Welcome. I am Mike Hendrix from smbGOLF. And today my guest is Jason Wilson from Gallus. And this is the Tech Caddie podcast. Jason, welcome to the show. Hey Mike. Thanks so much for having me. How are you? Are you in San Diego today? In San Diego. Yep. Sunny San Diego. So, you know, it's, just always, you know, seven degrees, perfect weather, you know, what you expect. Just kidding. But that's, always the,

the impression, but it is definitely it's a nice spot to be. We're definitely spoiled out here. I've been to San Diego though plenty of times during marine layer season, so it's not always perfect, but it is a beautiful place. You're lucky to be there. It is. I think some people kind of come in and they're disappointed with we call it May Gray and June Gloom is every year is if you get a little close to the coast, it's like what happened where the sun go right? Otherwise it's a pretty awesome spot to be.

So Jason, you founded Gallus, just to help the listeners a little bit. I used to call it Gallus Golf. I think at some point you went through a Mark Zuckerberg moment or something and you thought, well, let's just drop the golf. So, today you're Gallus, fair to say? Yeah, we are Gallus. And obviously we primarily service, you know, the golf industry. But, you know, we found that, you know, you know, with a lot of the clients that we're working with, they're expanding.

Beyond Golf, Resort, Other Amenities, things like that. really, yeah, and honestly, it was a tough, honestly transition for me because I'm kind of married to the title and whatnot and Gallus Golf and we even did a rebranding with the logo and as founder, it's kind of like you're kind of really tied to that. But really, really love the kind of new look and everything. But yeah, Gallus is kind of what we're going by now.

And so I'm, you know, I'm sure we're going to get into details of the product and how you built it over years, et cetera. I think the app space is a really interesting space from like a strategy perspective. What's the operator want to do? It gives me the elevator pitch, not so much to create the company, but the elevator pitch of I'm a golf course operator. I'm doing 32,000 rounds a year. Why do I need an app?

Yeah, no, really, great question. We hear that all the time. And I think that, you know, the answer is, what Gallus is really trying to do is we are trying to be, you know, really that central hub and that convenient spot for their customers or their members to have one place to go to easily and quickly interact with everything that that club is about. You know, so we we allow them to really, customize the look and feel and drop in there. What's most important to that? And that's everything from

booking a tee time, to maybe ordering food and beverage, to following a live leaderboard for a tournament, and using it for scoring, GPS, those types of things. And we also know that golf courses use a lot of different technologies out there, right? So they're best-in-class technologies that they're trying to use. And what we try to do is give that customer that one spot to go.

to access all of those things, whether it's powered by Gallus or maybe it's powered by another technology that they're using that's important to their operations. But there's a ton of convenience there in giving that customer that one place to go to be able to access all that, have a better experience from tee to green, you know, right? And I'll say tee to green, but it's honestly even before they get to the golf course, right? They can pull it up, they can access the booking engine quickly without having to go, you know, find the website.

They can go view their loyalty points instantly right there. They can go, you know, kind of see what's happening at the club. So, you know, I always say, you know, I don't care what business you are, but, whenever a customer downloads your branded app on their smartphone, you just purchase very valuable real estate on that device. You know, they are all the cost, right? mean, essentially, you on there for free. Yeah. exactly. And, and, you know, they're one tap away from

you know, engaging with your club and accessing everything there. And I would say you are one click away from, you know, engaging and communicating effectively with that customer as well through that direct connection, through push notifications, through an in-app message, through pop-ups, through news items, through all the tools that we give you that we have seen be more effective in many cases than, you know, email, social media, know, text messaging. You know, we get that kind of, you sometimes as well. Well, you know, I don't

I already have a text message campaign. I'm like, okay, well, that's great. But look at it this way, you know, what is more valuable to your customer? you can say, hey, sign up for a text marketing campaign. And the only thing that they get is they get the ability for you to send them messages. Like there's no additional value versus you say, hey, guess what, we built an app for a club. You can easily book tee times, you can access, you know, our news and info, you can order food and beverage, you can use it for scorekeeping.

we're going to send you incentives and offers to come out to the club and enjoy yourself out here and kind of in return, hey, we get to send you some messages as well. there's a little bit more of a buy-in and trade-off with that. that was a super long elevator ride. you were forced to, if you had to boil it down to something, and I'm the golf course owner, is it improved?

golfer communication, is it, improved, visibility? Like if, if it's one thing, what would you go with? Yeah. I mean, I think, definitely, communication. I think that definitely is probably one of the things we hear most consistently is that, you know, Hey, our, our, customers aren't, reading our emails or newsletters as much as they are now. You know, they're not, maybe they're not on social media. And this is a,

this is a direct line of communication to make sure that they, see it. that's, that's definitely probably one of the, main pieces there is that they, they're able to ensure that they're going to get a message out and they see, you know, high conversions with those messages that are low effort to get out. So we've got a bunch of founders that watch this show and CTOs is the CTO at Gallus your brother. Is that right? It is. Yes. Yeah. So that's actually pretty cool too.

that you get to work with your brother. But anyway, so we've got these founders and people interested. Can you share with us a little bit? How did you go from, got an idea to getting your first customer and then maybe getting from customer one up to customer 100 is a whole nother journey. But just give us some insight as to how Gallus Golf got spun together and came to be.

