All right, well, thank you for joining us. This is a Dathan Wong from Noteefy and thanks for being on The Tech Caddie. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to meet you, Mike. Yes, so you're with Noteefy, like I said, I refer to you as the CTO, so tell me if I'm wrong, but I think of you certainly as CTO and founder.

Yeah, that's right. I'm a CTO and co-founder. My other co-founder, his name is Jake Gordon. He handles a lot of the business and sales side of things while I handle most of the tech and product side of things. Great. And what's your background, Dathan? Have you been in golf all your life or what's your background? Yeah, my golf background. So I started golfing in high school. So that's about 15 something years ago. It was just like a nice thing.

for my family to do together. You know, like my parents getting older, it's something we could all do and still enjoy as a family. Unfortunately, my parents didn't really continue with it, but me and my brother, we love it. I'm still like horrible though. I'm a 14 handicap right now and it's rough. I feel like I should be a lot better. Well, don't say horrible 14 handicap because there's a lot of people that are 14s that don't think they're horrible. That's fair, that's fair. Yeah.

And have you lived in California most of your life? Yeah, so I am. Man, I've been all over. I grew up in Seattle. I actually ended up living in Beijing for a couple of years when I was in middle school, went to college at Villanova in Philadelphia, ended up working in Dallas, Texas for a couple of years, then moved back to Seattle and now finally in LA where I can actually like play all year round and I love it. That's great. Is this your first

company, you said you're co-founder. Is this the first time you're in that seat, so to speak? So I've actually tried to found companies in the past before, but you know, they all didn't quite work for various different reasons, but this one is the one that really stuck and we're really finding a lot of momentum with Noteefy and you know, obviously being able to blend my passions. I love to code, I love being a software engineer, I love to golf, like there really isn't a better

place for me to be right now. And I think that obviously helps a lot being a founder and dealing with a lot of the challenges and the lows and the hard times when I really love the product, really care about the mission of the product. So it's been a very different this time around. Okay, well, that's a good segue. Tell us what the mission of the product is. I think there's a lot of people in our industry.

That you know, we think we know but maybe we're not sure that we know so tell us what the mission of the product is Yeah at the end of the day We want to help golfers play more golf and we want to help golf courses and make more money And those obviously those two things go hand-in-hand very much You know, we created Noteefy because Jake and I are live in LA at post-covid Impossible to get a tee time. I'm sure a lot of people around the country have that same sentiment

And it was something that we wanted to solve our own problem, right? That's, that's how it started was we just want to play more golf. We know that other golfers would love something like this. Um, we're all, we're all busy people. We don't have time to sit there, refresh the tee sheet, call the pro shop, whatever that is, like we don't have time to be doing that, but we knew that people canceled throughout the week. Those tee times are going to become available. Um, we're trying to optimize that experience for the golfers and the golf courses.

Okay, that's great. So I have done some homework and tried to obviously prep for the episode. I'll take you back to about 2017 or so, there's a company called No Wait And I don't know if you're familiar with the app, No Wait built in Pittsburgh and ultimately acquired by Yelp for $40 million. And No Wait was really as simple as it sounds, instead of standing in line.

at First watch, let's say a breakfast place or whatever restaurant, instead of standing in line, you would simply get in line on the app and you could watch how you could progress in terms of being ready to be seated. But that's really not what Noteefy is. Noteefy, I think maybe takes another couple steps. Why don't you explain exactly what Noteefy, let's say does for the golfer, and then we can explain what Noteefy does for the golf course.

Yeah, no, that's a great analogy as well with Yelp. I think that's something that people can really probably are more familiar with. But Noteefy is not a waitlist in the way that, OK, everybody is going to, like you wait in line for your turn. A golfer would go to a Noteefy site. They would set their preferences for what days they want to play. They can actually select the entire year if they wanted to, what time range they wanted to play.

and for how many players. As soon as those tee times become available, any golfer that's signed up for that search will get that alert. So we want to democratize the process. We don't decide who gets notified. We don't put you on a list. It's just everybody's going to get it at the same time. And then you're going to go in. Whoever's fastest after they get that alert, whoever books it fastest, will get the tee time at the end of the day.

