#130 - Noteefy: Jake Gordon (CEO)

In this week's episode I interview my good friend Jake Gordon, the Co-Founder & CEO of Noteefy, the fast-growing technology company helping golf operators fill tee time cancelations more easily.

Noteefy (pronounced ‘notify’) has the first automated tee time assistant / waitlist for golfers and golf courses to improve the golfer booking experience, while accelerating course revenue and efficiency. The Noteefy booking assistant (technology is patent pending) enables golfers to input their personalized playing preferences, then get a real time notification when their desired tee time comes available. The golfer then books on the existing POS tee sheet as they normally would and the course keeps 100% of the revenue. Golfers never need to call again, and operators fill every desired tee time.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:00

Today we play golf.

Speaker 2 0:02

Let me show you how we do it in the pros.

Speaker 3 0:05

Yeah . Welcome to Behind the Golf Brand podcast. I never missed with the Seven Iron , a conversation with some of the most interesting innovators and entrepreneurs behind the biggest names in golf. My

Speaker 4 0:16

Friends were the golf clubs. I lived on the golf course, I lived on the driving range

Speaker 3 0:19

From Pro Talk . You should learn something from each and every single round. You play to fun from on and off the green. Why would

Speaker 5 0:26

You play golf if you don't play it for money?

Speaker 3 0:27

Just let me put the ball in a hole. This is Behind the Golf Brand podcast with Paul Libert . Tore .

Speaker 6 0:34

Guys, welcome to the Behind the Golf PR Podcast. Podcast. Hey, I have my good friend Jake Gordon from No Fi . It's actually a really cool app and system. Like I wish they'd invented this a long time ago, but Jake invented it, so now we get to use it. But it's really cool and I'm really excited to have him on the show. So welcome to the show, Paul.

Speaker 7 0:52

Thanks for having me. So

Where are you located?

Speaker 6 0:53

Where are you located?

Speaker 7 0:55

I'm here in Los Angeles, California where it's , um, blue skies and sunny. Um, so there are worse places to be and it's almost like one of the epicenters of , uh, of Muni golf these days. So it's fun to, you

Speaker 6 1:10

Know , yeah, it's changing a lot, right? Like Muni golf's become like super popular there.

Speaker 7 1:13

Oh yeah. I think , um, it's kind of interesting. So from Santa Barbara to call it San Diego, which is about 120 miles, there are over 200 public golf courses. So it's almost like Scottsdale. I feel like the density of courses out here. And there's a lot's that main

Speaker 6 1:32

Munis though. They're all like pri they're all expensive.

Speaker 7 1:34

No, no, those are , those are public 18 hole courses is , it's crazy. There's a ton out here.

Speaker 6 1:40

But it's like changing too 'cause like it's becoming popular, right? Like it's like trendy I guess is a better of saying it, right? Like it's Yeah,

Speaker 7 1:47

It's

Speaker 6 1:47

A place to be seen.

Speaker 7 1:49

Yeah, no, it's true. It's funny, like golf, especially in this market, I think in general, like it's having a moment , um, especially among new golfers who I'd say aren't super used to , um, playing the game, right? You go out to any of these Muni courses and you see high school kids who are in shorts, in basketball, shorts and, you know, wearing t-shirts and just hacking it around. And I think part of you wants to be, you know, kind of frustrated. You're like, man, pick up the pace of play. Like, you know, guys, let's, you're using a driver in the Fairway <laugh>. But then the other part is like, well it's also kind of cool that golf is like a fun destination to hang out without a lot of that pressure. Like, you don't know what you don't know. So it's kind of a balance where you're right, it's definitely become a place to hang out, be seen. Um, you know, it's very hard to get tee times out here. Um , is it really? Oh my God, I

Speaker 6 2:44

I heard like there's like blocks, right? And then like resellers buy 'em and is that what's going, I remember that somewhere. Somebody told me that. Is that true?

Speaker 7 2:52

Yeah, it's, you know, it's, it's hard to know exactly what is going on. But at the LA City courses , um, you, they release the tee times, nine days out at 6:00 AM you go , uh, for, and that's for city residence . You can go on there at six, at 5:59 AM 6:00 AM they're released, you refresh. And by 6 0 1 9 days out, almost a hundred percent of the inventory is gone.

Speaker 6 3:23

See, there has to be some kinda like bought or something that's like, it has to be, dude, it has to be like, someone's figured out a way of like locking that in. You know, it's on like concert tickets. It's like,

Speaker 7 3:35

No , it's like

Speaker 6 3:36

We're all gone .

Speaker 7 3:38

It is really like that. So what's interesting, I don't actually think it's bots that are buying them up because if you go through the process, you know, you have to hit a capcha , you have to put in

Speaker 6 3:50

Well there's for , you know , as well as I do , there's ways around Cap .

