Two calls into The First $1M, nearly every question comes back to the same thing. Building, selling, and getting folks to actually use your product.
Here are some of the sound bites I wanted to pull out and share more widely.
The real coach number
I find myself repeating this one weekly. The US has roughly 30,000 PGA members, about 10,000 who ever give a lesson, around 5,000 who give a handful a week, and maybe 2,500 who make real income from it. Those 2,500 already run on tools like CoachNow and OnForm.
Getting a coach to try something new is the easy part. They love to “try” things.
The real test comes when they have to invite a student into it, because coaches protect those relationships and don’t want to push their students to create dozens of random accounts.
Even if the athlete creates an account, it doesn’t mean they will consistently log in, and if they don’t, the coach abandons the tool.
That’s the real “cost of switching”: moving athletes.
When the buyer and the user are different people
Golf courses buy bundles from Golf Genius, and CoachNow became part of that bundle along the way.
The problem is that the way it’s currently sold is not actually driving adoption.
Compliance is the #1 thing I see seasoned companies like GG, as well as early startups, ignoring.
Selling is EASY. Getting folks to use the thing you sold them, not so much.
GG sells a bundle of products covering a number of golf course departments. The problem is that the buyer is often not even a user, or if they are, they only use one of the many products.
So you sell a fat bundle, high-five, and then a year rolls by and you’re shocked to hear they want to cancel.
2 Reasons
You didn’t sell EVERYONE
You never dug deep enough to ensure all the products were being used
How to get compliance
Focus less on the bundle and more on selling 1 awesome product to the right people
Onboard them and stay connected
Once compliance is confirmed, sell the rest of the bundle
Something I’m still wondering about: pricing by seats
At CoachNow we didn’t charge per athlete, so coaches could grow uncapped, but we did charge for coaches. If I were building it again I might only use feature tiers and no user caps, since every cap makes a customer decide who deserves an invite.
Basecamp is a good example of the other side of this. Their free version gives you one project and lets you invite up to 3 people, which is enough to try it. The paid version has unlimited projects, unlimited people, and every feature they offer, so nobody has to stop and decide who deserves an invite. They keep delivering more features to either keep people or raise the price.
Talk about low friction for compliance as well as a high cost of switching.
As a consumer of tons of B2B tools I’m now seeing how much easier it would be to jump in if I didn’t have to think about user count.
scale.golf is growing
With the launch of The First $1M and our success with the Remote Coach Accelerator phase 1, my overall plan is really taking shape.
In short, my aim with phase 1 is to provide access to the experience and advice I would have killed for back in the day. This newsletter, my 1:1 work, and these programs are the early signals it’s working.
Phase 2, Connections, is now getting off the ground as well. Members in The First $1M are establishing relationships, and as we invite more teams in, there will for sure be some serious deals made.
[golfhackz], my other big project, is growing as well. We’ve done our soft launch and will enter BETA next month. Its success will fully unlock phases 2 and 3 of my overall plan: Connections and Customers.
More soon!
Keep fighting the good fight. See ya next week 👊
-Spencer
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