Thanks for joining the Tech Caddie. We have Brendan Beebe today, and I thought it would be really interesting to speak with you, Brendan, based on your past time at foreUP, and then what you're doing now, I believe it's Luminous, correct? Yep, correct. So welcome to the show, Brendan Beebe, CTO at Luminous, and just tell us a little bit about what you're up to today, and then maybe we'll go back and visit.

all the stuff you accomplished at foreUp. Yeah, so right now I'm no longer in the golf industry. I'm working on another startup, kind of same stage as early foreUp when I joined. And we're in the e commerce space. And so we provide a system of record and forecasting or replenishment across warehouses for small businesses that are primarily e commerce. And this is your second, I think.

stint as a CTO, you were CTO at foreUP, but that was the first time you had been a CTO. Correct. If you don't count like the tiny startups where there's like two people, then yes, this would be the second. Right. You know, it's interesting. I don't know how much you stay on top of golf tech today, but waitlist technology is becoming quite popular in golf. And actually one of the first things you ever built.

was related to wait list, but it was related, I think to getting classes at BYU. But I thought it was interesting that you had done that so many years ago and now it's very hot, so to speak in golf. Oh, really? Yeah, I noticed you had the Noteefy? Yes, and they just call it Noteefy. They just spell it differently. Yeah. Okay. There's Noteefy, there's tee time snipe, there's loop golf. And then there's actually a couple of newer tee sheets that have said,

Hey, we, we see this more as a feature and it's going to be a feature of our product. Right. And so there's a, uh, a company that just actually launched today called Golf Geek Software. There's another company called club, uh, um, unity club or Club Unity. And, um, and so, uh, wait, that's the challenge, right? Is like, for foreup, if they wanted to teach me a waitlist functionality, I would, they could just build in a week or two.

And it's, it's hard to build a company around small feature like that. Agreed. But you know, it's interesting about this, uh, this waitlist stuff, but I don't want to get too far off track. Yeah, go ahead. But boy talk about ROI for the operator. I mean, you, you know how much money it really costs an operator when there's a no show, right? Especially a Saturday morning, you know, for some no show. Well, um, or say it's a late cancellation, say they cancel Friday evening.

Well, if you cancel Friday evening now and you and you it's a golf course using waitlist technology, it will send a text message to every single person that's expressed an interest in playing on Saturday morning. And then it's just a, you know, it's kind of a call to action to quickly backfill that tee time. So the, so there's, there's good money, good revenue impact for the opera. I think it's a brilliant idea. Even the popular courses like Beth Page and Torey Pines, they actually had an issue where people were, there's GitHub repose online where you can actually download the code.

that runs their wait list on your computer and the GitHub repos will do that exact same thing. It just automatically texts you. And so in the courses where demand far exceeds supply, the open market has created these open source tools to do exactly that. Yes. And I think several companies have figured that out and sticking their brand around it. So, so let's, let's for the people that don't know and you.

I encourage you to correct me every time I make a mistake here, but yeah, of course, foreUP up essentially, uh, moves from napkin to reality in 2011, 2012. I think Joel Ragar is the CEO, uh, at the time founder, uh, certainly. Um, and, and I think maybe starts it with a couple of other people. It was Joel Ragar, Evan Teshima, and then Joel Hopkins. I don't know how his name doesn't get out there. That was like the brains behind it. He built the.

first prototypes. And yeah, it was the three of them that got the initial small investment in 2011. And they kind of lived in poverty for a couple of years to get that thing running. And so Joel Hopkins, so we'll have to I'll have to dig in on that a little bit. I appreciate that. And so then I think it's in 2014 or 2015, you joined and what I'm not sure about is did you join as CTO? Or did you get elevated after you got there?

No, so I was doing contract for them, contract work in 2014. And if anybody was on foreUP, the first rendition of foreUP Marketing was kind of the contract project that worked on the side. And so at that point, it was Joel Hopkins and another developer called Jordan Bush. The two of them were the primary engineers at the time. And it was getting, the project was getting a little too wide. There was just too much going on. And it was getting to a point.

There's a few thick key things that happened. I think Fore was it Fore Reservations that turned off service in 2014? Yeah, four reservations was acquired by Golf GolfNow. And I'm not sure where you're headed with that. Are you saying, and so that opened up the field a little bit more? Yeah, so that was a huge influx point for foreUP. And that's kind of what, right when they took me on was during that period. So things were starting to explode. It was getting incredibly complex. Bugs in the software were getting a little too.

hard to handle. So they brought me into, hey, let's mini gig development under control. How do we take care of this? And so before you became full time, I am curious, were you working for a company, you know, that had that had engineers out being third party engineers? Or was that on your own in the evening? So as a side gig, it was on my own in the evenings. Okay. So as I in that stages of hustling, where I had my full time job and then worked at Lumen at fourUP up

in the after, in the evenings. That's excellent. How'd you guys even find each other?

