Turning a Side Project into a Six-Figure Subscription Business – Eric Duffett, Shot Pattern

Golf coach Scott Fawcett had spent 5+ years teaching golfers to measure fairway width on Google Maps satellite images to plan strategy. Eric, a fan doing this himself, built an app that measures the hole in front of you on the course and shows the strategy analytics in real time, instead of trying to create a new behavior as with his first app.

Set up the Shot Pattern X account a week or two before launch and started posting content and joining conversations on golf Twitter. After launch kept adding value to the community and dropping app screenshots into conversations. Everything posted from the brand account, not a personal one. No paid budget; pure sweat equity.

The bare-bones V1 just treated any Apple Maps satellite image as a course. To professionalize it (tee box, green, number of holes) Eric paid a reliable golf course data provider $5,000 upfront, going about $4K into the negative, deliberately treating the app as a business rather than a hobby. To get value from the spend he explored the provider's APIs and found data he didn't know he'd bought, which let him compute an expected value for every shot from the user's data, based on an idea a statistician popularized in a book in the early 2000s.

While building the expected-value feature, posted from the Shot Pattern X account (about 1,000 followers) saying it was coming soon and people would like it, well before it was done.

When a strategic buyer asked for downloads and users, Eric instead showed conversion metrics against RevenueCat's State of Subscription Apps benchmarks (25% trial start, 75% trial conversion). He asked Very Good Ventures what it would cost to build the app, asked others for advice, and set a high ask. Buyer's final offer was $75K with a hint they would build it themselves. After advice from Seth Miller (Rapchat) via the Sub Club community to call the bluff, he walked away; Curtis Herbert (Slopes) later advised not to anchor on the number since deals get re-traded in diligence.

After declining the offer, spent the off-season building features that give users more of what they already wanted, released at the end of June, and raised the annual price about 2x to about $75/year. Paid marketing started right after.

First paid attempt in July 2024: an image-only campaign for a couple of weeks.

Offered free app access to golf video creators; those who wanted payment for a video got paid: about $750 to one with a small following, and $1,500 to sponsor a TikTok creator (50-100K views per video) entering a golf tournament in exchange for a video. Videos go to the creators' audiences and are repurposed as ads. Eric continues to pay creators for content.

Needed a third video to fill out the ad set, so recorded the app screen with the first idea that came to mind and added captions with CapCut. It became the top ad within days.

Once installs cost $0.70 against $3.50-4 revenue per download, Eric considered a line of credit and got an interest-free credit card to push ad spend as far as possible through the summer.

Reached out to golf video creators with a free version of the app asking them to talk about it.

Collected emails of every college golf coach in the US and sent each an individual copy-pasted email. Acted on two replies asking for Android by building an Android app.

Ran some small Twitter ads for the meditation app.

As the only developer and marketer, Eric keeps support to 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes at night, alongside a full-time teaching job.