Speaker 7 3:52

So you would Yeah , I don't, I don't, I know there's some bots, but like when you talk to the operators, what's happening is it's actually brute force . So I've heard that there are rooms of people rooms who literally right at 5 59, they all buy up as much inventory as possible. And then one reseller actually moves a lot of that inventory through like WhatsApp groups, honestly. Like they'll buy resell .

Speaker 6 4:25

Like really basic, like basic, like not even

Speaker 7 4:27

That's what I'm saying . No, that's what I'm saying. Like people think, oh my God, there are these unbelievably sophisticated bots that have figured out how to buy every single tee time . And I'm like, when you talk to the guys, they get 30,000 hits on the site at that minute

Speaker 6 4:42

And it dies and there's no more for it for the next, the next day.

The beginnings of Noteefy

Speaker 7 4:46

No, everything's zapped up. But actually this is, so I was one of those guys at 5:59 AM hitting a refresh trying to find tee times nine days out. So Thursday for the following Saturday. And it was almost impossible. But what would always happen without fail is there's a 24 hour cancellation policy where you'll get fined 10 bucks ahead if you cancel inside 24 hours. So without fail, at 25 hours out before the tee time, Friday mornings, a bunch of inventory comes online a bunch for in prime time . And so what I would do is I'd be, you know, you and I are having a chat on Thursday or Friday and I'd have my monitor over here and I'm hitting refresh on all these teesha TSheets waiting for last minute inventory to come online and without fail, because I was a tee time guy from my group of friends. Without fail, I'd always get a great tee time and then I'd tell the buddies, you know, we're playing, here's where we're playing 10:00 AM whatever. It was a brute force , brute force mechanism with very little sophistication. But , um, I came from the technology industry. I was working at a big consulting firm at called Accenture and we were um, I was on our ventures team, so I was working with technology companies all the time. And I think one day, actually, I don't know if it was YouTube, you know when you go on YouTube you follow someone. I'm sure like if I followed you, I get an alert that says, Hey, Paul just went live with behind the

Speaker 6 6:20

Brand . Yeah . Notifications. Yeah. Click the bell.

Speaker 7 6:22

I was like, okay, click the bell, get an alert when the , when the creator you want comes online. And it's funny, I had a, there was a creator who had a podcast I'm obsessed with and he'd call it like his noie , like his <laugh> like the Noie gang, which is kind of cringey, but he's like, the people who get notified and then jump on the live stream , they're like his people. And so I was like, noie notify YouTube. And then with OpenTable have used OpenTable to book like for restaurants. Yeah, they have an alerting feature when the restaurant, if there's a last minute cancellation. So the vision was like, huh, if I can combine all these things for golf, that would save me a lot of time. I'd play more and it would make my life easier. So that was long-winded. But you know, as an LA So

Speaker 6 7:11

You started notify,

Speaker 7 7:13

Huh?

Speaker 6 7:13

Is that how you started at all of this too?

Speaker 7 7:15

That was how everything,

What year did you start Noteefy?

Speaker 6 7:17

What year was this?

Speaker 7 7:18

2022.

Speaker 6 7:19

Okay, so you had this idea. Yeah. But then how did you implement it? It seems a lot . It's a lot. Yeah. It's crazy. You think about it . 'cause you gotta like, so, okay, so how did you implement this? So you had this idea of what did you do? Did you like build a , like did you build background a back or , uh, you know, the foundation in the background or what did you have to do to build something like

Speaker 7 7:38

That ? Yeah, so I'm not a software engineer. So the first thing is like, I had this idea, like, it would be awesome to get notified

Speaker 6 7:47

Like that, like that noise in the background. Is that like a , is that how it sounds

Speaker 7 7:50

Like I know <laugh> , it's something pretty much like that. Um , I was like, I gotta , and I'm turning off my , uh, alerts here, but I was like, I gotta get a system that pretty much can chime me like that when tee times at my favorite courses come available. That was the idea. I thought my hypothesis was this is a consumer product. This is going to be an app that helps golfers play golf at the courses in their area more easily. That was the vision. That was the idea. But I was like, okay, now what First thing I did is I put up, like I wanted to test the idea before I put any time and energy into it. So I put up a Facebook ad that said, Hey, I made a landing page, I on GoDaddy with just the idea. Like literally it took 20 minutes or less to take a GoDaddy template and just say, you know, it's so , it's hard finding tee times. It sucks finding tee times . We, we've built a better way. Be the first to find out , put that landing page. It took 15 minutes and then I was like, okay, I'd love to test this idea. So I took , I had a Facebook , um, create a Facebook ad with the idea and just put it out there to Southern California. And amazingly thousands of people started signing up. Like the Facebook ad was converting. Like they

Speaker 6 9:25

Were off because they didn't get a freaking tee time . It's all literally

Speaker 7 9:28

People were off about the availability and they, you know, were looking for solutions. I hit a pain point. I was like, okay, what I've validated.