Um, that's a great question. I think a friend of a friend, I knew somebody over there. I knew, and you live in Utah, so it would stand to reason in the tech community. It's okay. So that, that makes sense. Um, okay. And so, so now you become the CTO and I think at some point you all had to make, uh, some difficult decisions, but I also think that they were, uh, successful.

decisions. But when you kind of first, you know, became a full-time employee, did you had to work through some challenges, I think. Oh yeah. It was a crazy time. Cause those first years you're in, how do we get to a million dollars in revenue? And you're just, you're, the founders are paying themselves nothing. They have a kids, they have families and you're just trying to get on any customers we can. And golf, you feel like golf is like this super small market.

Like there's not much room to grow in. And so you're just trying to sell whoever you can, but you end up selling management companies, public clubs, private clubs. And every time you sell somebody to like, I need a new feature, I need new functionality. And nobody in the golf space is willing to pay anything. So your contract values are like $2,000 a month. Like how do you build a company off of that breadth of features while paying this amount per year? It's just, it's really hard. And so, and so I think that's the question. So how did you do it?

Um, just barely. Um, we had three generalists. So Joel Hopkins, myself and Jordan Bush were kind of the type of guys who could do everything. We didn't have an outsource team. I, it's almost in some respects, it's easier to see like where other people went wrong in the moment. You don't realize it's a good decision. But like one of the things I feel is really important is if you have engineers who understand the problem.

they can build things in a way where it will help you in the future. You see companies like Teesnap. That was like the blossom. Like they were the apple. That's what they were trying to go after, right? Is the apple of the golf point of sale market. And they're spending millions of dollars a month, a year on these outsourced contractors to do their bidding. But what you run into is like when the engineers are really far from the problem, they don't know where things are going. And so you end up.

One, you probably are ignoring your user input. Those engineers aren't on the course seeing how this is actually being used. Like the customer may say they want X, but in reality they need Y. And you need an engineer who's able to think that way. And if I could just throw it in there. I mean, there is a different, there is another philosophy out there where maybe you think you are such a good product person, you don't think your customer knows what they want.

Right. And so you'll build what they should want or something. I do think that there's a bit of a. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. That was I think that's where Teesnap went wrong is they weren't listening to their customer. The customers were saying like, we want to be able to change the tee sheet after somebody books. But no, it's like, no, that's not how you do it. Like, yeah, you can go the opposite way where it's you're not listening to them in reality. And I do think the flip side of that.

is we had a guest on earlier, Tyler Arnold, who has a new company. And I think it would be interesting. I think it's actually it's called Eagle Club Systems. Oh, Eagle Club Systems. Right. And I think it'd be interesting. It's at some point, I want to talk about maybe how you can help some of these newer companies that are coming up. But at any rate, Tyler will talk about.

trying to not build everything for everybody, right? So there's a happy medium in there somewhere, right? Where it's like, you know, you do need to listen, but boy, don't make the mistake of listening too much and building every single little thing for that one golf course. There's a story in golf tech, I don't know if you're familiar, but way back in the day, IBS started to build kind of a special version for Club Link, a rather large management company out of Canada that had locations in Florida as well. Well,

They got so far down the road they got stuck Never do that is We were oh my gosh I think Club Profit probably that too like where you build yourself into so much technical debt You are just completely blocked in a corner and you're not going anywhere Right, and you have to fight that like there were times where we had management companies a hundred courses saying hey we need this and We're looking at thinking not a single other course will ever benefit from this

and you have to make a decision like we can't. We literally, we're a software company, building something for the golf industry. You want something custom, we'll give you the tools to be able to customize it yourself, but that's not something we can do. Yeah, in doing some research for this call, one thing I uncovered about part of your strategy that I thought was great, but you don't hear about it a lot in this space, you guys kind of came up with two specific, not sure if I'd call them goals or criteria, I guess they'd be goals.

you wanted to limit the opportunity for the user to make a mistake and you wanted to reduce the amount of time the user had to engage with the software. And I think what that meant was you just wanted to make booking a tee time really fast. If, if at all possible, you didn't want to have that have them live in the software. Um, you don't, how did you know that? Well, I, you know, I do, I did some research, but, but I, but I, when I learned that, I thought, wow, really smart.

