How Golf Genius grew Golf Genius to $53M revenue and 11K customers in 2025.

Nathan Latka (00:00) Hey, folks, my guest today is Mike Zisman. He's the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, launched back in 2009. He is a serial entrepreneur. Mike, I don't want to age you here, but first company back in 1979, formal faculty at MIT, over 40 years of experience building software companies. Mike, ready to take us to the top? Michael Zisman (00:17) I am. Great to be with you. Thanks for inviting me. Nathan Latka (00:21) you bet. Tell us more about what you're selling at golf genius. Then we'll go back and get your backstory. Michael Zisman (00:26) Sure. So Golf Genius is the leading provider of tournament software to golf clubs, private clubs, public courses, tours, associations. ⁓ We provide sort of the very high end software for, you know, creating tournaments, doing registration, payment processing, live leader boards, broadcast feeds where we're working with, you know, like PGA or USGA tournaments. So it's a very deep product for providing. ⁓ the capabilities that golf professionals need. Typically our end user is a PGA golf professional in a private club or a public facility. Nathan Latka (01:05) And is the group at the private facility, is that the owner of the facility or it's a player at the facility? Probably the owner, right? Michael Zisman (01:12) No, so you think about a club I belong to, Marion Golf Club, right? It's a member-owned club. We have a golf staff, typically a head golf professional, assistant golf professionals. Our user is that director of golf or assistant golf professional. But we're really B2B to see Nathan in a sense that all the live scoring is done by the players at that club using our ⁓ live scoring app. So we provide, think about it, provide software Nathan Latka (01:40) Interesting. Michael Zisman (01:42) for the ⁓ pro to set up the tournaments, they say, hey, let's go. Then the players themselves are typically using our mobile app to actually do the scoring. So the beauty is when the last guy walks off the course, click a button to resolve ties. We know what all the results of the tournament are and it may have been many different tournaments all going on at the same time. Nathan Latka (02:07) So just to put that all in a sentence, you're selling to the director of golf when they have a tournament, they're emailing all the players saying, down to the mobile app before we start. Yep. Michael Zisman (02:14) Correct, exactly. Most of them already have. mean, millions of people at this point have our mobile app. So typically they don't have to, but say at a charity tournament, you're absolutely right. There's people show up to play at a charity tournament. They'll literally get something that says, download this app. We don't make them register. They're going to have a six character ID and they enter that ID and you know, they're scoring. Nathan Latka (02:36) Very cool. Help me understand how you've thought about pricing, then we'll get the backstory here. What's the average director of golf paying you for the software? Michael Zisman (02:42) So our list price, which we stick very close to at a private club today is about $4,200 per year for essentially unlimited use of the product for up to two 18-hole golf facilities. So if you're a Pinehurst with seven different courses, that's all custom price. But it's actually, as I like to say, every business is price times quantity, P times Q, you learn in economics one, we're relatively low P, high Q, high quantity. We're in 11,000 courses. So we're pretty simple plus we do lots of other things, but it's certainly the most inexpensive software that club will have because they also need software to you know Do their point of sale to manage their t-sheet to do their website to do? ⁓ Member billing and things like that So we're we're one component in in that software stack that a clubber of course is running It's a very high-end like the US the United States Golf Association. You know, we're doing all of their tournaments. We do all the handicapping in the United States. So the USJ is responsible for handicapping. One of the things that makes golf unique, Nathan, I if you're a golfer not, but golf has handicapping. So what it means is that a really poor player and a great player can go out and have a very fun round of golf. Let's say that that really good player has to give me 15 strokes. So he has to beat me by more than 15 strokes to win. So we have, we can come down literally the last putt on the 18th hole. Compare that to something like tennis. If you have a really good tennis player and a really poor tennis player, no one's having fun. So what makes golf unique is this handicapping, which is very precise, and we do all of that in the US and 20 other countries. Nathan Latka (04:19) 11,000 courses across how many clubs? Michael Zisman (04:23) It's 11,000 customers, so 11,000 clubs in 62 countries. Nathan Latka (04:29) Okay, got it. So 11,000 clubs, 