Last week I laid out the case: forget the 50 million, build for the improver, the golfer who pays to get better and keeps right on paying. If you read it, you've got the bones of the argument. I also promised you the Golf Genius story, and that's what's waiting in the video above.
The video does two things. It goes deeper on the points I made last week, the leaky bucket, the 21% who carry the spending, the lesson-taker as the clearest buyer in the game, and it brings a stack of new material the newsletter never touched.
What I expand on:
Why the big number is a false positive. Last week I told you to ignore the 50 million. In the video I show you what's hiding underneath it, and why that committed minority will buy 20, 30, 40 products in a lifetime if you keep handing them the next one
What the lesson-taker is really worth. Not just that they spend more, but the mechanism that makes proven intent the only number worth paying for
What's brand new:
The full Golf Genius story. They tried to buy CoachNow more than once, over years, before they ever tried to build their own. Why they kept coming back, and why their version never worked
Where the thesis actually started. I didn't set out to build a golf company. I built for the entire instruction economy, and golf one major area it led
The retention proof I watched for 13 years. What a busy coach logging five and six hours a day inside CoachNow taught me about why improvers never churn
The family flywheel. How one junior who wants to get better pulls a whole spending household onto the course behind them
Who's already moving. The roll-ups and the strategic money quietly betting on this exact layer right now
[golfhackz] Insider
(If you’re new here, this is our D2C performance brand that we’re building semi-publicly)
This is the thesis from the other side of the table.
Between [golfhackz], Andrew, and our partner coaches, the social audience now reaches beyond 200,000 golfers. Every one of them showed up for the same reason: they want to get better. That hunger is the whole reason this audience is worth anything.
But wanting to get better and paying to get better are two different things. The only way to truly know someone is an improver is to get them to buy something, and a subset already have (high-ticket remote coaching).
Our next job is to move these folks off social and onto a newsletter, then from a newsletter into a membership. Each step asks for a little more commitment, and each step tells us more about who's real.
This fall we're launching a number of ways to test exactly that, different offers, different price points, different products, all built to turn a hand-raise into a transaction.
Here's why that matters, for us and for you. Distribution is the name of the game. It's the hardest part of any business, and it's the part we're solving in public.
What we're building isn't an audience. It's a list of verified customers, golfers who've proven they'll spend to get better, and access to that list is something we intend to open up to the right companies and coaches down the road.
We're not chasing a follower count.
We're building the buyer pool that most brands spend years and fortunes trying to reach, and we want to put you in front of it.
FAQ
"One investor gives me 30 notes, the next gives me 30 different ones. What do I do?"
You stop treating their notes as a to-do list. Raising money is sales, and like any sale, the person who controls the funnel wins. Right now you've got it backwards.
You're letting every prospect run you through their process, react to their feedback, rebuild the deck to their taste, and the result is you're chasing 30 different versions of the same pitch and landing on none of them.
It's impossible to accommodate that many styles, preferences, and opinions, and trying to will water your story down until it sounds like nobody, including you.
Flip it. You own the story, you own the numbers, you own the process. Take it or leave it.
A no is a gift because it gets you back to building faster, and the quicker you collect your no's, the quicker you find the yes that was always going to be a yes.
The maybe is what kills you, and chasing notes is how you manufacture maybes.
Got a question you want answered here? Hit reply. The best ones run in a future edition.
If you're building or investing in the business of lower scores and you made it this far, you already know I'm here to help.
This fall we're opening up new ways to work together, including access to the buyer pool I just walked you through, the verified customers most brands spend years and fortunes trying to reach. Room will be limited and the people on the list hear first.
Reply with "IN" and I'll make sure you're at the front when it goes live.
Our goal is simple: help you build your business better and faster than we did.
Keep fighting the good fight. See ya next week 👊
-Spencer