Speaker 6 9:39

Yeah . So now you found the pain point, right? Which is the same pain point you had. Now you know it's for everybody. Correct . And then now how do you monetize it?

Speaker 7 9:46

So the next step was one of those people who had signed up reached out to me and said, Hey, I'm a senior software engineer at Microsoft. I've been in the, you know, building technology for 10 years. I'm obsessed with golf. I have this problem. Let me know if I can help. And it was honestly almost like the heavens opened up and just like dropped the perfect partner right on my lap because his name is Dathan . We were like, I said, okay, cool, let's go play around of golf and we got together. Lemme check

Speaker 6 10:20

You out . Let's let's date before we get married. We

Speaker 7 10:23

Were dating before we got married for sure. Yeah , you have , we started dating pretty much <laugh> . Okay . We, we got out there , um, we played at a muni on like a Thursday afternoon and we just walked the course and got to know each other and we had a great, we had great chemistry. We're very different .

Speaker 6 10:41

You buy drinks.

Speaker 7 10:43

Yeah, I picked up the, I picked up the round. I, I bought the round , but $17 afternoon, you know, walking fee. And what was great is just, we were super different but kind of aligned with our entrepreneurial passion, interest. And the most important thing was that we were obsessed with this problem. Like if I was to go build a, you know, healthcare AI company, there's just no way I could jump outta bed every day and like be fired up to go kicked out a brick wall and do this. But when I thought I love golf, I love solving this T top problem. And Dahan was exactly the same. The difference was he was a software engineer. So he was an , he was a builder and my background was in helping take startups to market. So we had this great synergy. I was like, all right , I guess I have to figure out if I actually know what I'm doing. <laugh> . Yeah. And you know, over the next um, six months pretty much we built a working minimally viable product, an MVP and this MVP you could put in your course, you can put in your parameters days, times players and it'll start to ping you when there's availability, right? So it was working minimally version of what we wanted. But then I was like, okay, well what are we, what's the business? Right? Is this a consumer business? Are people gonna download an app or like what's, what is

Speaker 6 12:11

It ? Yeah. Because everybody gets tired of apps nowadays I feel like it's like, that was cool like 10 years ago. Now it's like, oh do another app. I don't wanna do

Speaker 7 12:17

Another app. Right? So for us we were like, you know what? And also just my skills and my interests, like I'm not, there's consumer and then there's B2B as two business models. Consumer is like Instagram, Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, those are consumer software companies. And then you've got B2B, which is like Salesforce, HubSpot, like all of these B2B companies. So I was like, my instinct's much more B2B, let's take notify and bring it to the courses. And if we can, if we can help courses fill last minute cancellations by pinging their golfers when there's inventory based on their preferences, we will have just achieved the same thing for the golfer. Right. Paul found his tee time at <crosstalk> .

Speaker 6 13:03

Yeah . From the source, right? The actual source. Correct.

Speaker 7 13:06

So Paul found his tea time at Ken McDonald on Saturday morning when it opened on Friday night

Speaker 6 13:12

Night . What time people play Ken McDonald for Now that I think I'm <laugh> you gotta like any course like , alright , ready ? That's where I play at a lot. I'm just, I'm just joking around.

Speaker 7 13:20

Paul wanted to play , uh, Kopa on Saturday morning 'cause he's at

Speaker 6 13:26

I expensive. I don't play there. I'm like at McDonald. No .

Speaker 7 13:28

Yeah, you're rolling it . And so our whole thing is , so our technology where we ended up going was, okay, let's license this to the course white label the technology, meaning it will look and feel like Ken McDonald, it will look and feel like TPC Scottsdale. It will look and feel like Wko pa . But the functionality of the technology is connecting the golfer with the inventory in real time when it opens. So Paul can say, I wanna play Saturday morning at Kenny Mac

Speaker 6 14:01

Or any course, like anyone, whatever course they wanna play at and be like, okay,

Speaker 7 14:03

Any course that has signed up for us. So the course is our customer, the golfer's the user. And so the course pays a software subscription. They bring our software to their customers. Next thing you know, they're driving their

Speaker 6 14:19

Website . They already go on the website 'cause they wanna book a time direct

Speaker 7 14:21

On their website. Exactly. So that's how it works.

Speaker 6 14:25

Yeah . Solve that problem without having to like be another competitor. That's smart.

Speaker 7 14:31

Exactly. We, we are not, we don't see ourselves as like a golf now competitor. We don't see what we are. We don't

Speaker 6 14:38

Wanna be like , you don't, you care less, you don't wanna , we're

Speaker 7 14:41

Not in the consumer

Speaker 6 14:43

Software. You have the booking system. You don't be a booker. You just want to be a tool.

Speaker 7 14:47

Hey , we don't even wanna be a T sheet . We just want to be

Speaker 6 14:51

It's data a helpful Yeah , you wanna be the , you wanna be the link between the two.