Yeah, no, it's kind of a funny story. know, the guys that I work with now, you know, they had done some mobile app development in some other spaces. And I was actually out, you know, we were out playing golf and the golf course that we were playing had an app, you know, and said, gosh, you know what, is a really great idea. This is a really crappy app.

but it's a really great idea. And I think that this is something we could do better. And I grew up playing golf since I was a kid. It was always a big part of my life. I've worked at golf courses at my local municipal golf course where I grew up. Not PGA or anything, but just running the pro shop and things like that.

And so I started to say, gosh, you know what? think there's something here. And kind of getting input from those guys to understand what could we do from, could we do this? Could we do that from a technical perspective? And then I honestly, I just started going out and talking to golf courses with some mockups and saying, hey, what do you think of this? Would this be valuable from building, really trying to build something through the course operator's eyes to help them better engage and build that relationship with their customers directly.

And long story short, kind of put together a business plan saying, hey, I think that this could be a business here. Had it thrown back at me a few times saying, try again. But eventually got to a point where said, yeah, we had one angel investor that said, hey, I think there's something here. I'll let you give this thing a shot. And quit my job two weeks before my first child was born to say, let's give this thing a shot.

I figured, you know what, can go get, you know, I've always been in sales or marketing and said, I can go get a sales and marketing job if this doesn't work, but this could be a chance to do something really fun and special. And luckily, you know, it's worked out. So we, you know, we kind of launched in early 2012 with our initial product, which I go, if I went and looked at it now, I kind of like cringe, you know, just as far as we've come with like the technology.

But it really was at the time was a fantastic product and I had two ways to kind of go about, you know, growth, right? Is I could go hire a team of salespeople just to go knock on doors at golf courses and try to sell this thing on the grassroots or I could find partners to help us really get some initial partner market penetration. And so I was able to do that. Our first partner was Active Network Golf. sure.

Which makes sense because you're in San Diego. they had a big presence there in San Diego. Yeah. So Active Golf for people that don't know that was one of the acquisitions that we did at GolfNow. That was a big one for us. So, okay. So that was an early partner and what were they doing? Were they selling your product for you to their customers? They were. So, so yeah, I, when I met with them, they kind of said, gosh, you know what a mobile app has been.

on our like to do list for years and we haven't been able to figure it out. And so great, you guys have something let's let's partner to go, you know, make this work. So so we actually did an integration with their open book platform at the time, built a built a mobile booking engine in in the app, a native booking engine. And the primary reason we did at time is they had nothing mobile, even their desktop like their their

their web booking engine, nothing was mobile friendly. So this was really the only booking engine that they had that was mobile friendly. And yeah, so we, would go out, we did a kind of a license distribution agreement with them so they could go sell the app and bundle it in deals or upsell to current clients. And that was a, that was a great partnership. And then I also still, you know, did direct sales and hit the phones and did my marketing and everything. And, know, really for the first couple of years,

I was the guy that called you on the phone trying to sell you the app. when you signed, I was the guy that onboarded you. I was the guy that was sent to the invoice and I was the guy that answered your support call. So for the first couple of years, I was I really I always tell everybody that I hire now I'm like, I did your job at one point. So right. So so there's a lot of value to that. There's a lot of value to that. and so how

How'd you take the next step? How did you get from say customer 100 to 500 or something like that? what did it, did it require more investment or did it just require more product development? What, was the key to that? Yeah, I think honestly, it was, we really, we were kind of very bootstrapped. and so we didn't put a ton of, additional investment with beyond the team that we had, you know, developing. So again, we had another partnership, you know,

after Active, we were able to partner with EZLinks as well. So I remember when I first met the team at EZLinks and said, hey, let's go do something together. They originally said, hey, yep, we're going to go build this on our own. But thanks that we're good. And then a year later, I remember came back and said, yeah, that was a lot harder than we thought. So yeah, we'd love to partner. So back then, was, you

Kurt Albertson, Jim Wood was at EZLinks, those guys there. so, again, had another great run with them where we collaborated to go out and talk about what we were doing together and they were able to take our app as well. And at the same time, I think a lot of it was really honestly, it was myself initially, just kind of the direct sales and growth and marketing there.

planting flags all over the country and as more and more people saw what we were doing and obviously seeing success, they got a little bit more, hey gosh, you know what, I see the club down the street, just got an app. I've never thought about that, but I see they're having success with it. So through those partnerships, a lot of other smaller partnerships, one-to-one marketing was a great partner for quite a while. They got acquired by foreUP I think it was two years ago.

So really, honestly, it was building relationships with other technologies in the space. And we've always been big believers in building bridges between technologies, and that's going to help us grow. so when Active would say it was hard or when Jim would say it was hard to build this, can you define that? What is hard? What makes it hard to build a great app?

