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by patio11 5030 days ago
I know little about golf.

I know a bit more about selling software -- I can tell you, for example, that "Facebook integration" is not a benefit for most people (you mention it prominently like you believe it solves problems, but no golfer wakes up in the morning and goes "You know what was missing from my last golf game? Facebook!"). You're not making economically rational decisions trying to sell ad networ ads against a userbase smaller than X00,000 to X million. (You can have one-off ad deals which are viable much smaller than that, but that gets you into ad sales.) You're probably not going to have success with AdWords unless you can get people to a 3 figure LTV -- "make it mobile" does not strike me as getting you there given what I know about app store economics.

But help me on the golf front. Does this solve an actual problem real people actually have in their lives? Have you talked to avid golfers and have gnashed their teeth about how not knowing Average Score By Hole Distance is just crushing their enjoyment of the sport? Are these customers willing to pay for better golf scores, for example because it helps them invite more clients to more golf games and hence close more real estate sales, which is the reason they golf in the first place?

Talk to your customers. (Or the people who should be your customers if you were actually charging for this, which -- by the way -- is a great discipline to have from day 1 since it focuses you on reality.) If they're not wildly hair-on-fire enthusiastic about this, I don't know that I would spend lots of time on this when for the same effort of getting you from 150 non-paying users to 300 non-paying users would let you write software people that people would passionately care about.

1 comments

Agreed. He should make sure people actually want to use this, and if not, then just move on. Seems he built the software before testing if there was a market for it. Golfers spend lots of money on the actual game and equipment, though. So maybe he could use this as a channel to sell some golf equipment. Maybe he can test different golf balls and then have the software tell people which to buy from his website. Though this would require more resources to be invested into it.