I wish more people in this industry did that. Right. And I don't hear about a lot of other tech companies talk that way. And I just thought it'd be interesting. Maybe you could share with us, like how did, how did you even get to that point? You know, how did you make the decision to prioritize those two things? No, it's interesting paradigm when you're the point of sale or you're the tee sheet you're not a software people necessarily want to use. Like they're at the front desk or they're a waiter or a waitress taking orders.

they don't want to be in your software. And if you're making them be in there for longer than they need to, then you're kind of doing a poor job. And we found out, I think we launched the NPS campaign. NPS is like a net promoter score, where we ask customers like, hey, would you recommend us to your friends? And intuitively, like that high school student in the pro shop will never recommend us to a friend. So what's the point of asking?

And we could have simply dismissed those negative comments as like, this is just a high school kid. He doesn't know what he's talking about. But instead we accepted it for what it was. And our NPS score was terrible. And we could have easily like dismissed all the bad ones saying those are high school kids, but we accepted it and asked ourselves the question of like, what would it take for this guy to enjoy working in our software? And it was make it as easy as possible. He can check a line of people in during rush hour, get them through and

take payments as fast as possible. Or get it so that waitress can split her bill as quickly as possible. And as we started to dissect that, we were able to use the tools we had in place. There's a lot of product tools that measure usage and things like that. And we could see where people were spending a lot of time, where were people getting angry. We could then go back and kind of watch those, those happen in real time. Like why were they getting angry?

And we came to that conclusion, like they just want to be out of the software. And so we just made that a goal for several years. Every aspect of the software. How can we fix this up? You, you probably had to run your dev stuff through those two filters. I would think. Does it, does it check these two boxes? And then, you know, assumably you went on to a lot of other boxes you had to check or something. But yeah, by the time we got to that spot, we had a team that was, that was their sole focus is like, let's choose rest the food and beverage software. How can we decrease the number of.

clicks to get to checkout. Yep. And that was their, that was, and I think that's a key. Like when you have a software team, and I see this a lot in the golf industry where it's non-software guys starting companies, they don't let their engineers think for themselves. And foreUP a big piece of the culture there was, we had this high level thing of decreased clicks, but you figure out as a software team, how to solve that. And they're the ones that would go to the course. They would figure out the real reasons. So there's zero micromanagement.

And it was a lot of like freedom on right. So it's kind of like as leaders, you guys would set the North Star and then they would build the map, how to get there. They would figure out what roads they wanted to take. And hopefully you would hire people that could get there, you know. And we could only do it because we didn't outsource our software development. It was and you can't when your core product is. Software development and you outsource it, you're not a real software company and you can't do that type of management.

Right. So I'm curious, I've been, you know, very closely involved with a couple of different golf management software platforms. I think that's what we're supposed to call it. That didn't have, did not measure user behavior. Is that something that you all then did build organically into foreUp or how did you measure how long it took people to do things, etc, etc. Was it was it third party software? Did you build some measurement tools in there?

No, there's third party software we were using. Okay. That was key to everything we did. I think one of our strengths near the end was our product teams who they would dissect that data. Like we had almost too much data. We didn't have too much. We had the right amount of data and those product managers were able to really dissect it, dive into where we needed to focus. Why were people complaining? Why were people angry? And they had that freedom and enough data to actually make the right choices.

There was a culture around like, I don't, if somebody came up and said, Hey, we should go this route. It was like, why show me. Yeah. I don't trust your gut. Your guts probably wrong. Yeah. It's, you know, what you learn when you're building these companies is just how important culture is and how important it is that the leaders really

they absolutely embody the culture, right? It's people, it's learned and people watch behavior and it's so stinking important. And listen, I think when the leaders are truly intimately involved, like you refer to yourselves as generalists, but really what that meant was, hey, I can fix anything that gets broken. Like I'm not afraid to get in there and do it. And I think that there's great value in that.

So, okay, so you're in the role, you're fixing problems, you know, you're also growing. You know, I think a lot of us in the industry watched you guys grow. It's interesting. I think foreUP came along at a time that there was some good opportunity because it was kind of cool to be in the cloud and you can kind of just brand yourself as like, hey, we're cloud-based, whereas, you know, very few others are.

And I look back on those times, I'm like, yeah, you could really run a long way by saying you were in the cloud and some of the hipper management companies, we're going to think that was pretty cool. And yeah, this is where we want to be, etc, etc. I'm curious today. And I know you're not super involved today. But what would be the separator today? Or do you think it's we've gotten so commoditized that like, now we're just down to price in terms of golf technology?