Well, so I think building a great app is not necessarily the hard part. It's building a great app and doing it 500 times or supporting it 500, 600, 700, 800 times for individual facilities. Anybody who has built an app is going to know the joy of working with Apple and all the great things that they like to change whenever they like to change them.

And so there's quite an extensive process that goes into, if we want to release a new feature, we want to enhance a feature, a new device comes out, we've got to go through and now we've got to submit 800, 900 updates to the App Store. And doing that at scale is a business in and of itself. It really, really is. And so we've invested in the ability to kind of scale that process, which I've seen

You know, other companies have been able to figure it out, but usually it's kind of they get to, you know, that 30, 40, 50, and then close to a hundred. Then they realize, holy crap, like we need, we need a team just to manage this part of it. So, so I think that that's, that's where the difficulty comes in. And that's where we, we, it's one of our core competencies. Yeah. If you were, if you're just sitting here today, you're about to open a new golf course or something. Everything's fresh. Everything's new.

In today's version of Gallus, what are the must have features? Like what are the features if I'm going to do an app and you Jason, you're the app expert. What are you thinking about that? Like, well, Mr. Operator or Mrs. Operator, you better have these four features. Cause if you don't, there's no point in even using the product. What, what, what's essential? Yeah, no, great question. I think, well obviously, you know, being able to book a tee time on the app is, going to be, going to be critical. And we are not, you know, to be clear.

is we're not a t time booking, you know, system, right? You know, we, we don't want to try to reinvent that wheel. You know, there are lot of great systems out there. And so we just work with with them to drop in whatever they're using. And then I think I asked you a question. Are you though, and I'm not trying to put you in a, in a, on a spot on the map, and forget about desktop and forget about well, just, are you a booking engine company?

like when someone books a tee time, are they going through your UI and just getting the guts from the tee sheet company or are you bringing in their booking engine typically into your app? We're bringing their booking engine into the app. And in no cases is it a native engine? No, the only engine that we had built that was native was the open book integration. Okay. But you know, over time, know, most of the tee sheets have built,

mobile friendly, you know, and so again, you know, and we even found, you know, kind of at some point with active, you know, the there's there's there's always challenges with, know, as their API changes, keeping things, you know, updated with that API, you know, so there are booking engine matches what they're doing and whatnot. And so we've explored it. But and I know it's been a topic before that's come up is, you know, well, it's not a booking engine.

In the end, it doesn't matter. We can do a good job of basically making it still seem like a seamless and booking experience for the end user. And the reality is that the Tee Sheet providers out there, they're going to continue to enhance and modify and make their booking engines better. And so we don't want to try to be experts in that space because there's already really great experts out there. And it also...

gives golf courses a lot of flexibility too. We've had courses over the years, obviously they switch, know, tee sheets or point of sales, their app remains, you know, it's still the core app remains and all we do is say, great, you've switched, you know, from easy links to four up, great, we just need your new booking engine, right? So it makes it a much more seamless experience over the longterm. Okay, so feature one, we got to have tee times, what's next?

Yeah, the next feature obviously is push notifications and making sure that we do a good job, I think, of helping the golf course maximize the number of opt-ins for push notifications. We have a clear onboarding process so that they have a way to basically sell, hey, look, make sure you allow notifications because here's all the benefits you're going to get out of this. Here's why you want to make sure you stay in touch.

So that's another big piece. We also have a message center that's like a dedicated inbox for every notification that goes out, whether they have notifications enabled or not. So it's a great way to make sure that they are going to see that because it's an alternative to email. Like I said earlier, I checked yesterday, I have 141,000 emails in my promotions folder in my Gmail. I will never see them. I will never look at them. I went to look to see how many were there.

But my phone dings or buzzes, I go look at it. We're all trained really well, just like our Labradors and Cockadoodles and all that kind of stuff. And tournaments has been huge as well. mean, the courses have had a lot of success with using the app as kind of their tournament hub as well, and creating a unique and fun experience with live scoring.

And it allows them to take that, there's the operational aspect of running a tournament, right? You gotta set it up, you gotta print out card signs, you gotta do all that. But I think there's another opportunity with all those players that are coming out for that charity event or corporate event or whatever, you've got an opportunity to capture that information, capture that audience and try to bring them back again, right? And if you've got a hundred player tournament, every twice a week or whatnot all season,

you know, that's a huge opportunity. And so having the app is kind of the tool to get them to use for that, just a specific event, but then be able to create a targeted personalized offer to say, Hey, thanks for hosting your event here. we'd love to have you come back in the next 30 days and play our golf course. Here's a, here's an offer in our app to give you a, you know, 10 % off to come play in the next 30 days. That's a, that's a feature where it sounds like it's really the first feature I think we've touched on where there are multiple companies.

in that space, you know, fact that you, that your app can host a booking engine. Okay. Like, like that doesn't mean it's going to save the operator any money. Right. the fact that you can do communication, maybe they cut back on text messaging, but, maybe not. I, know, I think that depends on per facility, but the tournament solution, and I'm assuming you can do leagues as with tournaments and leagues, right. that sounds like maybe now we could create a cost savings. Maybe I don't have to use,