Okay, and so let's see, let's break this down into a couple of buckets. If it's Streamsong, which for our listeners, if they don't know, Streamsong would be this high-end destination resort in Florida, but it's public. If it's Streamsong and they take tee times 180 days in advance, and I'm already blocked out, maybe all Saturdays are already gone at Streamsong. I assume that means the technology is...

is pinging that tee sheet all 180 days out all of the time. Or maybe you can talk to us a little bit about the frequency with which it hits the tee sheet. Yeah, that's Streamsong is a great example. It's a customer of ours and they've seen a lot of really great results with Noteefy so far. And you're absolutely right. We're essentially, we're checking the tee sheet every so often. This changes, we have a kind of a proprietary algorithm that.

determines how often we check based on a variety of factors like, you know, how many tee times are available, how far out it is, what time of day it is. Like, we don't need to be checking at 3 a.m. at night because we don't really want to send alerts out at 3 a.m. in the middle of the night. But that's absolutely right. So we're checking the tee sheet every so often. So you don't have to do that as a golfer. Okay. And then we said we would talk about the value for the golfer or the value for the golf course.

For the golf course, I think one of the problems that you solve is, listen, there are groups of individuals that will group meaning four people, maybe it's eight, we'll say it's four. They will book four tee times all in the 9 a.m. hour on this coming Saturday. That's the captain will do that. He then will call around to his friends and he'll say, well, I've got four tee times, which one would you guys like? They ultimately settle on one.

And then the captain needs to go cancel three other tee times. I know that there are, there's such a thing as no shows and things come up, but I think the reality of it is, is when you all quote that 20% of online tee times ultimately get canceled, the reality is it's because of this captain scenario, right? Where they were a group over books and then they, they kind of pare back their bookings the closer they get to tee time. So for the golf course, the benefit is when those tee times

become available, you all are helping them, build them more quickly. I assume that that's what you would say the value is for the golf course. Yeah, that's absolutely one of the values. We strive to obviously provide a lot more value, but you're absolutely right. That's kind of, at the end of the day, that was the main thing that really want, got us into building Noteefy and why we wanted to build Noteefy is.

Golf courses are going to be able to fill up those last minute cancellations much more efficiently, much more quickly, and in a much more guaranteed manner. The other benefits that we provide to the golf course, not just on the revenue side, are one is reduced calls to the pro shop. People are always calling, I'm sure, you know, like, hey, anything available Saturday at 6 a.m. and they're like, no, there's it hasn't been available for years. But.

But what does the golfer do at that time? Or what does the Pro Shop even do in that scenario? Before, it was either nothing, or they keep a little Excel doc, or they write it down, and then maybe they call back, and maybe you get that tee time. But now we've automated all of that so that they no longer have to, they don't have to worry about that anymore. And they have some recourse to give to the golfer to be like, hey,

I know you wanted to play on Saturday, sign up here. You're going to be the first to know about it. Yes. And OK, and so that's a secondary value. I know that you and I don't really know each other, but I have often said over the years that I felt like my biggest competitor was the phone, being in the tee time. It wasn't so much the other golf course or another product or whatever.

I didn't want people to book over the phone. I wanted to push them online. So that resonates with me when you say you kind of helped to solve that phone problem. So, okay, so clearly it's a revenue play for the golf course. Then it's kind of improving the work experience in the golf shop because the phone rings less, right? And so Charlie can focus on other things and that's a great thing too. Is there other benefit? I...

You know, I get the sense that maybe there's a data benefit for the golf course, but I don't know. I'd be interested to learn. Absolutely. No, I, hey, you did your research. You said wait perfectly. That's another thing is we can provide that demand crystal ball, right? Is there's not a lot of other places where you can get that data to see, hey, next Tuesday 20 people wanna play golf between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m.

What you can do with that data is more targeted marketing. You could maybe open up some like fill in tee times to capture some of that demand. Squeeze times we call them. Yeah. But there's a lot of different marketing things, especially that you can do with this data is you know exactly when people want to play. And you can be pretty sure that they're available that day, especially if they just created the search for two days from now.

