A few years ago, Golf Genius tried to build a coaching app, couldn't get it to work, and ended up buying the one I'd already built.
I'll tell you that whole story next edition, because it's the best proof I have for what I'm about to lay out. For now it's enough to know that the improvement layer of golf is valuable enough that the people consolidating this industry would rather buy their way in than build it themselves.
Which brings me to the thing almost everyone building in golf gets wrong. They spend all their energy chasing the biggest number on the board, when that number is the one that matters least.
You've seen it. Participation at an all-time high, more than 48 million and climbing toward 50, and every pitch deck in the category opens on that slide like it's a permission slip.
The trouble is that the headline number actively misleads, because the bucket it describes is leaking from the bottom faster than most people realize.
The NGF even has a name for it, the leak in the bucket. Golf pours millions of new players in the top every year and quietly loses millions out the bottom, and the churn is brutal in exactly the years you'd expect it to look healthiest.
In 2020, the year everyone remembers as golf's great boom, the game still lost 5.7 million players. Only about one in four people who ever try golf actually stick.
The three who leave were never going to spend a meaningful dollar with you on their way through, which is the whole problem with building for the crowd. So set the 50 million aside and look instead at the golfers who stay and spend, because the concentration there is staggering.
A committed minority, roughly 21% of golfers, buys about 75% of all the equipment sold in this country.
A fifth of the players carry three quarters of the spending, and that ratio has held steady for twenty-five years.
Now, playing a lot of golf is a decent way to find that buyer, but it's still a guess, because plenty of people log fifty rounds a year and never spend a cent actually trying to get better.
There's a far clearer sign sitting right next to it, and it's the one I'd build a business around: the golfer who takes a lesson.
A lesson is an investment in a passion. It's a golfer telling you, with their wallet, that they've decided their score is a problem worth paying to fix, and that single decision changes everything that follows.
The Proponent Group (top resource group for golf coaches) estimates