Golf Genius, or maybe I don't have to use X, Y, Z. And maybe there's some cost savings there for the operator. Do you feel like, your customers feel like there are times that you do everything that Gallup or that Golf Genius does and you actually can save the, customer some money? Yeah, there are definitely scenarios there where we can. I do want to say, you know, Hey, Golf Genius is a fantastic company and they are, they are the best at, you know, servicing and

covering almost everything under the sun that a golf course or a league may want to do. And so, and we're integrated with them so that we can provide that additional option there. But what we really set out to do, we built the tournament software. We didn't have it originally and we built it in 2015. Really as a result, we had a very light, like leaderboard functionality, but not the ability to set up an event and have, you know, cart signs and track.

track all the different formats and things like that. And we got a lot of inputs saying, gosh, and this is way back, remember TPP? A lot of them were using TPP, which was very, very dated. And so they wanted something a little bit more upgraded. so what we set out to do was to build what we, to make it very simple, quick and easy for the operator and the end user for what golf courses, 80%, 90 % of golf courses were doing 80 to 90 % of the time.

So those scrambles that they're running, simple stroke plays, some best balls, some match plays, some of those things. But we weren't going to cover everything under the sky there. And what we found was a lot of clubs went, gosh, this is perfect. This is what we need. And we're seeing that still now is the cost of everything's going up. And definitely we've seen and heard from clients that the cost of tournament software is going up.

And lots of times they don't need everything else that they're doing. They really just need, you know, kind of the core things. And lots of times we, fit that bill for them. So, so yeah. And so that kind of does get, me thinking about your breakout. You have about a thousand customers. About 900 customers. Okay. What's the breakout public to private? We are a majority public. We're probably give or take, I'd say in the 70%, you know,

daily fee. and then the rest is, you know, private, you know, resort, you know, some other types of facilities. Right. And so we haven't touched on, GPS and then let's go like GPS, even slash scorecard. that like really important or do you feel like no range finder or, know, the guys walking around with individual range gear, they're going to use that instead of GPS. Like, how important is GPS today in an app?

Yeah, I think it's important for many clubs. I know for a number of years, gosh, GPS systems, they still are, can be very, very expensive. And so we definitely had a lot of scenarios where people said, gosh, we're going to save 30, 40, 50, 60 grand by saying, gosh, we've got a GPS system here on the app that is a fraction of the cost and also too. One of the things I used to always say is, the GPS systems on the carts are great.

But those systems stay on the cart. They don't go home with your customer. And that is the other values that, Hey, look, if you've got an option here where they can keep score in the app, they can use it for GPS. That's also going to go home with the customer and gives you another touch point to be able to reach them and bring them back. question. Yeah. mean, that gets into strategy. think it's a different conversation, but you know, clubs that are really intentional about what they do could actually intentionally not have GPS on the cart because they believe

that if they can get 70 % of all golfers on the facility to download the app, that throws off more value ultimately to the club. Again, I'm not a general manager, but you could see somebody working through that. Yeah, we've seen both ways. I mean, we've seen people who've taken that direct strategy is to say, hey, gosh, this is what I'm going to go after doing that. We also see clubs that they have GPS on their carts. They still have the app because they understand, they're also trying to reach

Provide a certain experience maybe based on what they're charging at the club or whatnot and the expectations that you're gonna have. But they still are offering other reasons, other incentives to say, download our app. We have the ability to create what we call a download incentive. Most of our clubs will do that when they first launch an app, right? Just to get some good momentum, the ball rolling. And it's usually something that's nominal like free small bucket of balls or fountain soda, something like that. But it helps drive.

I, you know, for so many years and you still talk, hear people talking about, the value of an email address, right? You know, it's like what, what that value is from a marketing perspective, same thing with an app, you know, getting somebody to download that app is, is another, you know, there's, it's worth something, you know, to get more of those people to download the app there. Yeah. Now we mentioned the 900 in my data. we, you know, I don't know, I don't think I've even talked to you about this before, but we track a tremendous amount of vendor data.

for each individual golf course. Because there are people like you, frankly, that want to know is XYZ using ABC and EFG, right? And so anyway, so there's people that subscribe to our data service. That's a long way of me getting to, we do have you as the market share leader in the app space. Are you getting pushed today? Are there new?

players in the space that are making it more difficult or just, and I don't, I'm not looking for you to mention names, but just give me a perspective on like how competitive is the space today versus when you got in in 2012? Yeah, no, I mean, it's definitely, you know, more competitive today. And I think probably, you know, mostly from, I'd say, you know, lot of the point of sale providers, you know, just kind of having their own solution. And I think that,

they would probably admit and we've heard courses say, that it definitely doesn't have a lot of the bells and whistles and all the backend tools that Gallus has. We really have built out quite a suite of services that the app can do. And so I think where the challenge comes in, honestly, I think is, it depends on the course operator. We've had course operators who have kind of said, yeah, we're gonna go with such and such app because it's included in our deal.