That's a great question and you're a hundred percent accurate on the Cloud based point of sale like that was the sales pitch, you know from I think Teesnap Chrono Golf for up that was the number one sales pitch for the three of them up until What 2019 2020 is when I don't know if you can actually use that anymore, right? and what we started when we started shifting towards is like value you have to be able to

show to your golf courses that you're returning value in some respect. And so we did that through outsource marketing and other marketing related tools. But that became, I mean, and so I was involved with that as well, but that really became service, right? I mean, that's not really software or really technology, right? That was okay. Now it's going to turn into IBM and it'd be a service game. It's not going to be these great tools that we've built. Right.

Well, the other piece of that is then, I think you can supplement with services and where we were going. And it's been a couple years, year and a half since I've been out completely. So I don't know where they're at right now. But at the time it's like, okay, we need to, how do we automate this process? Or how do we build it into the products that the marketing happens automatically? Because it's a kind of a recurring process that you can go through. But then the next strategy too is being the platform of golf. It was, and this is what you can't replace. If your system is,

wide open, if everybody can build into it. What we wanted to do was build an ecosystem of small apps where somebody like Noteefy, and they're probably into the foreUP API, we have the best documentation, it's probably the easiest. There's even a foreUP app store. If you've used foreUP, you probably are aware of it, where all of a sudden your windows are wide open, you can use all these point solutions that do what foreUP did best. Now was our key strategy actually. It wasn't to build the best tool.

for everything. It was, hey, let's do everything. Let's build a flexible product that can work with every single golf course. But then let's let these small point of point solutions come in and do things and specialize in things that we will never get to. Yeah, and make it as easy as possible for them to make money. Can I ask you a question about that? Because I think it's great. And I have seen the marketplace that you're referring to. And it's sure It's, I'm not sure anybody would not love that. What do you think about?

point of sale being in that marketplace. And so what I'm suggesting is, is at the end of the day is the most important piece to a foreUP up or a G1 or whatever is the most important piece, the tee sheet. And maybe it actually can just go ahead and connect the Square or maybe it can connect the Clover or maybe it can connect the light speed retail. Or do you think, nah, you better have a golf specific point of sale and tee sheet and then go ahead and connect to everything else.

I think the core is actually the point of sale. I've seen a lot of people try and do Clover or a lot of people try and bring in a third party. I mean, there's a small startup called Birrdi that uses Square, I think, as like their point of sale. And the problem you run to every case is that connection. It's adding this extra step to go from tee sheet to point of sale. And it's that extra little bit slows things down. You don't have to worry about sinking. How do you sink over?

The unique thing about golf is the member credits at the pro shop or the country club where you can charge your account. How do you charge your accounts and how do you make sure that data syncs over correctly? And every scenario where I've seen somebody try to just use a third party point of sale, that's what they run into. And so the core was identifying the point of sale was actually our core. And I don't know if it's out yet or... Let's just say the vision was eventually to merge the tee sheet point of sale to be one.

Yeah, your checkout, your checkout ideally is just a single button click. Everything rings up onto the credit card machine. You can check somebody in within 15 seconds without there being any type of jump between them. Yeah, I think that is the ultimate and I think a lot of people have chased it. So, OK, I talked a little bit about other companies that are coming on. And it's interesting you mentioned Birrdi We invited Birrdi to come on. And that still may happen. But I.

I do think the Birrdi approach is interesting, right? And that's why I want to have him on and talk about it. At any rate, the other thing that you have experience with that I think some of the newer companies are just kind of getting introduced to is building a really successful company and yet not being that gorilla in the space, right? Not being number one. I think when you and I were setting up this call, I talked about how Pepsi is really profitable. They might not be number one, but they can still be really profitable.

Talk about how you navigated the world of golf now or navigated the relationship with golf now, how that impacted what you guys built, if it impacted it at all, maybe it didn't impact it at all. But I do think for some of these up and coming tech leaders to hear others talk about how you manage that big piece of the industry, I think is important.

Um, to be fair, we never saw ourselves as number two. And we were going to be, we saw the golf now aggregate book inside of things as a completely different market that we could have got to eventually, but in relation to the tee sheet point of sale market, you know, what's important is when you're measuring the market leader, you look how you should identify that as you look at the number of contracts that are up for renewal.

how many people are renewing their software, switching software every year, and are you taking over 50% of those? And let me just interrupt quickly, just as a heads up because people know in my back, that's why to the salespeople in this industry or whomever, get your CRM up to date. When Brendan talks about knowing when contracts are coming up for renewal, you need to know those things and to know that, it's the people on the ground that got to keep the data up to date, but go on, sorry to interrupt. Yeah, so that's...