You can sell them golf clubs. You can upsell them on lessons. We have a feature that we actually call the suggested courses feature. But it can be used for much more than suggested courses. What happens is, after you create a search for a golf course, and this can all be set up by the admin so they can have all control over this, then maybe you show them scheduling for the next course.

the head pro at the golf course, right? Maybe they need a lesson. Maybe you show them simulators at your facility. Maybe it's like bays, Top Tracer bays, whatever that is. Like you can start using some of these powerful marketing tools to drive revenue and drive traffic to other areas. That's excellent. Okay, let's come back to some benefits, but let's, you know, I'm interested. I know your co-founder certainly, we've seen him a bit out there.

I don't feel like we have seen you and because we're a technology review site, right? I do think that you guys, um, you know, we want to put the spotlight on you. You guys, I think you guys are the stars personally. So, so, uh, one question I thought for you that would be interesting is there, there's Dathan the founder, let's call it founder slash leader, right?

Then there's Nathan, the technologist, cause you said earlier that you actually do enjoy coding. In that founder / leader, really, at the end of the day, that means manager, you're a people manager. Tell me how you kind of let all that come together and what you may be like the best. Do you love managing people? Do you love helping younger people grow in their careers? Or...

Do you want to build five companies in the next eight years? Tell us your mindset when it comes to those things. Yeah, man, it's a tough question. I think it's hard not to love all of it being in the position that I am. I will say in my heart, I think I am a software engineer. I love to just sit in my office and close the door and just code all the time. I love that. But to your point also, I love to mentor people.

I think I've had a lot of very fortunate experiences in my life. I've learned a lot from all of the different jobs and places that I've been. I love being able to kind of help other people accomplish their dreams, whatever those are, especially when it comes to the engineers that we hire or the people we work with. People have different career aspirations. I'd love to be able to be that person. And I think being the CTO and co-founder here,

it gives me that ability to kind of help them achieve their career goals or whatever they're looking to do. Also, and I love that part. You know, obviously the people management side of things like, you know, can be tough at times, but hey, it's all part of the job and I'm all for it. Okay. How big is your team? Tell me a little bit about your team. Is it offshore? What processes are you using? Are you doing releases every two weeks? I'd like to learn about the team.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So we just hired two new engineers. They're both based in the US. One of them is actually quite an expert in AI he's been working with. His name is Keaton Kirkpatrick. I'll give him a little plug here. We just hired him. He just started on yesterday, actually. He's been working with a team at UC Berkeley doing some AI research just for fun. And

The engineering team right now is five people, including myself. Um, all four of us are based in the U S we have one, one guy in India and he's, he's amazing. He's kind of been here from the start. Um, but we really pride ourselves on having our in-house engineering team, right? Having in-house engineering where we can iterate really quickly, where we're all golfers, we love the game of golf. We can all get on a call with customers.

really, we understand the problem because we feel the problem every day. It really helps us build a better product and understand, you know, the golf courses and golfers better. That's great. So, so I'm, I am curious to learn, you know, what is it that you've built? Right? So in other words, did you build a bot that essentially crawls booking engines, right. And then, and then, you know, uh, organizes this communication.

Did you build something that relies on interfaces and needs to be a little more tightly integrated into the tee sheet software? I'd be curious and certainly don't wanna break any proprietary information, but I'd be curious as to what it is that you actually built. Yeah, so the underlying technology, what we're doing is we're matching that supply and demand, right? We're getting all of these searches that people have created.

We're looking out on the internet to see what supplies available and we're matching that and sending notifications out. We do have direct integrations with a lot of the top tee sheet providers. So there are cases where we are, we do have integrated APIs to get that data that we need. In other cases, we do just scrape the internet for that publicly available data. Okay. So that's helpful.

And I would think even in the case of an integration, you may still wanna scrape a little bit because of what I call distance or windows of reservation opportunity, right? And so maybe you combine some scrape and some integration. I don't know, but that's helpful. So certainly it seems to me, we mentioned Streamsong a moment ago, it seems to me that probably the biggest customer to date is Kemper.

I could be wrong, but it seems like Kemper has really taken a shine to what you guys are doing. But I'm interested at the end of the day, are there technologists from other companies that are already working with you guys to where you're really getting into the weeds? Or are these more just a B2B relationship that is handled outside of the technology? Yeah. I mean, absolutely. As you mentioned, Kemper is one of our...