right, you know, that's not even costing anything or whatnot. And then they'll come back and say, yeah, well, we kind of got what we paid for, you know, didn't cost us anything. And it really didn't compare to what you had. they'll end up saying, hey, we really want to get you implemented now. So, but unfortunately, you know, some operators are just, you know, hey, it checks the box, we have an app and you know, that's kind of sometimes, you know, the tough part to overcome. But usually, I mean,

you know, I don't do as many, you know, in person or, you know, virtual demos today with, with clients, but I still do a few every once in a while. And it's still, I still hear, you know, when we actually can get somebody, you know, to sit down and take a look at what we're doing. Usually reaction is like, holy crap, there's a lot here that we can do. Like, no idea. They just thought, well, it's an app with, you a scorecard. It's like, like here is a tool that you're going to create.

you know, a pop-up to, you know, sell gift cards. And you can see that, you know, this is generating, you know, tens of thousands of dollars in gift card conversions through this channel that you're not getting somewhere else, you know, just because of the audience that you're reaching, the type of person that is looking to do that. And some of the integrations that we do have that, you know, we're...

I'm a big believer in the self-service economy, and that more more customers and consumers out there, golfers or consumers, are looking for that self-service option, right? To be able to check in and pay for their tee time right on their phone. Not have to walk into a pro shop and wait in line on a busy Saturday morning. That would be huge. We have some integrations with certain partners that do the wait list functionality. Well, I was going to ask you about wait list because

I seem to recall a press release or something that you were going to be a vendor in the wait list technology. Do I have that right? Yes. Yes. We do have a, it's called our tee time standby solution. It's integrated with Club Profit. So it only works with Club Profit courses because we are integrated directly to the tee sheet. So it is actually talking right to the tee sheet. And then,

But we also are, you know, I know the guys at Noteefy, know, Jake and I talk all the time and they're awesome guys too. And so they've integrated to our push API as well. So that if a club is using Noteefy, they can actually send those notifications to app users specifically right through the app as well. And I think you work with Golf Geek Software as well. Do you not? I want to say their golf courses were a client of yours.

Yes, well, yeah, the Walters golf facilities are clients of ours. yes, are, Aaron is awesome over there and we are working with them on trying to get that waitlist technology also integrated to the app. It's not there yet to be transparent. guess the key is, and I think you mentioned a second ago, and it's that you can integrate to the notification system because ultimately,

That's what this whole thing is about with this waitlist thing is notifying people that it's become available. Exactly. Yeah. We have a push API that honestly multiple people have integrated too. So really, you know, we are the channel to say, Hey, look, you know, they can decide. And obviously with waitlist, you know, what message do you want to send? You know, when do you want to send it and who do you want to send it to? And what do want to call to action to be? So we have all that in our API. So with waitlist, obviously, or Noteefy, you know, they, they can identify, Hey, look, this time just opened up.

we're going to send a push notification to this segment of users of the app that signed up with notify as opposed to maybe an email or a text message. So it's another channel for them to get that out. And, I am curious, you know, you're one of these few people, I'm just guessing you, you've not said this to me beforehand. You can see golfer behavior. I'm thinking in your large amount of data that Gallus has, and I'm not suggesting that you, you know,

golfer email addresses, but golfer behavior, I would think you would have data points on that from the interactions inside of the app. Yeah, I mean, we can see, you know, obviously anything that they're using the app and especially with our tools, whether it's, loyalty activity, you know, you can build a loyalty program within our app, you we have our, our offer locker, which is transitioning to our rewards and subscriptions programs. So we can see, you know, who's who's viewing those, you know, when are they redeeming them? But

What kind of activities there obviously the scoring data. Well, that's what I wanted to ask about how often because look, there's a lot of apps now that are saying they have a scorecard inside of the app. And I'm curious to know how often people use that feature. When I say people golfers, how often are golfers actually using the scorecard? I don't know UI inside of the app to keep their score.

Yeah, you know, it's it kind of depends on on the golf course. We have some that, you know, because of what they're doing at the golf course, they see a lot of high usage. And we have if they're a GHIN facility as well, for example, we're integrated to GHIN. And so they can keep their score right there in the app. And then with a push of a button, send their hole by hole scores to GHIN. And so, you know, the courses that are doing a great job of creating awareness about that.

or see some higher usage. Some, you know, the usage honestly is not as much just because, you know, the awareness is maybe not there in terms of, you know, what they're talking to their golfers about there. So it's kind of all, it's all over the place. But, you know, so it really depends on sometimes, you region and what the course is doing there. Yeah. You know, I think when,

scorecard functionality came along. think a lot of people thought maybe we can just eliminate the paper scorecard expense. Yeah. But that it's hard to find a golf course today that just won't buy scorecards. Right? Yeah, it is tough. We definitely have had many that have like, I wouldn't say just gotten rid of them, but they've reduced it. You know, they've really pushed like, the green initiative and say, hey, look, we've got we've got it. We've got an app here. can keep score. You can see a history of every single score you've got in here. So there's no reason not to use it.

