Golfers Practice Like Sh*t

This week, we're going to piggyback a bit off of our last edition.

Building a SaaS product, or in other words, building an app, always sounds cool, but in the end it’s far more difficult than most would give it credit.

The iterations, the customer support, the uncertainty of whether any of it is actually working — it's enough to drive anybody nuts.

And that's before you factor in the real challenge: you're not just building a product. You're trying to change behavior. Habits people have had for years. Habits that, in golf, are usually ineffective and deeply ingrained.

That's what makes game improvement technology one of the hardest spaces to crack.

The video above walks through the most common pitfalls I've seen founders run into, and what you can do right now to rethink how you're building, how you're positioning, and how you actually get to the other side of this thing.

Because if you do, there is still plenty of room to build a big business.

We're at an inflection point with launch monitors.

Going to the PGA Show this year confirmed it. The space is crowded. Anybody investing in complex, expensive hardware is going to have to quickly pivot their business model, and you're already starting to see it. The bigger players are pouring more and more into software because they have to.

I went deep down the rabbit hole with one company exploring exactly this. It only confirmed what I already suspected: hardware is hard, and if you don't have a direct connection to your end users, optimizing your revenue is going to be a serious problem.

It's obvious, but needs to be said. You can only sell so many pieces of high-tech hardware to one person, it doesn’t truly scale. Yes, there's a licensing fee or a maintenance fee, but that alone is not enough to build a truly sustainable business.

Here's the tricky part. The high-performance, expensive launch monitors are mostly purchased by coaches and academies. But the bulk of the people actually using the technology are golfers.

What you're going to start seeing is launch monitor companies overstepping. They can see the gold mine. They just can't touch it. But they're going to try — even if it puts their relationships with their core paying customers, the coaches and academies, at risk.

I'm seeing it happen. Thought you all should know.

Be thoughtful about who you're partnering with. If your business model hinges on these relationships, make sure there is a clear terms of service and privacy policy in place. Non-negotiable.

And here's the flip side. There's a massive opportunity sitting right in the middle of all of this. If instead of just being a consumer of one of these platforms, you create a genuine win-win between you and your launch monitor provider — that's where the magic is about to happen.

(If you’re new here, this is our D2C performance brand that we’re building semi-publicly)

Over the past couple of days, we had a couple of posts go viral. You never fully know when these will pop, but we've gotten better at figuring out the format and CTAs.

By the numbers:

As you'll see, simple formats. Perhaps 30 seconds each with a statement and or an invite to join the conversation. In fact, while I'm writing this the numbers above are still climbing.

Growing an audience or having posts go viral is cool, but mean nothing in the end without a clear monetization strategy. I'll share more next time on how we're already bringing in sales and how we plan to scale in May and beyond.

Keep fighting the good fight. See ya next week 👊

-Spencer