You look at the number of contracts that are up for renewal every year. How many people are switching every year and how many of those as a company are you taking? And I think fourUP up at its peak. Oh, I don't know what they're doing right now. Right. But when I was leaving, we were easily taking over half the contracts that were up from new every year from every, from all courses nationwide. That's tremendous. Yeah. Tremendous. And we were growing. We were adding an incredible amount of number of courses every year.

And you won big accounts. You won the New York State Parks, which of course is, uh, is Beth Page. And, um, I'm not sure if you would want Torey at that point or not, but I mean, you were really having big, big named accounts. Uh, we're, we're using four up for sure. Yeah. If you looked at the public sector, we were taking in well over half those contracts. And so I, in my mind, and in four ups mind, we were the number one, as far as like absolute numbers, we were on track. We were going to be number one.

And at some point it becomes a threat enough to golf now that, you know, do we enter that market? Do not enter the market? Those are the types of questions I think you have to start asking yourself when you get to the two to 3000 course mark. Cause that's in a market of 15,000 golf courses. Right. And two to 3000 is sizable. Yes, agreed. So, okay. So, so part of what you just said there was part of the way you manage that relationship is you never saw yourself as number two, right? You never saw your, you, you thought

Our product speaks for itself. We're incredibly passionate about our product. We believe in our product and that's how we're gonna run the company. Of course, then things continue to evolve and founders wanna move on to the next thing, right? I mean, like you say, heck, you get to a thousand golf courses, you get to 2000 golf courses and you feel like you've gotten to the summit. And so now comes private equity money.

Uh, you know, how do we exit? How do we navigate that? Talk about that a little bit. Talk about making those decisions, but then maybe too. And I don't know how long you, you stuck around, but how does the, how does the culture, how does the world change after the private equity money comes in? Uh, well, to be fair, I, in decision to sell, I, the unique thing about four up is that they were pretty much bootstrapped.

So I think the founders and employees had well over 90% of the company. And so it was very much as founders, Joel, Joel Hopkins and Evan Teshima you know, they were the ones to decide, Hey, it's we've been doing this for well over a decade. That's, it's time to move on to something else with, with their lives. And I don't know which options were entertained, but eventually it was, you know, PE money comes in. And I think whether,

It doesn't matter how you get acquired. When you get acquired, things change in a massive way, right? They are the new owners. And we enjoyed this period of time where we were the owners. We had nobody to report to. It's, we could set our own priorities and do what we thought was best. And then when the new owners come in, they have new priorities, a new culture, and it's either you adopt or it's time to get out. That's a good time.

where that's when I left, you know, I like, I have a problem with authority and yeah, but yeah, I don't know how much detail I want to go into, but that's, that's about we're a good win. Well, listen, you're, you're welcome to get as detailed as you want. I try to tell as many people as I can. So I'll just kind of talk to the whole audience right now. This podcast, if you're a, uh, in golf,

course technology, this podcast is your place to say something if you have something to say, you know, and, and obviously we want it to be interesting. And maybe that's part of my job to make sure it's going to be interesting, but I want people to feel like they can come on here, not to air grievances, but to share, right? To share so that we get better as an industry and we learn from different things. And, um, so I always want people to know that this is, this is a place to come on and say what you have to say. Um, um.

So how long did you stay on after battery? So just for people that don't know, Battery Ventures out of Boston is who ultimately invested in foreUp that may have been under the Club Essential umbrella. I'm not sure, maybe you could fill me in on that. Yeah, so they're currently part of Club Essential Holding and I believe they're trying to bring together. So Club Essential is private, they see foreUp as kind of their public solution and they have other kind of recreational software.

that are trying to bring together as a solution, or at least a company that can provide a solution for everybody. And another firm is Full Steam who had purchased Club Profit. They're more on the... They're very specifically related to payment processing. I think a lot of this business is going to payment processing, right? That I have said that I believe that payment processing can almost take the place of barter.

So in other words, the way the relationship would work is you go to the golf course owner and you say, I wanna be your payment processor and I wanna be it so bad, I'll give you all my software for free, right? And just let me be your, and so that's kind of how barter worked. And I've got a little bit of experience with that. But so I don't know how involved battery is in the payment space, but I suspect that that's always a reason that money will come in golf until everybody goes that.