Speaker 7 14:56

We want to be the helpful assistant for the course and the golfer to make them play more with less effort. That's our, that's what we try to do.

Speaker 6 15:03

How does it work? So is it like, is it, is it , so do you, I'm assuming it probably is like a landing page system that you guys control, right? Or something like that? I'm assuming like the data, like it's not like on individual sites. Like they probably have a link that goes back to you guys, which is the brain, right?

Speaker 7 15:21

Kind of kind of. So you go to TPC Scottsdale right now, or you go to Ken Mac or you go to Wico pa or you go to any of the hundreds of courses that use our system. You look at their T sheet and you don't see the tee time you're looking for

Speaker 6 15:38

Yeah, the time . Yeah. Which happens all the time. Right? It's like, oh, two 30 on a Tuesday afternoon. Oh great, okay . Well it'll be 400 degrees outside. So Exactly.

Speaker 7 15:47

So instead you now say, I'm looking to play between 6:00 AM and 8:00 AM Notify me when it comes available. Submit. That's all you have to do. You go about your life.

Speaker 6 15:58

So it's on the t sheet page then.

Speaker 7 16:00

Exactly. That's where we live. We are integrated into the existing booking control . So you're

Speaker 6 16:05

A box, like you're a box somewhere on the page That

Speaker 7 16:07

Exactly. Yeah . We ,

Speaker 6 16:09

This changes

Speaker 7 16:10

And then Exactly. We're a link, we're a widget that lives right on the courses existing site that powers the system.

Do most courses use the same software?

Speaker 6 16:17

So regardless of like, I don't know much about like golf course stuff. So like, do most golf courses use the same software? Right ? Is there like, you know what I'm saying? Is there like only so many software companies for golf courses? Or like how does that work?

Speaker 7 16:29

I'd say there's seven. Yeah, there's about seven to 10 big ones. Um, and so we So

Speaker 6 16:35

You agree with all those then I'm assuming?

Speaker 7 16:36

Yeah, exactly. We just bolt onto all of 'em and augment what they're already doing. So the T sheet companies in many cases have actually embraced us and they've been like, oh cool, you guys have a cool product that we don't

Speaker 6 16:50

Have to develop that we don't have to figure that out. We just wanna sell our , we just wanna sell our software. That's all we wanted .

Speaker 7 16:55

And what's really interesting is a lot of the t sheet companies actually make the money not on selling software. It's the POS business that's profitable.

Speaker 6 17:05

Oh really?

Speaker 7 17:06

So p os stands for

Speaker 6 17:08

<crosstalk> because the whole thing, right? It's like you buy that system for your course and it does everything and the teaching is part of

Speaker 7 17:14

It . Well , it's very interesting. So let's say Paul's golf course is looking for software and then you look at all the vendors , many of them will subsidize the software expense to take a portion of the point of sale revenue. So I give you $10 or I give you a hundred dollars. The point of sale company takes 3%.

Speaker 6 17:36

Holy. Yeah . So it's only a credit card charge.

Speaker 7 17:40

So 2% goes to the processing and the infrastructure and then they take 1% of all transactions.

Speaker 6 17:46

Yeah , that's So they , but they still probably get charged on whatever the credit card charges too, right?

Speaker 7 17:49

Right. So they usually,

Speaker 6 17:51

So now that was really 6% or seven or whatever the hell.

Speaker 7 17:54

So it's usually 3% of the transaction goes to kind of

Speaker 6 18:00

Processing the credit

Speaker 7 18:01

Card processing. The company that's doing POS will take usually 1% of every transaction. 2% goes to the payment processors or, or so

Speaker 6 18:11

They pay like a preferred rate and they probably have a preferred percentages and system .

Speaker 7 18:14

Exactly. That's where the revenue is. So if you're doing $10 million,

Speaker 6 18:18

You 1%. Right. So like times all those courses, right? So now it's the numbers name

Speaker 7 18:25

Like Stripe. You familiar with uh , Stripe? Yeah. They

Speaker 6 18:28

Charge you . Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 18:29

So all of these companies, they're taking a percent of the point of sale transaction. That's where, that's why they're worth a lot of money, but it works at scale. Um, but my point there, micro

Speaker 6 18:39

Transactions really, it's like you're making a penny every millisecond, right? And it's all gonna add up very quickly. Right? Not, oh, I'm not gonna make a dollar. We're gonna make a dollar . But

Speaker 7 18:48

That's exactly why they like working with us because we're driving more volume and the course like

Speaker 6 18:54

You're not losing money . Yeah. 'cause they're getting leakage, right? It's like you only have a commodity, which is the time on the course. And once that expires, like that's it. Exactly.