They were one of our first customers and we're very thankful for them for taking a bet on us and trusting our team here. We have a Teams chat with them. We're probably talking to them at least once or twice a week, just asking them about ideas, what kind of things that we can build to help their courses. You know, we have this main Noteefy product, but we believe that we can build a lot of cool things that are going to help these golf courses and help golfers.

So we're constantly doing discovery with our customers, talking to everybody, asking them what ideas that they have. That's one of the reasons we love going to these conferences. We'll be at the PGA show, we have meetings set up with a bunch of our customers. We're just gonna ask them like, hey, what do you guys like so far? What kind of things that you want, do you wanna see in the future? And like, how can we help support your goals for 2024?

You know, we really, we're not just a vendor. We really consider ourselves like a technology partner and we're here to help in any way that we can. That's great. I mean, I'd be remiss if I didn't say it feels to me like perhaps you'll build a tee sheet, perhaps you'll build other things that are associated to reservations. Um, look, I, it, to be totally honest, I don't think building a tee sheet is on our radar right now, there's a ton of great options out there right now and we partner with them. We have.

We have great relationships with them. They're great to work with. It's a lot of work. You know, what they're doing is a lot of heavy lifting. You know, a tee sheet is not just the tee sheet as you know, it's resource management, revenue management, there's marketing built into a lot of these things. It's not that interesting to us right now where we're at as a company. Okay, understood. You know, you've also mentioned a few times

the golfer and the golf course. And so this is always the kind of the dilemma in our industry for vendors, solution providers, if you will. And the dilemma is, well, who's my customer? Is the golfer my customer? Is the golf course my customer? When I came up in the industry, I tried to, we tried to make both be our customer. And as Steve Jobs said before we even started, and I think he was right, that's difficult to do.

But it doesn't mean it can't be done. And so I'm curious when you get that question, where does your mind go? Yeah. I mean, at this time, the golf courses are our customer. Obviously they're the ones paying us. The service is completely free for golfers, but that doesn't mean we're going to ignore their requests, right? We get a lot of support requests. We get a lot of great ideas from golfers as far as like what we can do to improve the site. And at the end of the day, the golfer experience is just as important as the

the operator's experience, right? If the golfers aren't enjoying the product, if it's not fulfilling their need, then they're not gonna come back and we're probably not gonna get that contract renewal. So you're right, it's a fine line to toe sometimes as far as what features we prioritize and what's on our product roadmap. But we're very aware that the end golfer user experience is very much a part of what we need to build.

and what we need to serve. That's great. What do you think at the end of the day, the golfer cares the most about? You know, what do you think resonates with the golfer the most? Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, they want the tee times, right? But to kind of dive into the, maybe some of the contrast here is, the golf courses just, they don't necessarily care who's filling those tee times. They want those tee times filled, but obviously the golfer who's signing up for those searches

wants to be the one that's going to get the tee time. That's why we've decided to kind of democratize the process where it's not like, we're not going to decide, the golf course isn't going to decide right now who gets those tee times. It's kind of up to luck and whoever can be the fastest. Yeah. So it seems to me, do you have competitors already? Other people have kind of noticed, right? What you all have built.

and there are competitors, that leads people like me, we like to write what we call buying guides. And a buying guide is, it's helping the golf course operator to make some decisions on when they decide to buy X or Y. So we would write the buying guide about a tee sheet, or we would write a buying guide about a...

I don't know what, what would we refer to you as a, uh, a, a no show filler? What w what would you refer to the product as? I think the term that's kind of resonated the most and kind of, you know, been the easiest to that just for people is waitlist software. I think that's, you know, at the core, that's the, the core benefit right now, but obviously there's a lot of other benefits on top of that, but when we sell in, we usually refer to ourselves as a waitlist software. Yeah.

Which makes sense, but going back to the beginning of the conversation, that led me to think of no wait but it's really not no wait right? It's like more functional or something. But I hear you. So if we were going to write a buying guide about waitlist software and you were ultimately the target, in other words, we wrote it for you, what would you hope that we would cover in that buying guide? Or what do you think we should cover you know, in the seat that you're in?