Yeah, because at the end of the day, like, as a company in tech, you have to be making money. And to be fair, golf course owners do not want to pay anything. And so the costs are sent to them, either through trade or through payment processing or some other kind of indirect method. So at the end of the day, the company has to make money. Sure. And so I totally agree. I think that's definitely going that way of payment processing, which is why it's so important that point of sale is the core of the product.

because then they, that's the only thing making money. Right. That's a, it's a good point. Now I think what you said is spot on, but, but then we, we know that like 80% of a public golf course's revenue does flow through the tee sheet. In other words, the vast majority of revenue to golf course comes from tee time sales. And so that's why this tee sheet becomes so important. And I am curious to know, um, you know,

when you started building a tee sheet or started to improve the existing tee sheet, what was your philosophy? Like what, what do you think today when you think about tee sheet was tee sheet, the biggest thing you did it for up, or maybe you would say, nah, actually member billing was a bigger deal to me than T sheet was. I guess I sit in this world of valuing the T sheet a great deal. I'm curious to know what you think. It's so spot on. Member billing was super important for our private play.

But for a public course, billings fairly simple, which is where you can get in trouble as a software company. Like if you are like, oh, member billion at the municipal course, I do that. We should be able to do it for the private country club. sorely of the mistaken, right? So I think it depends on the market, which is really important to like, which market are you targeting? But the market for foreUP generally speaking was public. Agreed? So tee sheet would be. The tee sheet was clutch and we were lucky enough. We had Torrey Pines, we had Beth Page,

you know, the podunk course in the middle of nowhere, we knew the gamut of what a tee sheet had to support and it's far more complex and you run into far more edge cases than you'd ever think possible, right? And so the initial tee sheet, it was kind of built on, built on, built on, things were tacked on and sometime in like 2019, 2018 is when we started the full rebuild and it was taking into account, okay, everything we know now.

how do we build something that's flexible enough to meet the needs of the 27 hole course in Florida and Beth Page and Torey Pines. And we started from that point. And it had all that flexibility built into it. So you were talking about.

guy from Eagle club systems where it's like, can't build everything. And it's like, yeah, you can't, but if you build it in a flexible way, you can actually support everything. And so there's a few key modules within for that allow you to customize the software to your needs. And we never had to go into a course and say, Hey, in order to use us, you have to change how you operate. It was actually, we have an implementation team. They'll consult you and they'll set up fore up to meet exactly the needs you need. Interesting. So you, you mentioned teams.

And I think another, I really believe that there was a time that four up was best in class when it came to customer experience, customer support. Um, and I know that there was, I can remember being, um, at the PGA show and talking to different four up people and them saying, we have a goal of zero churn. And I would think, okay, that's crazy. I can't believe that you would say that out loud. Had I said that out loud where I was,

I'd have been held accountable to it. But to your point, you guys were the owners, right? And so you could do that. And I know that you may not specifically been an owner, but you know what I mean. I mean, the owners were in the, and so you could say what you wanted to say in that environment, but I think it would be good for people to hear the goal of zero churn did mean you got to like 4% or 5% churn, which is I think outstanding.

Talk about that a little bit, how you guys prioritize that, how you made that be part of your culture. So one, if you look at the golf market, you don't have a lot of courses to sell to. If you're- No, and it's not growing, right? It is kind of this industry, that's why so many of us have left over, but it's this industry that's close ended. And so yeah, it's- You can't turn to customers. There's no way you churn a customer this year and you're gonna gain them back next year. You churn a customer and they're probably gone until that head pro leaves the-

golf course, you know, right. And so early on, you know, there's a time where our turn was like 15%. And we are still profitable, but just barely, we weren't growing very fast. And we decided, as a leadership team, like, our goal has to be 0% churn, let's take a step back. Let's refocus on the segments we do well. Let's refocus. I had a LinkedIn post recently where I talked about how we split it up into separate segments of the market. And we created

support teams and implementation teams and engineering teams that were focused specifically on these segments. And it was less about, Hey, we need to go build more software, but let's fix all the problems we have. Let's fix everything people are complaining about. Let's take that NPS score. Let's take the feedback. And we, it was a company wide focus at that point, even to the sales, right? If we think this customer is not going to be happy in our platform, we're not going to sell them. We'll come back to them next year. When we're ready. And the goal was actually 0%. And

It was, I mean, there's every years where we lost 20, 30 courses maximum at it. And we had 1500 courses on our platform. And when you look back on the churn, when you guys were as high as, what'd you say? 15% you were as high as 15%. When you look back on that, do you recall what the one or two top reasons for churn was? Bugs it was, or features that.

we sold a customer on that we weren't quite ready for. Yeah, over selling. Over promising, yeah, over selling. Yes, yeah. It was a big one. Yeah, yeah. And then on the other side, that was, the software just wasn't good. We were trying to do too many things too fast and we were just kind of tripping over ourselves. And so we had to take a step back and rethink about how we're solving the problems and take care of the core issues. Like we have to be able to process people. The software has to be up 100% of the time. It has to meet all these needs.