But as we all know, the golf industry doesn't always move as quickly on those types of initiatives there as we'd like. But yeah, think the good news is that the generations that are coming, they're more more in tune to doing something like that and not going to want to actually use a paper scorecard and whatnot. And so I think we'll see that increase over time for sure.

Can an individual's GHIN number travel from app to app? Do you know what I'm getting at there? Yeah, no, mean, well, yes. mean, you can when you go to download the app, you can go in and put in your GHIN number. It's not going to if I download golf course a app over here and then I download golf course B app over here, it's not going to recognize that we're not we're not tying. OK, and that's what I was getting at. Yeah, that's what I was suggesting. Yeah, you know, just because that's always been, you know, we are we are

doing some things to kind of maybe expand the profile a bit there and some ideas on how we can possibly connect those things. But we also understand that, look, really this is the golf courses app, right? And so last thing we want to do is share customer data with another golf courses app as well. That's important to them that, these are.

These, these are their golfers that are downloading their app. And we want to make sure that they have, you know, the priority to be able to, you know, connect and collect that data and market to them, you know, for their purposes. live in a really interesting space. I mean, you, know, where you're almost kind of have to straddle a lot of lines, right? You don't want to be a booking engine company. You don't want to be a tee sheet, but you, but, but you are going to participate in the, you know, tournament functionality. think you're now also kind of in that subscription.

functionality. I can only imagine strategy meetings at Gallus where, know, it's like, well, we don't want to two steps to the left, maybe one step to the left. Talk a little bit about the subscription stuff though, because clearly I think a lot of operators, think Supreme kind of made this thing a bigger deal, if you will, a few years ago. And now more and more people are getting hip to how subscriptions can be so good for the business.

Yeah. Talk about your involvement there and like what kind of problems you guys are solving as it relates to subscriptions. Yeah, yeah. We're excited about our turnkey subscription solution. And the idea there is again to try to simplify the process of being able to set up and customize a subscription in any way that a club wants to. They could have different tiers, they can have different recurring options, they can sell individual just

maybe not subscriptions, but maybe it's a golf pack of 10 rounds of golf and make it really simple for the customer right there to be able to see right on the app what those subscription option membership options are or golf pack options or lessons packages. And with a few taps their phone, they can sign up and sign up for that subscription. So and instantly to right there on the phone, they'll be able to have a membership card that's a digital membership card. They'll have access to all their benefits that they get with their subscription with a

tap of a button as well. And then any sort of redeemable vouchers, let's say you get five rounds of golf a month or you get a voucher in the Pro Shop for a discount every month or whatnot, they're all digital vouchers and they can come in there, they can see them, they can see when they expire, they can redeem them right through the app as well. So it kind of just closes the loop for the customer experience right there and make sure that it is actually right there in the palm of their hands versus, you know,

having to go into a pro shop, fill out a paper form, PDF, give them a credit card, have them put that on file, put it somewhere in a filing cabinet, have them print out some vouchers, hand them to you or email them or even mail. We have some clients that have been mailing out stuff, and it just kind of like closes the loop on that. And then also for the auto renewal aspect of it, especially with annual passes, season passes, things like that. I know that clubs go through a tremendous amount of effort.

to resell those every single year. And with ours, you can actually just have it set up so it auto renews. Obviously the person can opt out of it if they want, but that can reduce a significant amount of time. know, talking to a few clients, just, their eyes just go, my gosh, I don't have to go through the hours and hours of the day of next season to go through this process. We could just have them actually sign up right there in the app. And they'll have all the data there as well on the backend.

And when you mentioned a moment ago, you know, in the palm of your hand, mean, really you are suggesting there is some, kind of, you gotta be there at the right moment to get the purchase done. Right. I guess you're suggesting that, you don't want to have someone to have to put this off until they can go sit down at a desktop computer until they can walk into the pro shop. If they're ready to buy, you'd just like to be able to transact them immediately and close the sale. Exactly. Yeah. I just, I just did a,

kind of an interview with one of our clients that's using it. And he kind of gave the statement of, know, this is, can reach my customer and sell while they're sitting on the couch in the evening when that door is closed, when they can go in there and boom, I can send a push notification. They're going to see it. They're advertising our new pass or punch card program and boom with it, a few clicks, it's right there. So yeah, so you're able to reach them again.

the more convenient you make it with anything you're selling, right? You're going to increase sales just because, you know, they don't have to go, gosh, well, I'll go buy that when I have time or when I can stop by or I can do this. It's literally right there on their phone. Right. I, and I'm, know, this is my, my sales and marketing hat on here a little bit. I'm guessing that an hour after someone finishes their round, if they get a notification to buy five rounds at a total discount, right? you save some money, if you buy five rounds now,