What do you think we should include in that buying guide? Yeah, I guess for one, it's just all of the different benefits that we provide. It's not just being that waitlist it's not just that improved golfer experience, but also course operations, the data, and the possibilities there. You know, to be honest, I haven't done a lot of research into the competitors that are coming up. We're heads down, right? Like, I don't care what they're doing.

we're going to keep listening to our customers. We're going to keep building the product that we believe is right. And we believe that's going to help people. We're not really worried about the outside noise. And again, I think this is just, our engineering team is top notch. Every one of the people on our engineering team, when we interviewed them as a team, it was like, we have to get that person. Like there's no, like hire them now, do what you got to do to get them. And they've shown that time and time and again. That's great.

That's great. So, you know, you mentioned your brother. If your brother owned a golf course, uh, you, you would be saying to him, now listen, if you're gonna, if you're going to use, or if you're going to pay for, uh, waitlist technology, make sure they, I don't know, make sure they have a roadmap where they're building more things beyond waitlist or make sure that, that the initial, um, offer includes some level of, uh, business intelligence through data.

include some level of predictive analytics to help them better revenue manage their tee sheet moving forward. It sounds to me like those are the things that you would recommend, but I don't wanna put words in your mouth. Yeah, I mean, I think those are all the right things. I think to add another thing is just make sure you're partnering with the right people and you're getting the support that you need, right? I could imagine any competitor that comes up

when the product is working properly, when everything's good to go, no problems, right? Everybody's happy. But when things go wrong, or when you guys need a new feature, or when you need something to help your company or your golf course be successful, who's gonna be there for you? And I think that's us. We're very responsive to these kind of requests and we love to build those relationships. That's great. You know, that leads me to ask a question.

There are some companies in the space that maintain a public status page. Hey, if we're up, if we're down and historically here's where we've been. Is that something that you all do? Is there status dot Noteefy.com or, or is, is that not exist yet? Not at the moment. It's definitely something we like as, as we grow our customer base, as we kind of get more requests for something like that, I think we'll absolutely spin that up.

We've been very fortunate. We really haven't had any downtime so far. So it hasn't really been a need, but if people start asking for it, we're more than happy to spin something up like that. That's great. Obviously you are in this world of data collection, right? I mean, that really is part of what's happening here. What happens to the data? Who owns the data? Have you?

Have you sorted all of that out? How does that work? Yeah, so it can be different based on the contract who we're working with, right? As far as the data, like, look, we don't sell any data. We don't have any plans to sell data. We just want, we want to provide tools to the operators to help them use the data more effectively. That's what we wanna do. We don't need, we're not looking to monetize the data.

we're going through our SOC 2 Type 1 compliance process right now. That's like a security certification for anybody who might not know. There's Type 1, there's Type 2, we're doing the Type 1 now. We're going to get the Type 2 later. But we really want to emphasize data privacy, right? We're engineers. We've come from a lot of different places. We know the importance and obviously the data climate we're in right now.

really necessitates that as well. And we're committed to that. So like you kind of mentioned, it's a tough process. There's a lot of things we need to improve on, a lot of documentation and processes we need to put together. But to us, it's well worth it to give the customers kind of that feeling of security that we're doing the right things over here. No, yeah, that's great. You mentioned monetization and we haven't really talked about the revenue model.

Is it as simple as a SaaS product where if I own Golf Course ABC, I simply am paying you monthly regardless of volume, regardless of benefit? And I would have no idea what the fee is, but is it as straightforward as a SaaS model? Yeah, that's correct. At the moment it is. Obviously, as the company grows, as we add new maybe modules or new features, there may be some upsells and things like that there.

As of right now, the core product, it's a SaaS model, it's monthly fee, you get everything. So I think I know the answer to this now, just having spent 30 minutes with you, but one thing I wanted to ask was, is this a feature or is this a company? It sounds to me like everything you've said, you certainly intend for this to be a company. This is not an early exit, hey, we'll sell this thing in six more months.

and go on to our next thing. It sounds to me like the intention is to build a company. Absolutely, that's 100% right. I think there's so many different things we can do in golf. There's so many different things we can do in hospitality in general. We've been having some of those conversations, but absolutely it's a company. I think obviously you gotta start somewhere. And we started with this, maybe you would call Noteefy in its current form a feature.