And I'm curious, because it could be different today. Where did foreUP live, so to speak? I mean, were you guys AWS? Were you Google? How did you work that? Or how did you manage that? We were in AWS and really simple architecture. If we, it's for a dev podcast, we can talk about specifics, but it was in AWS. Okay. And I'm curious, what did you not...

get to, what did you not build that you thought you would eventually build? But of course, you know, everyone moves on at some point, but anything that you thought you would get to that, uh, that you never were able to get your hands around. Uh, it's been so long.

Let's just say there's a backlog a mile long. Like there's so many small companies popping up and every single one of the ideas I've heard it was on our backlog. You know, it was just a matter of prioritization. Did you all ever talk about the phone? Did you ever think about, you know, being in, in a, in that call center space at all or building tools that made it easy for, for golf courses to connect to different call centers?

Yes, we actually have it. It just never become a primary focus. So we have a call center that some management companies use. And we have a IVR, so automated booking that some large municipalities use. It's just not future thinking. It was more of something we just had to roll out because people still require that as a need. For sure. I mean, and we see it in 2022 and 2023, we actually saw some people come back to call center

just because demand was up so much. And- Have a way to get past the limitations. That's right. That's right. Yeah. So, so it's difficult. So, you built that marketplace really, really good. You built really good member billing. You worked a lot on the tee sheet. If you were going to do anything different, if you were going to start your own company today in golf, again, thinking about some of these newer guys that are coming up now.

you know, what's, what's one or two pieces of advice you'd give them? What, what do you think you would have maybe done differently or you did this one thing and that was the right thing to do and you would do it every time forward. One, I think the idea of bootstrapping or doing a small round raise you know, raise 250 grand, a half million dollars from some angel investors and build from there. And you're not going to build a billion dollars. Well,

I think you could if you spent a couple decades in it. But a billion dollar company and golf is gonna be really hard. So bootstrap it, do owner owned.

And then prioritizing like, what is the sub segment within golf that you're going to own completely? And you can't do everything off the bat. And that's where we had the highest turn is when you're just trying to do too much. And so hyper focusing on, you know, the municipal course that's doing one to 3 million revenue, we're going to just crush that other part, provide better support, do everything as well as possible. Um, I appreciate that. You know, one of the questions I've tried to ask.

people on the show is to think about golf courses today that don't even have an electronic tee sheet. And I'm sure that must have come up when you were at 4-Up. Just what's your sense for that? You know, they're probably they don't, they're not exposed to as much success as they could have. But do you feel like, well, maybe they they've not transitioned because we've done something wrong on the tech side? Or do you think, no, that's just human nature? And, you know, not everybody.

we'll ever get there. There'll always be some percentage of people that, that stay say non tech related. That was always on our list of opportunities because how many courses are still on PanPaper? Like, well, it's, it's thousands and thousands still to this day. Brendon. Yeah. And I think, I think GolfNow now in 2019, they like hyper focused, at least in their marketing efforts, they were going after the, you know, the computer list pro shops and

You know, what we found is it was almost too hard to sell them. Usually these were courses that honestly just didn't care. Maybe they didn't have enough revenue to even care about having it. Or maybe the course wasn't busy enough and their, their locale was just, you know, walk-ons and they didn't really care about online booking. I, so I think there's still an opportunity there, but it's just such a hard sell. I, I wouldn't focus on that.

And the contracts are going to probably be so small that it just doesn't matter. Right. Yeah. I do. You know, we mentioned Birrdi I think Birrdi was one of those that came along that he felt like he maybe he could get some of those people because he was going to make it so stinking easy. You know, I don't know if you ever met an individual. Sean Berryman was with this company called Tee Leader, and he had made it so that, you know, it was 10 o'clock at night and you found his website. You could have a tee sheet up and running in 10 minutes. You know, it didn't need no one was required.

put your intervals in and a couple of other things and your tee sheet was live. And there was a thought that maybe that, if you could just figure out a way to get it in front of these people. But I don't think anybody in the industry has figured out how to crack that nut yet. Yeah, it's people aren't buying like when your software is free, your expectations on it are going to be minuscule. I know.

Evan always told the story of it was harder to sell for up when he was giving away for free than charging money. It's people don't want a free product. And because you have that fear of there's probably no support. If it's free, how are they making any money? Will they be around next year? People are looking for a long guaranteed win. Like this is going to meet my needs for the next decade. And those people will pay better. They'll do more in revenue. You'll be able to sustain yourself as a company. Now.

probably a better option if I were to tackle like the pen and paper would be to build just an generic booking engine where there's not a lot of specific golf things, but it is as easy as sign up. And now you can go into tennis courts and, you know, simulators and all these other areas that are tangent to golf or similar is some respect. Right, right. You know, pickleball, uh, had a lot of, a lot of push on, on more reservations. So, okay.

