or 2 from now - this whole startup thing is iterative and that’s the fun of it.

I’m all about it. Especially if you’re sitting below $1M ARR. In October I’ll be launching a new growth engine called “The First $1M”.

ICMYI - You can get more info plus lock in your spot below.

ONE major addition - early adopters will get first dibs at hitting the [golfhackz] audience if their product is a good fit. A golfer eco-system over 200K and growing.

Keep fighting the good fight. See ya next week 👊

-Spencer