62 countries, but one of those clubs might have on average three 18 hole golf facilities. Michael Zisman (04:35) The vast majority of them have one. Most clubs have one golf course. Some have two. And then resorts like a Desert Mountain in Arizona or a Pinehurst may have six or seven or eight golf courses. Nathan Latka (04:48) I see, okay, but it's fair to say on average, your customer's gonna be paying you then about that 4,200 per year price point, because the majority have one course. Yeah, okay. Give me the backstory here. How do you go from MIT professor to golf guy? Michael Zisman (04:54) Almost all the time. Almost all the time. Yeah. ⁓ Well, I always loved software. think my happiest days were programming. They're still my happiest days, but I don't do it anymore. I love coding. It's magical for me. Like some people, I think when some people appreciate a great poem, I appreciate great code. So I've always loved programming, very technical. ⁓ As soon as I got to MIT, I realized I did not want to be an academic. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. So I was there for two years, moved back to Philadelphia where I was from. I went to graduate school, started the first company, SoftSwitch, which was in the communication software business. It was very low level communication software, sold to Fortune 500 companies. That was acquired by Lotus Development in 1994. And then lo and behold, 11 months later, IBM came along and acquired Lotus. So in 11 months, I went from a company of 450 people, my company, to Lotus, which was 6,000, to IBM, which was a quarter million. They were different. Trust me, they were different. Not good versus bad, because it's amazing what you can accomplish when you have a quarter million people trying to do something. And I stayed at IBM for a while. I worked with Lou Gershner, who was a just fantastic CEO. He turned around to IBM, absolutely. And then that kind of ran its course. Nathan Latka (06:04) the Michael Zisman (06:24) and ⁓ left IBM in 07, you know, I really don't want to retire. I love what I do. And I was always the guy organizing the buddy golf trip. know, 12 guys go off some place to play golf. And, you know, I'd come back from the trip and I was the organizer. And, you know, you come up to me and say, you know, you had me play with John three times and you know I don't like John. And I didn't play with Sam at all. And I have a, my PhD is really in operations research and scheduling. I sort of love scheduling problems. So I that's an interesting problem. And so it all started with, let's build a scheduling system to get everyone in the right foursomes over five, six, seven rounds. ⁓ It was called, in fact, the original name of the company was Golf Trip Genius for Buddy Golf Trips. And then ⁓ that turned out to be a very small market, but still serviced it. It's a small market, very price sensitive market and moved from that to golf leagues, right? And so instead of... 12 guys playing six rounds of golf, you got 60 guys playing 20 rounds of golf, and then move from that to selling to clubs. But the real break for us, and every company, I often say, if an entrepreneur tells you luck wasn't part of his success, they don't know what they're talking about. ⁓ Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, but you need some luck. And in our case, it was building relationship with the USGA to replace their tournament management system with ours, which really put the company in a whole different trajectory. Nathan Latka (07:48) What year was that? Michael Zisman (07:49) That was 2016. So it started in 2009. As I like to say, we wandered in the desert, entrepreneurs wander in the desert till you, today we say product market fit, you do you have a product market fit? And we went from buddy trips to leagues, to servicing clubs, and then, you know, really, really enter a relationship with the USGA to do tournament management. And then they came back in 2019 and said, hey, Nathan Latka (07:51) Okay. Michael Zisman (08:15) We also want you to build the new handicap system. There was a new worldwide standard for handicapping ⁓ and we want you to build that and operate it. So we did that. And in fact, we just entered the second five-year contract to do that. So we have a very close relationship with the USDA as well as the PGA of America. Most of the England golf, the Ireland golf, do all their tournaments and almost all the the PGA associations around the world. So it really isn't an international company today, very focused on golf. It's probably the largest pure play golf software company in the industry. Nathan Latka (08:49) Bye. ⁓ measured by revenue or something else. Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4,200 to back into a revenue range? Michael Zisman (09:05) ⁓ no, that would get you to about two thirds of our revenue, but then we do all the handicapping. We also have other products. You know, we go to, we go to a golf pro. It's a classic suite. Like I grew up...