Well, listen, go that small. You have to do wider. Right. You know, I'm curious just kind of maybe to wrap it up here. Are you in touch with the people that you were working with at foreUp? Do you know, does that team still keep a Slack channel or something like that? And and you guys are following each other in your new careers? Oh, yeah, we all have a Slack channel. We chat a lot and.

I think pretty much everybody has kind of moved on to the next thing. So you'll be seeing, what's interesting is you tend to see in the golf industry. It feels like everybody's been in golf for forever. And a lot of the guys at four up are moving on to other industries, other markets, and it's, it's not the lifetime golf experience that you've seen previously. Right.

Well, listen, I think what you guys built was amazing. And listen, it's still a great company, right? We're not here to talk about it in the past, but I thought it would be interesting to talk about, how you got from 100 to 1500. And so I appreciate you coming on and sharing that with us. I don't know, a random thing that just came up. I don't know if you have time still. Sure, absolutely. So,

Just coming to my mind of something we did right regarding like flexibility. I don't know if you're familiar with foreUP a passes No, maybe they're punch cards. I don't I don't know so it's actually it's a system in there That's it was built for a management company up in Washington who has complex rules of like you buy this pass You can use it twice two times at this course But if you use it two times at this course, you can only use it once at this course it's only available from like 12 o'clock to 3 p.m. And

unless you use like super complex rule sets, right? For a large management company. This feature set was built for them, but with the understanding of like, hey, this has to be applicable everywhere. And so it essentially became this super flexible, almost like engine, where any course could program any set of rules within this, you know, privilege system. And that was became like the key reason we were able to onboard 90% of our courses. They all have some sort of

cool engine created in there. And it's all custom to however they run. And it came from this really random place in Oregon or Washington. But yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I totally can see why that would have appealed to so many different golf courses. However, it is kind of like the antithesis of dynamic pricing and maybe like optimizing pricing for each individual tee time, right? And so there's certainly a camp of people in the industry that

Kind of want to see those cards go away because they want to help operators make more money per individual, uh, tee time. But then there's a whole nother camp that says, yeah, but that's really what the, what the client wants, right? That's what the, the guy that owns the golf course, that's how he wants to run his golf course. And we ought to build, you know, what he, what he wants. And so, uh, what's your take on memberships? I know, uh,

Well, yeah, I'm a believer on the, on the public side. So whether we, maybe we call them annual passes or whatever you want to call them. Um, my fear about, uh, annual passes is that they can get to the best inventory and ultimately the, the real rate that I collected for the best inventory maybe goes down, right? And again, the world has changed in the last three years because demand is so far up.

Mike Hendrix (46:47.886)
Five years ago, maybe this didn't matter, but now that demand is here, there's an opportunity for golf courses to get healthy on their Saturday and Sunday morning inventory. And so if it's me, and I've counseled some people on this, I sell an annual pass that does not get access to that inventory. And then I also sell another benefit, if you will, I sell an extended booking window benefit, right?

hundred extra dollars a year. I'll let you book three weeks early versus a week early or something like that. And doesn't mean I'm gonna lower those prices, but I know that there's a class of golfer out there that really wants to know that they can get their tee times organized and not have to worry about it. And again, now that demand is up, I mean, listen, the reason that people like Noteefy and tee time snipe exist is because demand is up so much.

Right. And so because demand is up, um, I think more operators could leverage that into some, some added benefits that you could actually sell to people. So that's the way I see those two things. So the real gorilla in this space, like the one who's making the most of the money in the software and reselling tee times, obviously golf now, how do you compete with a golf now? Like if you were to start a company,

And that was your goal. Like that is a potential billion dollar idea, right? Sure. But how do you come, I see a lot of the aggregate companies come up and nobody really nails it. How do you? Yeah, so to me, one, I think an aggregator will have to come along that is not golf specific. And so there are a couple of aggregators like this that aggregate activities in general, right? And you make golf as one of those activities and you figure out a way

to do a deal with a four up and a couple of other big tee sheet companies where you can have a meaningful amount of inventory. Uh, and golf is just part of the game. Right? So I think that that's, that's certainly that's a great idea. Actually. I think that that's one approach. The other thing I would say to people like a four up or heck, let's talk more about Eagle club systems, member sports, 10 four, the booking experience. And this is not to say to not use golf now, but the booking engine that they build.

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