Shot Pattern · B2C · golf strategy GPS app
Pay $5,000 for golf course data, then dig through it for new features
Found data for a new expected-value feature that went viral
Workedfeature-developmentfinancing
What they did
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.
What happened
The pressure to earn it back pushed a big swing; the extra data enabled the expected-value feature that set things 'off to the races'.
- Stage
- Launch (early after launch)
- Effort
- $5,000 upfront
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Turning a Side Project into a Six-Figure Subscription Business – Eric Duffett, Shot Pattern“the only way to get this data from a reliable provider was to pay $5,000 up front.”
“I was digging into the APIs to figure out what else was there to like really take advantage of the money I'd spent, and I found something else that I didn't know I had purchased that unlocked this additional behavior that nobody else was doing.”
“I basically was able to take a user's data and reflect it back to them and show them an expected value of any shot that they hit.”
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More from this episode
- Shot Pattern: Build an app for something golfers already do by handEarly trials and paying strangers with little effort, unlike the first app
- Shot Pattern: Post helpful golf tips on X with app screenshots, starting before launchA few trial starts after each helpful post; slow steady growth
- Shot Pattern: Tweet a teaser of a feature you are still building25-40K impressions from ~1,000 followers; influencer calls and a buyout offer
- Shot Pattern: Compare your trial numbers to public benchmarks before selling, then say noDeclined $75K; 2024 revenue ~$185K and $500K+ ARR a year later
- Shot Pattern: Add features users already want, then double the price to $75 a yearPrice now ~$75/year; no separate conversion impact reported
- Shot Pattern: Run image-only ads for a couple of weeksAbout break-even; switched to video
- Shot Pattern: Pay golf creators $750-$1,500 per video and run the videos as adsCreator ads were not the winner at first; still used as ongoing ad content
- Shot Pattern: Make a quick screen recording of the app with auto captions and run it as an ad$0.70 installs vs $3.50-4 revenue per download; drove 2024 to ~$185K
- Shot Pattern: Use an interest-free credit card to spend more on ads that pay back2024 revenue ~$185K; founder paid himself $100K
- Shot Pattern: Give golf video creators the app for free and ask them to mention itMany posted once; no numbers given
- Undaunted Golf: Email all 300+ college golf coaches one by one about the appAbout 5 replies: 2 'unsubscribe', 1 hostile, 2 asked for Android
- Undaunted Golf: Try a few Twitter adsDidn't work; founder calls it a weak effort
- Shot Pattern: Answer support for 30 minutes each morning and 30 minutes each night