I would think that that can be a pretty effective marketing ploy for people that do have the app. Yeah, exactly. like you're saying, the right timing is what you want. And it's not just the timing of the messaging, but also the ability for them to follow through on the transaction immediately. So yeah, so we're exploring a lot of the automations there. One of the automations that we're working on is

with certain rewards, right? They might expire at the end of the month or at the end of the season or whatnot. And being able to automatically notify them, hey, know, hey, this reward or this voucher is about to expire. You know, make sure you come out and use it. And you want to drive, I think if you're a golf course, there's some element of breakage, right, that you're looking for, but it's also, you also want them to come out to the club. You you want them to use it. You want them to spend a little bit more money with that program so that they renew it.

you know, every single year and see this continue to see the value in it. Is there anything? So I'm a big believer. We have not talked about this a lot on this podcast, but I actually think one of the next big frontiers, I'm listen, I'm big on the whole AI voice thing. I think I've made it myself clear that I do think that that's an unlock for a lot of people. but one of the other ones that I'm really interested in is loyalty. and I understand what you're saying that, you can customize your loyalty program any way you want, et cetera, et cetera.

I'm wondering, do you all talk about, creating some kind of a custom loyalty program that really came out of your brains and you rely on AI, you rely on algorithms to build a loyalty program that, frankly, your competitors can't get to, right? That you've got some IP there that sets your loyalty program apart. Do developers have conversations like that or what's your perspective on something like

Yeah, I mean, I think there's definitely opportunity there. I think that the challenge that I encounter is that, as we know, every every golf course is a little bit different and they have like, you different ideas on how they want loyalty to work for them. And I think that there's when you talk about loyalty to I think there's there's two there's two ways, right? There's a your traditional loyalty program, which is, you know,

the more you play or the more you purchase, the more you earn in rewards, right? And then there's the subscription, which I think is it's prepaid loyalty, right? It's like, hey, you're going to pay upfront for these additional benefits types of things. And I think that I think there's huge opportunity in golf to do that. And yeah, AI can definitely play a role. think the more that is able to understand what is working across a range of facilities and what

what is making the business viable from a loyalty standpoint. Because I think, yeah, some clubs might get hung up on, well, gosh, what do we do? So I think really kind of having almost like a guideline that's driven by AI-powered data could be really valuable. it's not something we have today, but it's definitely something we talk about, gosh, how can we implement and use those types of things to make it valuable for

for a golf course operator or other industries. mean, honestly, one of the reasons we built the subscription module was we have a sister company that started this year in the craft brewery space. something that's super important to craft breweries is beer clubs, mug clubs, membership programs. It's a big driver for their business. And so it's kind of one of those things, gosh, we can build it once and sell it twice. Because there's two markets that it fits.

And it's really honestly been interesting too with being more intimately familiar with the craft brew space on the side. I still have one of my partners really runs it, but they're the opposite of golf right now. They were in a period of rapid expansion and you could just open a craft brewery and you got a line out the door. And ever since 2019, 2020, that has shifted. So golf took off and craft beer kind of took a slide.

And so it's just been interesting to kind of see both sides of that is where, you know, breweries now are going, gosh, we can't just, you know, we can't just exist and have tons of customers. actually have to market. actually have to, you know, engage our customers and get them back into the tap room. And so that's why I think they see a ton of value. What's the name of your beer brand? It's called Tapwise. Tapwise. Okay. And so that this does lead me something because I think a lot of founders, some, I don't know.

Sometimes founders can go 10 months and forget about this, but other founders think about it every day. Ultimately, there's some kind of an exit, right? And a lot of times the exit can be an acquisition. Sometimes the exit can be, the company ran its course and I've put all my kids through college and it's going to be something different now or whatever. in those, in these 10 plus years that Gallus has been around, has other outside money come in?

and put you in a place where you feel like, well, as a founder, I've now satisfied, you know, my desire to build something and see it exist forever. How has it worked out for you guys as it relates to that founder component? No, that's a great question. We have been fortunate enough to not require any additional investments. So we've been able to, you know, after the first couple of years, be profitable and reinvest back into the

So we haven't had any additional investors come in. We've definitely had interest in that and had some of those conversations. But ultimately, I've also been around long enough to see some of those acquisitions happen and kind of see kind of how sometimes they play out. I'm still, know, is, Gallus is kind of my baby and I'm not ready to kind of let somebody else take the helm there. And really want to, I still think there's a lot of

additional opportunity that we can bring to the industry. And I want to still see that happen. So to me, I still love what we're doing. I love this industry. I love the team that we've got. maybe somewhere down the road, there's something there. But honestly, think what we've been looking at from, I'd say, of the management perspective is, gosh, what we've built doesn't just apply to golf. A very scalable, affordable,

branded app technology with the tools that we have applies to so many other different verticals. know, there are other verticals that we can go serve and really help level up what they're doing. Essentially a fragmented vertical, right? So whether it's bed and breakfast, golf course, know, individual breweries, these fragmented industries where the owner operator is often involved and

is looking for outside vendors to fill gaps on skill sets and et cetera, et cetera. So I'm sure, yeah, I'm sure that it's Switchcase, right? The Switchcase group. The Switchcase group, yes, kind of the portfolio company. Yeah. And so it'll make sense that the Switchcase group will bring in other industries. I'm sure you'll have some unique development within those industries, but you'll also have these core things that you have built, like you said, five or six years ago that can be used over and over again.

