Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman
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How did Mike Zisman self-fund his $10M investment in Golf Genius?
Can we take 11,000 clubs times 4,200 to back into a revenue range?
That would get you to about two-thirds of our revenue. It's a good deal more than the $44 million. The company's been profitable since 2017. We have more cash on our balance sheet than all the money we've ever raised. $14 million in cash. What the hell are we doing sitting on $14 million in cash? We can fund acquisitions. We've done 10 acquisitions. What was your first year where you broke a million of revenue? It took us eight years to get to a million and eight more years to get to 50 million.
If I looked at the cap table today, how much would be ESOP or employee owned? Almost 80%, including me and the other executives. If someone came to you today and offered you 400 million all cash up front to sell the business, do you sell? 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, you ready to take us to the top? I am.
Great to be with you.
What role did the USGA contract play in Golf Genius's growth?
Thanks for inviting me.
You bet. Tell us more about what you're selling at Golf Genius. Then we'll go back and get your backstory.
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 creating tournaments, doing registration, payment processing, live leaderboards, broadcast feeds where we're working with like PGA or USGA tournaments. So it's a very deep product for providing information the capabilities that golf professionals need. Typically our end user is a PGA golf professional in a private club or a public facility.
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?
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 software for the pro to set up the tournament. 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.
How did Golf Genius achieve $1M ARR in 8 years and $53M in the next 8?
We know what all the results of the tournament are, and it may have been, you know, many different tournaments all going on at the same time.
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 download the mobile app before we start.
Correct. Exactly. Most of them already have. I 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 the 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.
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?
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, 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 do their point of sale, to manage their T-sheet, to do their website, to do member billing and things like that.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
How did Mike Zisman self-fund his $10M investment in Golf Genius?
0:00–0:57
2
What role did the USGA contract play in Golf Genius's growth?
0:57–2:20
3
How did Golf Genius achieve $1M ARR in 8 years and $53M in the next 8?
2:20–4:44
4
Why does Golf Genius have a team of 50% engineers in Cluj, Romania?
4:44–8:48
5
What is the three-phase acquisition strategy of Golf Genius?
8:48–18:40
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