Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Welcome back to ModGolf Live at the PGA Show 2026. I am Colin Weston. I am your host. So this is our second of three fantastic interviews. So I've made a point here of making sure that the guests that I had on, the entrepreneurs, the founders, the leaders of these great companies are very diverse. So I didn't want to be telling the same story twice. And this is a gentleman that I just met two days ago at the NGCOA Golf Business Conference. I had the opportunity to speak there and be part of that since I have for the last couple of years. This is what I love about being on these live events, that you just meet people and I had the chance to meet Adam Kanouse. And what Adam is doing with their company, with Reach Golfers, I saw the demo that they had and I loved it. I see hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, not only the golf industry, but elsewhere, of products, of ventures. If I don't like them, I'll walk away. And I was just drawn in. It's not just my background in architecture, in graphic design, usability, but after I saw what they were doing here, I had to have them on. So with that, Adam, welcome to ModGolf Live. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah, thanks for having me. Absolutely. Absolutely. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast So you've got, I don't think that's really an iPad, but you certainly have a device here that you can demo that you'll do in a minute. But before you do that, why don't you give us an overview here? Why don't you give us, this isn't a pitch challenge, but why don't you give us the overview of what you do and why you do it? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah, happy to. So I joined probably 18 months ago, joined this company. I've never been in the golf industry. Love to play golf, love technology on the golf course. I'm a user of technology on the golf course. And what I liked about what the company was trying to do is the company was focused on the golfer. So we're in the GPS business. So we put GPS technology on golf carts, help improve the golfer experience, give them yardages, the basic things. And then we build tools on the backend to help the operator just be more effective in what they're doing and make things easy for them. But what differentiates us from every other company that's been in this space is we're not trying to protect the golf cart. They all started protecting the golf cart, protecting the assets, almost creating a little bit of an adversarial relationship with the golfer. We don't think that's necessary. So we want to create an amazing golfer experience that also solves the problems that an operator has. Well, you just answered the next question I was going to ask. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast You read my mind. I was going to ask you, what is that secret sauce, that differentiator? Because there are quite a few players in the marketplace. So with that, perhaps to help answer this question, you did bring with what you have here. So you've got some graphics. So why don't you give us a little demo here? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah, I'll show you what it looks like. I think when you see the screen, if you're a golfer, played with GPS screens on your local golf course, you're pretty familiar with what these things look like to do. You can see right away by looking at ours that the graphics are just better, better than all of our competitors. I'm not being cocky saying that. It's just a fact. You as a UX designer, you can probably look at this and see that it's just visually appealing. It's all fully reactive, interactive, dynamic yardages. We do cool things like give the golfer drive distance. That's not just an ego thing. If I hit my ball right, I know it goes about 215, 220. I know to drive right to 215 and start looking for my ball, which I do more than I'd like to admit. But the whole point was we want to create something that's beautiful, interactive, helps the golfer enjoy the game as much as possible. And then we won't talk a ton about this, but in the bottom right hand corner, we do have an advertising video player. The intent there is to bring brands that golfers would care about to the course where they can see those brands in a very receptive way when they're relaxed and they're playing the game they love. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast You brought up an interesting thing there, a question I was going to ask you later, but I think it's a good time to ask it now. And that as far as your revenue model, it sounds like you've got multiple streams of revenue here, kind of a multi-sided marketplace. So why don't you tell us about that and perhaps a little bit about the back history of the company and maybe what the first product started. I always love that journey. So I'm sure the product you have now, which is very elegant and that has that frictionless experience and that ease of use, but I'm sure it wasn't that way all the time. So I'd love to hear what you could share with us on that front. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers And that's the story of how I became CEO of the company or co-CEO of the company. When I originally joined, the model was a full advertising revenue model. So the idea was we're going to take these screens, give them the courses, build a large ad network, and then sell national advertising to offset the cost. Problem with that model is it's very hard to acquire enough capital to buy all that hardware. No one's going to give you money to buy $20 million worth of hardware to give away for free. So part of me taking over was balancing a subscription model for the golf course. So they keep their fees relatively low compared to our competitors. And then we offset some of that cost by selling the advertising. So it's a dual revenue model and it's going really well. We're at the bottom of the market price-wise, but we bring a premium product for that price. And then we work with our advertisers to help us keep that cost low. Now in this competitive marketplace, you talked about your differentiators, but how are you finding with this market and your customers? Let me ask the question a little bit differently. Let's say you're pricing model without actually saying what the numbers are, but you have different tiers or keep it super simple. Everything we do is simple, simple, simple. We make it easy to buy, easy to understand what we're doing. Our installation process takes about two hours for an entire 70-car fleet. Everything we do is simple. We're not trying to complicate anything for the golfer or the golf operator. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Are you finding for your customers, what percentage are you finding that, let's say are laggards in the market, perhaps they've never put anything in or that doesn't even probably exist anymore. Maybe that was 10 or 15 years ago. So you're out there having to convert, I'm assuming, kind of winning them over. So you have to show them that you are 10X better than what they already have. Otherwise, human nature, I found for anything, anything that we do, we'll just stay with what we have, even though it's just kind of good enough, rather than it's better. So tell us about that a little bit as far as your conversion and how you go about it. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers It's a great question and you might find this shocking. So I wouldn't describe the courses that haven't implemented GPS as laggards necessarily, but the price point six or seven years ago, that was not on purpose, was at a point where a lot of public facilities or middle-priced golf courses couldn't afford it. Prices have come down now where if you're a $50 or $45 green fee course in Michigan, you can't afford to put GPS on your course. You can raise your fee by $1 or charge $1 on your cart fee that offsets the entire cost of this technology. So the prices have come down for everybody. So we called every golf course that was public in 42 of the 50 states this summer, literally picked up the phone and called them to ask if they had GPS. It was shocked to hear that 65% of courses in that $45 to $75 green fee range don't have anything. It's an open market. So we're not out there trying to replace competitors. That's a long road, like you said, and there's enough work out there and enough business out there. We don't have to battle our competitors for their existing customers. We're out trying to fill in some of that green space that exists. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Wow. I don't know your world at all. If I would have guessed, I would have thought maybe it was like 2% to 3% of the marketplace that didn't already have something installed, not as high as you said. That kind of blows my mind that it's a little bit farther behind than I thought. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers There are more courses that have just trackers on their carts, but no screen. So I don't count them as competitive. So they might track their carts around there, but there's not a golfer experience. It's a massive upgrade. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yes. You're basically pulling them ahead by about a decade and a half, if not more. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah. And I live in a little bit of a technology bubble. I'm in Chicago. I'd say probably 50% of the courses right around within 10 miles of where I live have GPS. So it's higher, but you get outside of the major metropolitan areas and it's a lot less. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Now, are you finding with the courses that you're getting into, you find there's kind of this grassroots push that it's the people out there, the players that are then demanding for a better experience and they're hearing that? Because my question rolls into, are they reaching out to you? Is there more inbound starting to come in now that you're getting awareness in the market rather than even though you're picking up the phone and you guys are doing the hustle like you have to do. But are you also finding now that because that is a pain point that they're falling behind on the experience that people are demanding is kind of table stakes now and they don't have it? What tends to happen is if there's a golf course that of course is competitive with that installs technology that trickles because they fight for the same players. So then the players start asking, why don't you have GPS? And you start to see a trend where they prefer to play the other course. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers That's really what drives it. The other thing that drives the growth is a lot of operators, assistant GMs, pros will move from course to course. So if they're at a course that had it and they moved to another course that doesn't, they miss it. It's like, oh, this is something that actually makes my life a lot easier. We can Ranger from the clubhouse. We don't need to drive around and guess where the problems might be. So they will pull technology with them when they moved courses. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Oh, that kind of makes sense. It really does. So with your design and development team, I'm sure we've got a lean mean team here. You have to decide what features and benefits you're going to put in. You can't do everything. I remember the Simpsons episode from years ago with Homer came up with a car that had like had every feature at like six wheels on it and like ridiculous stuff. Like that was his idea of what a product should be. You don't want that. You don't want the car with six wheels. So how do you and the design team, as you move forward, what type of feedback loop do you get? What I witnessed with the demos, it's nice and tight and you're not trying to add everything. And I've seen some in GPS cards where then they've got the music and they've actually pulling in a feed that you can watch live sports. And, it's this, yeah, you can do it, but do you need to do it? So my question is here, how do you go about making those decisions of what you're doing now, what you're adding, maybe what you should reduce or remove? So yeah, tell us about that iterative design process and that design thinking that goes in into what you do in the culture with the company. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah, like I said, I am not from the golf space. So what I've learned over my career in any market, the first movers are actually at a disadvantage. They might grab market share because they can get to customers earlier. But what happens if you're a first mover is you get pulled in 50 different directions as you're experimenting with what's going to work, what's not going to work in a market. So the GPS market, there's a very few number of players and they've all been around for a long time and they end up with legacies, kind of a negative word, but they end up with a legacy system that was built with a lot of one-offs to meet one customer's demand. So we have a huge advantage. We can step in with modern technology, modern design and see what worked and what didn't and only work on the things that people really want and need. That's going to benefit multiple customers, not overfitting something for a single customer. It's a huge advantage. It saves us time. We can iterate more quickly. We can add new features more quickly. We're getting to a point now where we have what I'd call an MVP. We've got everything you need to run a course. So this year is going to be tougher. We're going to have to put everything that we could do on the board and pick and choose the things that will really move the needle for us and for our operators. Got a couple golf features that are coming soon. I'm not going to spoil those, but there's some cool stuff we're going to do for the golfer and there's some cool stuff we're going to do for the courses really around data. Data is very underserved in the golf industry. The tee-sheet companies have been working with data and providing data to operators and owners for years. That's why you can see dynamic pricing coming along because they've been collecting and understanding this data. No one collects good data of what happens on the course. Your golfers are out there for four and a half hours. You talk to them for five minutes in the clubhouse. They're gone for four and a half hours and hopefully they return your cart with no damage. So that is a very underserved area that we are extremely focused on in the next year. It may be a spoiler you're not able to provide, but it's the way where mine's going. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Since your GPS tracking around the course from an environmental sustainability aspect, I know people that they've been doing over the years with the USGA and agronomists have had people just carrying around trackers so that they can heat trace where they are, where the balls go. So then they realize, well, we don't have to mow over there. We don't actually have to seed. We don't have to, as far as pesticides, herbicides, water, we're going to let that just go wild and natural because no one's hitting the balls over there. So you've got that aspect that all of a sudden you can cut down maybe by 20, 30 percent of all your requirements. So not only is it good for the environment, but it's also good for your bottom line. And the other piece too of where you can set your tees of realizing myself as a 16 handicapper doing some fitness training now, let's get my swing speed up. I'm hitting it like 225, 230. I'm not hitting it 260 anymore. I don't play from the tips. So my question here, both on the environmental side of the advantages there, getting all this data, is that somewhere are you able to be able to reveal a little bit what the data can be used for that you're gathering here? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers You gave one good example, and we're not a agronomy company, but we are going to be looking for partnerships over time that somebody could use our data to do those things. We have cart tracking data for all of our courses that we store permanently. We don't get rid of the data. So yes, people can start to harvest and use that information. My favourite one, honestly, is around pace of play. Like if you could identify who's actually playing on your course and you can build a personal profile for your golfer, you can start to market to that golfer differently. So if you're a rabbit, if you're getting around the course in three and a half or four hours, I want you taking my 7.30, 8 a.m., 8.30 tea times because you're not going to clog my course for the next five hours. So I can give you a discounted rate because I know you're going to get out and everyone else is going to have an awesome experience. That's just one example. So I think the future is being able to identify the person who's on the course, track how they play, where they play, where they drive, how many shots they hit, how they score, and be able to market to them with things that they care about. I'm not as good as you. I'm a 19 handicap. I would love it if somebody would push a marketing message to me saying, hey, 25% discounted lesson, come by on Saturday. That'd be good. Maybe not right after I hit a bad shot, but you get my point. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Yeah. Wait till you hit a good one and then you'll feel a bit better. So there's so many opportunities and we are just scratching the surface on that. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers My co-CEO, Andrew, likes to say that this is not a GPS device. This is a computer on a cart. There are so many opportunities that we can do to integrate with other technology solutions on the course, data solutions, people that are doing data analysis. We're scratching the surface right now. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Nice, nice. So right now in the marketplace, where do you see 2026 for you? Is this really a growth year to kind of get into that expansion into the market? Now that you're in the funnel, people are aware of who Reach Golfers are. So yeah, tell us what you can of what excites you about 2026 for Reach Golfers. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers That's it. Absolutely where we're at. You asked how our product has evolved. One of the huge evolutions of our product that was a sales objection at the beginning. We're a battery solution. We don't wire to the cart, which is great because we're not messing with your cart's internal workings. But switching out a battery can be an objection. Our new version lasts all day. So you put a scorecard, pencil, battery in the unit, you're good all the way through the day. It's got 22-hour battery life. Huge change for us. And then on the hardware side, we recently signed some hardware leasing partners that make acquiring the hardware easy for everybody. So it's pretty standard in the industry if you have golf carts. So those two things really unlocked us. So we expect 2026 to be a huge growth year, mostly in getting more customers on the core side so we can invest in some of this data work that we're talking about. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Nice, nice. So I want to flip it around a little bit, a little bit of time we still have left here. The PGA show, is this the first time you've been here? Have you been here before? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers I was here last year. So we were in a very different spot last year. So this has been a more positive, exciting PGA experience because we're in that growth stage. Yes. But I love it. The NGCOA show was awesome. Demo day was awesome. I stood on the 10th hole during the golf outing. It was amazing because I got to talk to everyone who went through. So it's been a great experience. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Nice. So people that are watching, haven't been to the PGA show, and I've been covering it for years and talking about this. This place is massive. So right behind us on the wall, so that is the show floor. It is so packed out this year. That's why we are out in the hallway here because there's no physical space. Down either side, there's other booths. The whole show is spilled out into the hallways here because the demand is so high and it keeps growing and growing and growing. But it's not just about what goes on in the hall. And this is industry only. There's about 40,000 to 50,000 industry professionals and ourselves, people that are involved in the industry. But there's much more that goes on in that. There's all these other breakout meeting rooms and business does go on. It sets everybody up for the year. So how do you look at this? Is this setting you up for 2026, that year, really your year starts once you leave here? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah, that's what amazed me. So I've done other industry shows and prior to my career that were more training focused or kind of network to focus, AWS reInvent comes to mind. I went to that one for years. This is a buying show. People are coming here because they've got a need or something that they want to solve for. They're networking with their peers to understand the solutions that they've brought to their courses. And then they're looking for vendors to help fill that need. So it is way, it's more concrete, I would say, than other shows that I've been to and that you can actually move your business forward by being there. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast Now, the opportunity to have these conversations and these, I call them these casual collisions of humanity that we had, otherwise you wouldn't be sitting here right now. So can you talk about now that you've been here, not only for the NGCOA Golf Business Conference, that lasted for three days and was great, but now we're into day two, but halfway through the PGA show. Can you tell us something that you said, wow, that's really cool, or even just a conversation? There's probably many things, but something that has unexpectedly made you happy. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers I had a mind blowing experience yesterday. I'm sitting with PGA Magazine and a little wine networking event. The person sitting next to me happens to run a course in Michigan. It's pretty popular course, very nice course. I'm like, oh, hey, I know your course. Great to meet you. I'm from Michigan. It's like, where are you from? I said, Reed City. My hometown is 2000 people. No one's from Reed City. He's like, really? My wife's from Reed City. I'm like, what's her name? He told me her name. I'm like, she graduated three years in front of me. I know exactly who that is and her sister. He's a GM of a super popular course that I want to work with someday. His wife went to the same high school as me, graduated like 90 people. That was a serendipitous happenstance occurrence that happened yesterday. I've had three or four things like that. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I love that. That's the magic, the magic that happens at this show. I love that. Well, hey, to finish up here, once again, why don't you let everyone out there know with Reach Golfers, how they can reach out and find out more? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah. Come to our website. It's reachgolfers.com. It's pretty easy to find. You can contact us there. Those emails actually go to me and I do respond to all of them. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Love it if you reach out and see if we can work together. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast There we go. And I'll make a point as I always do. So in the description below, not only for your website, but I'll also put your email address in there? Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Do it. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast I'll do it. Thought I'd ask permission first. There we go. Well, Adam, thanks so much. I'm so glad we met here at the PGA show. And once again, that's part of the beauty here. You just meet unbelievably awesome people in the golf industry that have the passion, have the excitement and the energy, and you are no exception to that rule. So thank you for joining us on ModGolf Live today. And before we go, I want to mention, nine years into ModGolf, and I've been thinking about doing some apparel, but for me, it's like, well, it's not like we're Barstool Sports or Rick Shiels or someone like that, or ESPN. So of course for me, it's like, well, if I do that, where do I sell it? I got to buy it all. It's like $5,000, a minimum run of whatever. I've got a great partner called 36 A Day with their apparel. You can see what the shirts here, we've got the hats here too. I love this one. We're just working this. We've got a ModGolf cursive script bucket hat going on here too. I've got to say the power of partnerships also, whereas our friends at 36 A Day, they take care of the whole thing there. And I don't have to worry about anything except wear it. There we go. I can be their model, their ModGolf model! There we go. So Adam, hey, again, thanks so much for joining us on ModGolf Live. And I hope the rest of the show is as fruitful as the first half has been for you. Adam Kanouse - Co-CEO of Reach Golfers Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Good stuff. Colin Weston - host of The ModGolf Podcast All right. Thanks so much Adam. That's a wrap for this episode of the ModGolf Podcast. You can find previous episodes and be alerted when new ones drop by subscribing to the Mod Golf Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, www.mod.golf, or wherever you enjoy listening in. I invite you to join our ModGolf Patreon community at www.patreon.com/odgolf, where you will have access to exclusive content and will be entered in each and every one of our monthly ModGolf giveaway contests. I'm your host, Colin Weston. Thanks so much for joining me. Bye for now.