Speaker 7 19:01

Bingo. It's it's perishable. Every tee time is perishable. It's like Yeah . A movie . And it's like fruit . Fruit . It's like a fruit. It's like movie tickets. It's like airlines. It's like hotels. As soon as the day passes that's gone. It's gone. So the operators care a lot about preserving that. And the golfer is like, Hey there, there's some golfer out there that would play that tee time somewhere. The question is, do they know that it exists? Right? Whenever there's a cancellation and previously there just wasn't any great scalable system to being able to, you know, understand You would've ,

Speaker 6 19:36

Well you would also would've thought that like a golf now or whoever Right? Would've invented that a long time ago. Right? Because I mean, you would just think that because you're like, well you have this system and these app and fees and all this crap, you know, to be a member and blah and blah, blah blah. Like this was like level one, right? Like Yeah.

Speaker 7 19:57

Yeah. I was surprised it didn't exist . But then we've spent now two years and hundreds of thousands of hours of software engineering. You know, we built up our team now at 15 , um, and most of that is engineering building this great one product, right? So, you know, we filed a patent on it and like we now have this great system that we can use to kind of scale. Um, and every one of all of our engineering's in-House and everything we're doing is, you know, just sharpening this X right? We don't want to be every single, we don't , you don't ,

Speaker 6 20:31

You don't wanna be competitor ball as people. You just wanna be, you want be your system. That's what we, that's what we have. And you wanna be the best at that so that like, they're not gonna go and make their own 'cause you already have it. Or if they make their own, you're gonna sue their As because you guys have depends .

Speaker 7 20:44

We wanna , we wanna be a good steward in the market, right? Like one thing that, and all of this is new , is new to me. I didn't play golf until four years ago. I never played golf until Covid. I fell in love with the game and my background is in technology, so I just have a fresh pair of eyes on a lot of this I'm learning. And a lot of, you know, the point of

Speaker 6 21:06

You're problem solving too. Like, you're seeing like why, why, why is it like that? That doesn't make sense,

Speaker 7 21:11

Right ? Right. So a t sheet , like a golf course picks a t sheet point of sale software company who, you know, whether that's easy, you know, golf now has a full stack Lightspeed four up , you know, there's new companies like called ten four. There's cGAS , there's all of these software companies. They have to do in many cases, like 70 products just to turn the lights on for a golf course. They have to do the T sheet , they have to do the point of sale, they have to do email marketing in many cases they have a mobile app. There are, there is a laundry list of just basic criteria that a TV

Speaker 6 21:51

That's so funny too is that most people will just call the golf course and be like, Hey, I wanna book a time, you know , most like , I wanna play like , oh yeah, sorry, we have these times available, but like, you gotta train the public. You gotta train the, the older generation that this is a better way of doing it because they can just not have to worry about it and plug it in and they're good to go. You know? Yeah. So calling in my dad calls , my dad calls all the time. Right. But calling dad

Speaker 7 22:18

<laugh> . Well, you know what's unbelievable? So we have some courses in like Palm Beach and we see the age demographics of the people using the product. The number one age demographic over there is 75 years old using our system. Number one. It it is crazy. Like people, it , it's been the biggest surprise, I would say of launching the system is how the average age of the users are between 50 and 70 years old of notify.

Speaker 6 22:46

That's awesome.

Speaker 7 22:48

Yeah, because they don't wanna call

Speaker 6 22:51

Don . They wanna call, don't wanna talk to anybody you wanna call. I don't wanna call golf course and like have some dumb conversation for a minute to find out. I can't get the time I want.

Speaker 7 23:00

Exactly. Exactly. So, so

When did you get your first client?

Speaker 6 23:04

Then , so then when did you get your first client? Or who , like, how'd you do , how'd you get that?

Speaker 7 23:10

So the fir it's actually a pretty funny story. So being in LA there's a municipal course out here called , uh, Simi Hills . It's super popular. They do like 85,000 rounds a year. It is a , yeah, it's crazy amount of rounds, but it's a great golf course. Just really fun layout. A

Speaker 6 23:28

Really nice muni. Yeah. Like, yeah, it's like really, really

Speaker 7 23:30

Nice Muni priced at like $70. It's

Speaker 6 23:35

Portable .

Speaker 7 23:35

Yeah , you can walk it, it's in the mountains. It's got elevation, it's got interesting whole layouts. There's trees, there's, you know, like nestled par threes that are, you know, at huge elevation differences. It's just a blast and it's super hard to get a Teton. Oh . So this was, this was one of these courses where I'm smashing refresh, refresh, refresh. And one day when I had the idea, I picked up the phone and I called up Brian, the gm and I said, Hey, this is Jake. Uh , I play your course all the time. Huge fan. Huge fan. Cool. Well how can I help? Quick question for you. Really hard to find tee times. Yeah. What else is new? But cancellations always occur. Uhhuh <affirmative> . What if there was a way to get notified when a cancellation occurred at the last minute at your course, would you be interested in that? He's like, yeah, does that exist? That sounds cool. I said, no, it's an idea, <laugh>. And he said, okay, call me , uh, call me when it's ready. So I call him back three, four months later when we had an initial version. I showed it to him. He is like, dude, this is pretty cool. Uh , we'll try it. And so he actually , yeah ,

Speaker 6 24:38

There's no downside, right? Like, I mean, yeah ,

Speaker 7 24:41

He rolled it out. Um , it was our first course and then from there at Parlayed , um, we got Kemper Sports , which is one of the biggest management companies too . Yeah.