Exactly. The idea is that we can ramp up a little faster because we've already got something that we can build on top of. And yeah, we can obviously build some very market-specific features that are going to address that market very well. But we get to add in all these. It doesn't matter if you're... You take out the GPS and the scorecard and tee time booking out of our app and the communication, the loyalty, the native features that they can...

know, drive through that app and engagement they can drive with those customers applies to a lot of different businesses. So the idea is we don't want to build something that they catch all for everything. We want to be very, you know, determined about which type of market we go after. But we definitely think there's some other opportunities outside of golf for sure. And does the boost marketing services for people that don't know?

Jason, they have a marketing service like so many of us built over time. know, a lot of us, I think figured out if we were selling software, then there was an opportunity to help our customer use it at a more deep level. Does the boost marketing service translate into the brew side as well? It definitely could. haven't, we haven't actually added like a marketing services to that business yet at this point. But just like any, just like in golf you know, we kind of boost kind of came out of

the fact that gosh, we're working with golf courses, we're helping them with obviously our specific technology, but kind of realizing, man, they need help with a lot of their technology, email marketing, making sure their website's up to date, social media. And honestly, for a while we were just kind of helping them. And then I realized, gosh, we should be charging for this if we're helping them. So that's kind of how Boost kind of got started. And we see the same thing in the craft beer space as well. You've got just like in golf, you've got

you know, individual who is wearing a lot of hats, their GM, their head pro, they're running F and B, they're the superintendent. You see the same thing in the brew space. They're brewing the beer, they're running the tap room, they're doing the marketing. So they need help as well. Right, right. Well, it's, I appreciate you giving us, you know, an inside look. think it's a, I've always thought it was a really interesting business. You just sit in such a unique spot in the, call it the ecosystem of golf course technology.

and, I think you guys have done a really good job of carving that spot out to be larger and larger, which is ultimately, you know, what you're, what you're charged with doing. So, I think, I think that's great is, is, is, you know, is AI part of the roadmap. And then I also kind of want to touch on like, I would think you'd want to get to a thousand clients and then 2000 clients, but I'd be curious to hear your vision. Yeah. I mean, AI is definitely, I mean, we, use AI and

I'll call it just in our development, obviously, to try to streamline our development. And we're exploring, okay, great, where can we implement AI that is most useful for the operators, can be effective. And yeah, I mean, and we wanna grow, obviously, yes, we wanna continue to grow. We wanna cross that thousand threshold, we wanna cross the 2000 threshold. And the challenge is always, I mean, we've been doing it for a long time here is just,

the needs of facilities are obviously so different. We can go talk to one facility and we check every single box and some other facilities, they have something else that maybe there's that one thing that we're missing. And the challenge is, as you well know, we can't do it. We always say, we can do anything, we can't do everything. Or at least we can't do it all at once. And so the idea is, how do we responsibly prioritize a roadmap where we're not just,

burning cash like crazy. got to be a viable business and we want to be very deliberate about, you know, the types of things that we're building. One thing that we're focused or working on right now is kind of addressing the resort market as well. So we've been working with one of our clients who is, was originally just a golf course. had three golf courses at the resort, but they really wanted something that was even more robust. You know, they've got so many other amenities from spa to marina to biking to beach to dining to, you know,

paddleboards, all those types of things. And so we have been working with a partner in that space to really build that full, full encompassing resort experience. know, that's, know, if you're Hyatt or you're Marriott or whatnot, you've already got something, but those resorts that are kind of in that middle space there, and they really want something that that's that full end to end experience, fully integrated. And so we're really excited about that in 2025 and really expanding into the resort space.

I would think there would be an opportunity to for the the homeowner association space right there where they have the golf course and and they've got some additional needs as well. Yep, exactly. The vacation rentals is especially with our one client. That's a big part of it, right? You know, and the idea is that, you know, they've got it's a it's a business that has, you know, multiple revenue streams, right? It's not just golf, it's but they've got dining, they've got all these things. And we bring it all together into one spot for that seamless experience for that

customers so that they can go in and see, gosh, it doesn't matter if they booked their vacation rental through this and their dining over here and the marina over here. We kind of create that basically one stop shop experience for them to interact and access all of those things. So that's something we're definitely really excited about for next year.

Well, that's great. Again, thanks for your time. Thanks for coming on. I hope you guys get to a thousand quick and then 1500 even quicker, you know? So I'm always rooting for all you guys to grow. So I think that's great. You're providing jobs, right? You're building something that's going to be around forever and ever. And that's really cool. Yeah. No, I appreciate it. It's been a fun journey and just like any.

founder out there. It's fun times and the times that I'm just banging my head against the wall. And so we know that for sure, it wouldn't change anything, you know, continue to welcome the challenge and let's go continue to grow. So I appreciate you having me on, Mike. Good for you. Yep. Thanks a lot.

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