But you gotta start somewhere. We wanna win this space. We wanna build the best waitlist software, the best marketing generation software for golf courses. And then we can start exploring some other areas. Yeah, well, listen, it's, you know, a lot of people will talk about perception is reality, right? And the perception certainly is that you guys have the hottest thing going in golf. Oh. You know, I talked to a decent amount of people and have generally been in that tech.

kind of arena and people are really taken with what you guys have built. And I think one of the reasons is because it's so real. This is my opinion, but from what I've seen and talked to operators, you truly have made people more money in 2023. And at the end of the day, that is so crucially important, right? And so,

it maybe wasn't the problem maybe wasn't defined exactly the way you would have thought it would be defined, but you clearly uncovered a problem or at least addressed a problem that everybody knew about. Now, I will say this. There are other ways to address the problem. I'm sure you guys know that it's essentially a threat to the business. I mean, if everything moved to prepay. Well, this might not be, you know, as big a deal. But it seems that

the operator slash golfer isn't ready to go 100% prepay when it comes to having an experience on the golf course. And so, as long as that's the case, I think you guys are in an amazing place. And then in the meantime, if it does ultimately get the full prepay, you will have built other things and you'll be insulated at that point. So I think what you've done is really impressive.

Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate that. And I think, you know, to your point about the revenue we're generating, like, absolutely, we're having an impact on the top line, like, there's no doubt about it, we have the data to support it as well. You know, some outlier courses, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. But obviously, those are outliers, but like the potential is there. And it goes back to the scenario, like, if the tee time is not available, what does the golfer do? They

They just, they go golf somewhere else or they just don't golf. We're giving them an option now. We're, we're generating more demand for this product now. Well, and you're also just delivering unbelievable convenience, right? Forget about it. I don't need to go look at a booking engine anymore. I'm the golfer in this scenario. I don't need to look at a booking engine anymore. I got these guys in LA that are just going to text me. Right. I mean, I'm not sure it can get more convenient than that. So.

I think you win on golfer convenience. I think you win on operator revenue, essentially, you know, the P&L. And you have found a way, and this has always been difficult in this space, you have found a way to deliver some meaningful technology that did not rely on an interface, as it sounds like to me. It sounds to me like you prefer an interface, but you actually don't need an interface. And that is a key piece of what will allow you to be successful.

You've really checked all the boxes I think that you need to check. And I think to that point, it's so easy for the golf courses to set it up. There really isn't any, they don't need any engineering effort. You know, okay, you've got to update the website to add the link, but we take care of most of the work. You know, yeah, the golf courses, if they do some marketing on their side and promote the new waitlist capabilities, they're going to see better results. But as far as like actually implementing the technology.

we really don't need any engineering effort from them. Yeah, that's great. Simplicity is always preferred. So that's excellent. Well, listen, I appreciate your time. I always say to guests, please give us contact information, not your personal contact information, but like you just gave me 40 minutes, right? I owe you at least the opportunity to sell your product. So like if I'm a golf course owner in Zanesville, Ohio,

And I think this sounds interesting. How do I sign up? How do I get this technology so I can make more money? Yeah. Appreciate the plug, Mike. Um, the best, the best way to get in touch with us is go to Noteefy.app. That's Noteefy with two E's like NO-TEE-FY T five dot app, uh, Noteefy.com will also take you to the same place. Uh, we have a landing page there where you can, uh, request a demo. Uh, one of our salespeople will get in touch with you.

But hey, if you want to reach out to me directly, I'm just dathan at Noteefy.app. Feel free to shoot me a message and I'll route you to the right place. That's great. We've had some traffic come in the last 24 hours on our site as well. Obviously, one of the things that we do is people write reviews about the technology that they use. Golf course operators. We hope that golfers are not reviewing it too much. We're really focused on the operator.

but people write reviews about the technology they're using to run their golf course. And we've seen some traction already on that noteefy page. So, you know, congrats to you guys for that. Well, listen, you're off to the PGA show. Yes. Good luck. Will you go as well? Yes, our whole team is gonna be there. You know, we're a remote company. So this is the first time everybody's gonna be together, which is gonna be amazing. Well, good for you. That's great. Go have...

awesome dinners on Sand Lake Drive and enjoy the convention center. And again, I appreciate you coming on The Tech Caddie and really looking forward to watching what you guys do moving forward. Thank you so much, Mike. It was great to meet you. Thanks for your time. Okay. Thank you.

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