Speaker 6 24:50

They own a lot of, right ? Like a

Speaker 7 24:52

Lot . They have about 170, 180 up to 200 courses even that they manage and some that, so

Speaker 6 24:58

That's key, right? It's like go after the whales. Like you show proof of concept, go after the whales that have a lot of courses that manage a lot of. And then, then you get all those courses and then it's like you can start filling in the ma the gaps, right? Like where are we? Yeah,

Speaker 7 25:14

It's a risk .

Speaker 6 25:15

How do you do like a muni though? Because it's, oh , I guess, I dunno . But in California, like, are the munis now getting managed by larger companies? 'cause they're happen here in Arizona. Like the city's like selling the contract. Really?

Speaker 7 25:28

Yeah. Well the cities in some cases will have a management company around the course. Like Kenny Mack is run by Corco .

Speaker 6 25:35

Um , yeah, but they just got that last year and you know what, they paid for that? A lot of money. Like 20 million?

Speaker 7 25:41

No, they sold it Ken

Speaker 6 25:43

McDonald. No , they got it. They got somebody, they got it last year.

Speaker 7 25:46

The management contract

Speaker 6 25:48

You're saying ? Yeah , there was , there was somebody else and they just took over January 1st.

Speaker 7 25:51

Got it. You know, it's in , so my my point is, you know, with them MCOs , um, they run these courses very streamlined and they , it's it's obviously, as you said, it's attractive to trying

Speaker 6 26:04

Yeah . Guess they don't a clue what they're doing, dude. Like it's already better. You know what I mean? Like it's not Yeah .

Speaker 7 26:10

Retired

Speaker 6 26:11

Dude out front being like, what the ?

Speaker 7 26:14

Yeah. These, the , the MCOs can come in. They know how a playbook, they know how to run these, run the course. Um, but you know from Exactly. But like if you yeah . If you don't do well, like as a technology company for them, you're shut out. Right.

Speaker 6 26:30

Blackballed , you're like your thing's , we're not gonna use you. You're full of it. Exactly. And you're never gonna get our business or anybody else's because we're gonna tell everybody else your stuff's

Speaker 7 26:39

Pretty much. So you gotta have something that works, you know? Um, but that's kind of how we compounded one thing into the next Into the next. Yeah . And you know, it's, you gotta be able to show the value. That's what it comes down to. You . If you don't, then you're out. Well

Speaker 6 26:53

Mean think how much money you're, you're like, it's all this lost revenue for 'em . Right? Right. Like that was money that they were going to lose.

Speaker 7 27:00

Right, exactly.

Speaker 6 27:02

And the golfer is now gonna be notified, Hey, your stuff's coming in. Do you want it now? Yes, yes, yes, yes. You know , and then it's like, it's, it's like they already want that. It's like you're , so then how, so then the, the golf course p purchase a license , um, of uh , a licensing agreement with you to use your software.

Speaker 7 27:22

Yep , yep . That's exactly it. Free for the end .

Speaker 6 27:26

Is that a yearly licensing fee or is that like you don't, are you charging based on the like percentage, blah, blah, blah .

Speaker 7 27:32

Just a yearly licensing fee. That's

Speaker 6 27:33

Smart. So makes it easy because you don't like , okay . Not all like convoluted and being like, well you only sold 14 blah blah blahs.

Speaker 7 27:42

Yeah , exactly. Easy. That's exactly it.

Speaker 6 27:45

Which makes even easier to sell later on

Speaker 7 27:47

<laugh> , you know, but the courses wanna know like, okay, that's great that you drove $200,000. I don't wanna necessarily pay now 30

Speaker 6 27:56

10%. Yeah, I'll be 20 grand for that. Like,

Speaker 7 27:59

Right. They, it's very easy when it's fixed price to know the ROI . It's black and white

Speaker 6 28:06

For you too because you know they're buying it for the year or however long they're buying it for. You know, that money's coming in, they have to pay for it, move on. Not like, oh I gotta chase my money down. Where's my percentage?

How many courses Noteefy has?

Speaker 7 28:19

Exactly. Exactly. So that's kind of been the , the playbook and we just keep making the thing better every single day .

Speaker 6 28:26

So how many courses do you have right now?

Speaker 7 28:28

350.

Speaker 6 28:29

A lot of courses.

Speaker 7 28:30

Yeah. Where's

Speaker 6 28:31

The biggest market at for you? California.

Speaker 7 28:35

You know, you'd think, but there have been some hotspots. So DC we probably, we have over 30 courses in DC in that one market. We have a meaningful amount of all the meetings and all the public courses in DC are using our system, which <laugh> , we don't have any footprint there. It's just how it's been. Like the operators in that market have taken, they

Speaker 6 28:58

All know each other. Right. They're like, Hey. Exactly.

Speaker 7 29:02

New York Metro. We have a ton of courses, you know, in California we do. But you know, there's some hotspots like Chicago, Florida, in , you know, NorCal , we have in , in, you know, Sacramento, like it's been in , in , you know, we have 10 courses. So do

Speaker 6 29:16

You have like a sales team that has to go around or do you have to go around and talk to these people?

Speaker 7 29:20

We've just started to scale up our kind of sales team. Um, but for the first year or so, it was just

Speaker 6 29:27

Word of mouth kind of me ,

Speaker 7 29:28

Just me. Just me helping out, chasing

Speaker 6 29:30

People down, calling 'em

Speaker 7 29:33

Little bit. Yeah. Mostly as I said, like going through a lot of the building relationships with the multi-course operators, going slow with them to prove it out before adding

Speaker 6 29:44

Yeah. And fix whatever issues. And so like, and making them happy. So then you're like, okay, we're not selling a product that has problems, you know, multiplied by 350, you know, it's only by a hundred or

Speaker 7 29:56

Whatever . Right , right. So we won't scale up to add the next one unless, you know, people are happy and they're getting the value and they're , you know,

Speaker 6 30:04

Things <crosstalk> . So how does the system work? Okay, so like, I wanna play Kenny Mac on Saturday. Yep . And they don't have the time I want. Yep . What happens?

Speaker 7 30:12

It literally, there's a link on their T sheet that says, didn't see the T time you're looking for at your preferences. Here I wanna play Saturday morning, not only this Saturday. Every Saturday for the rest of the year between seven and 10:00 AM from my four cell notify. Then we start pinging you, Paul .

Speaker 6 30:28

So is it like email or is it by phone or by text? Both

Speaker 7 30:31

Email and text. So

Speaker 6 30:32

You can choose or is it both automatically

Speaker 7 30:34

You can choose

Speaker 6 30:35

And then it's like a notification. Hey dumb come play golf <laugh> . Right. And then they can decide if they don't wanna , that's fine. 'cause there could be a 300 other people that want be notified. That's so now it's first come first serve to , but then, okay, so let's say I get the notification, then what happens? I have to go online or I just call the course. Or what do people do ?

Speaker 7 30:55

You click a link which redirects you back to the course on the exact day you're looking for and then it's on you

Speaker 6 31:01

Did this show like the whole fricking liket sheet or just the time you want and you can continue to like purchase.

Speaker 7 31:07

So you put in a t time range, we'll drop you on the right day you asked for, and then it's on you to book the

Speaker 6 31:14

T sheet . Oh, you pay . Okay . That's smart. Because of like, oh, I actually want 8 49, 8 20.

Speaker 7 31:18

Exactly. Exactly .

Speaker 6 31:19

And you just wanna get 'em back on the T sheet page of the day that they wanted. Correct . So what happens, so on the backend then, let's say I canceled my time. Yep . Right? I'm assuming how it works. Yep . Then the T sheet changes 'cause it got canceled. Yep . And then it boop goes right back on the screen. And then your , but on the back end , your system already picks it up like, okay, it's changed and then it goes boop and it goes out at the same time.

Speaker 7 31:44

Pretty much. I mean we , that's

Speaker 6 31:46

When you first come first serve , but you're giving the notification to whoever signed up for notify.

Speaker 7 31:49

Similar. Yeah. Yeah. And , and behind the scenes a lot of the sophistication is knowing who wanted what tee time when they wanted it. Like there's a mountain of parameters that Paul wanted. Right. Database . All the things that you wanted to play. We have to match that to availability. Like just to trigger notification and go out to the right person at the right time is,

Speaker 6 32:15

I can imagine your database is like crazy.

Speaker 7 32:18

There's a , I mean, DA and the engineering team, like they're really mad golf scientists who are just focusing on this one thing all the time. So it's, it's getting better every day. Every single day we're chipping away, we're adding this. And then, okay, if you think 350 operators, they all have ideas about things to make it better. So they're always telling us, aj

Speaker 6 32:40

Yeah. They see problems that may have made a problem yet or might be like, Hey, you might be able to tweak it in this way. Which is cool because they're a partner then they don't feel like you're taking advantage of 'em. They just think , Hey cool, you guys are helping us out. We have no problem paying you for the licensing and you could make us a better product by doing this. You're like , exactly . Okay, cool. We didn't know that. And you guys know 'cause you're on the front, you're on the front line .

Speaker 7 33:03

Yeah. We want to be their partner. We want them to feel comfortable to share, you know, ideas and recommendations and everything with us.

Speaker 6 33:10

Smart. You're smart, dude. Smart.

Speaker 7 33:13

You're

Speaker 6 33:13

Unfortunately though , you're you

Speaker 7 33:15

Friend . No , it's , it's okay .

Speaker 6 33:18

<laugh> , you were a Dodger fan every time about Dodgers for like a half hour today. We like to Dodgers. So

Speaker 7 33:26

<laugh>, don't get me started, man. I'll go all day talking about the boys and Blue

Speaker 6 33:32

<laugh> . It's like, I , the joke is like, how do you know somebody went to Ohio State? They tell you they went to Ohio State. Like that's just the thing. Like, it's like you just , they'll just tell you all the time . So , um, it's like with the Dodgers fan . Um, so what , what's in store for you guys this year then ? Like what's ,

Speaker 7 33:51

So the plan right now is for us to , uh, to just stay heads down and get better every single day. We're just trying to maximize our impact of notify in the market right now. So like 350 golf courses. That's great. We think that there's much, there's a lot more courses than that who have the

Speaker 6 34:07

<crosstalk> dude , bro. This is like a worldwide product. So

Speaker 7 34:09

That's the first step. Yeah. We could go international, we could, you know, but really we're excited about other use cases as well. You know, making sure that in spa and hospitality really as many different use cases as possible can benefit from , uh, what we have here. Yeah.

Speaker 6 34:27

What would be good. That's so smart. Is there anything else like this product in other markets or in other industries or Not really.

Speaker 7 34:40

I love what , um, OpenTable has in terms of that seamless, you know, in the restaurant industry, but I've not seen anything like this in hospitality across the board .

Speaker 6 34:55

No, I haven't either . I think it's , I think it's genius. It's genius. Uh , so what what is your background then, really? Is this tech or a sales or what , or not sales, but like you were at Accenture, what'd you do at Accenture?

Speaker 7 35:13

So when I was at Accenture, we had a stage emerging technology. And everything we would do is try and figure out how , um, we can take cool startups to our big clients, solve problems these deals and get, get in front of their AI or their cloud or their digital health , their cyber solution, and get it in front of the , uh, the customers. Uh , learn a ton about how to take startups to market. Um , that's just what I did every single day. So That's cool . That's where, that's where I was at before I'd taken the entrepreneur plunge .

Speaker 6 36:02

Man, dude, I'm really impressed with this . This is cool. Like, I didn't know until like how robust this is, but it's like , I think you guys just scratch the surface like you were saying too.

Speaker 7 36:12

Yeah, I appreciate it. It's, it's a lot of fun. We feel like kids in a candy shop right now doing what we're doing. Um, and uh, we're, we're fired up man. I think the best is yet to come. Yeah,

Speaker 6 36:26

Well where can people find you?

Speaker 7 36:30

So if you're a golfer , um, you can come , come to our website called Notify N-O-T-E-F-Y app and we have a, a segment on our site, which is all of our courses. And we'd love for you to go support one of our course partners if you're a golfer or go knock on the GM's door and say, Hey, why don't you guys have notify? Um, and if you're an operator , you do ,

Speaker 6 36:52

Jake will give you a , a free , uh, <inaudible> .

Speaker 7 36:55

<laugh> . Yeah , we'll , we'll hook you up. Um , and then if you're an operator , uh, we'd love to chat about how we can help your course.

Speaker 6 37:03

That's cool, man. I , I'm really impressed. This is actually really cool. So smart. It's like you find that little thing, right? That like needs to be fixed and that's all about entrepreneurialship, right? And like h how do you, I don't know , like you don't have to be like, Jake sucks at golf. I mean , you only played for four years. I do this

Speaker 7 37:22

Dude ,

Speaker 6 37:22

This dude already figured out like the problem is played golf for like the beginning of time. So

Speaker 7 37:28

I thankfully , uh, the technology works better than my golf game. 'cause it needs a lot of help, man . <laugh>, I'm fighting to break 90 out there. That's, that's my , uh, I'm , I'm hunting bogey golf.

Speaker 6 37:40

Hey, we all are, dude, that's, that's just normal. But well thank you for being on the show today. Um, you guys had checked out , notify, that's , I mean, I'm really impressed. There's very few times where I'm impressed with like software and golf and I'm like, dude, this thing's smart. I think you're just scratching the surface is where you guys can actually use it. So , um, thank you for being on the show and I'll see you guys in the next episode.

Speaker 7 38:01

Thanks Paul.

Speaker 3 38:03

Thanks for listening to another episode of Behind the Golf Brand podcast. You're gonna beat me, the golf stay connected on and off the show by visiting golfers authority.com. Don't forget to like, subscribe and leave a comment. Golf is always more fun when you win. Stay out of the beach and see you on the green.