00:02.49 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast Welcome to the ModGolf Podcast, where speak with the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the disruptors, and the influencers who are shaping the future of golf. I am your host, Colin Weston, and I am still on the road. i am still away from Vancouver, so I'm doing another live podcast recording here. I'm excited to do this, just like I did last week at the RBC Canadian Open. 00:22.81 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast And that is what the gentleman that I met, he reached out to me about a month or so ago and I bumped him into again at the RBC Canadian Open. And we're going to talk about that experience in a minute or two. And that is Rob Sundstrum. And Rob is the founder of Smart Golf. 00:38.90 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast I've got to say they are taking tournament golf and scoring to the next level, making it so easy that even I can do it. So that's really saying something here. So, Hey, I want to introduce Rob here. We are actually at his home club at Highland golf club here in London, Ontario, London's halfway between Toronto and Detroit. So that's where I'm spending a couple of days. Rob invited me down and we said, rather than do it remotely, let's do one live. So here he is. So Rob, welcome to the ModGolf podcast! 01:07.86 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Thanks so much, Colin. Welcome to Highland Golf Club. I appreciate that. Appreciate that. We're here on a beautiful day. A little bit windy here. We're overlooking a Stanley Thompson design course, I believe, that opened in 1922. So, celebrated your 100-year anniversary a couple years ago here. And, unfortunately, I won't have a chance to play today. But one of the things we're here, why we're here today, is the every Wednesday, it's the men's league that we're running here. 01:33.56 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast So we're going to get into that and how you started Smart Golf and where you saw the opportunities, the pain points that you needed to solve. But I'm going to start here, Rob. I want to ask this. You and I really don't know each other too much, even though we spent a little bit of time together at the RBC Canadian Open. But I'd like to ask this icebreaker question, Rob, and that is your first golf experience, that power of invitation. Who invited you at what age? 01:58.49 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast that person who put a golf club in your hand. And what was that first awesome golf memory that you have that keeps you coming back and playing golf now? Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Well, thank you very much, Colin. And welcome to Highland again. I'm really excited to have you here and walk you through the progression of Smart Golf. But to answer your question about my first early memory experience golfing, it would have been like a lot of people with my dad. He brought me out to Sunningdale Golf and Country Club in the early 90s and you know a great course out there. 02:30.17 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf They had a great junior program and my older brother played and it was always this question of when will I get to play the golf course? And I remember my dad would take me out golfing and all of a sudden there was this junior camp that culminated in a big competition at the end of the week. And I was placed on a team with other junior golfers and my siblings were on the other teams and my team ended up winning. So I got called up to the prize table in front of my dad and my siblings And I didn't don't even remember what the prize really was, but I just remember feeling so happy that I had beat my siblings. And I don't know if that says more about my competitive nature than anything else, but yeah, I don't even know if I really contributed that much to the team effort, but it was a really fun experience being on the course with my family my dad and having that competitive experience spirit instilled in me very early in my experience in golf probably is that one of the reasons why i run a scoring and competition program online. So yeah. 03:31.90 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast Nice, nice. And it is creating those collective memories and experiences that I can see with what you're doing with Smart Golf that you're providing that ability. And that's where the growth is. You're seeing at clubs where you're seeing that with some of the clubs you're getting into here, the number of for example, for let's say if it's a men's tournament night, weekly night over the course of 17, 18 weeks, that the the numbers were quite low and as soon as you get in just because of that stickiness and the way that it's promoted and creating that sense of community that you're seeing the numbers doubling and tripling from year to year so obviously you're you're doing something right so we're going to get into Smart Golf in just just a minute here but i have to say i looked at your background i did do a little ah a little lurking on your LinkedIn profile there and i saw your background isn't in golf although i don't know if you were a competitive junior player. You were grumpy today when you came in with your tournament score, you shot even par today after being three under. And I, of course, I'm not even close to that as a 15 handicap. So if that makes you grumpy. Obviously, you're a player. 04:35.19 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast But your background, I understand, was more in logistics and distribution in that side on a global level. So let's start with that. So tie that into the AHA moment. 04:46.49 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast Over five years ago when you launched, probably six years ago when you started to develop like obviously in the depths of covid with Smart Golf so let's talk about this. How did you take the experience you had in your other professional capacities and what did you take from that that allowed you to then see the opportunities and decide you know what i'm going to create this tournament scoring app, even though there's other bigger players out there that are getting most of the market share? But you're going to create something that not only is unique, but is a differentiator. And here you are today. Let's start with the AHA moment and what you did leading up to this that got you into what you're doing now. 05:26.90 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Sure. So my entrepreneurial journey started right at the start of COVID. I had worked in logistics. I was one of the sales reps at DHL Global Forwarding for a couple of years and COVID hit and found myself in the depths of COVID and I wasn't really sure what I was going to do. but I ended up getting laid off and rather than thinking about looking for another opportunity in the same role that I was running in, I decided that I had a bit of a nugget of an idea for an application that myself and a partner could build out. And it was pretty simple. it was basically the Trivago of freight. And we realized that there was a bit of an issue when it came to contracting shipments for freight outside a contract. And a typical scenario that happens to this day on digital freight is a customer of ours will have a regular lane going to Ohio from London, Ontario, and all of a sudden their regular trucker is not available. So what do they do? They scramble to find a truck. So previously they would send out email after email to their carrier network and then they would collect all the quotes and then they would select the carrier. And it became quite time consuming even though the situation that they're in is ah under a time constraint. So what they'll do is they'll go to our program, log in, They have their preferred vendor list and they'll send out a quote to everyone immediately and the vendors have now been conditioned to respond to those quotes online. They get an email receipt once they've done that. If there's no quote that is sent back to them, we actually have a matching program where we actually match them with other freight providers that they've never used before that are being used by other people on the program. So that started in 2020 with one other their business partner of mine. and still runs to this day. We're quite busy in the shoulder seasons of golf is usually when I'm actually working really hard on the freight side of the business that I run. 07:29.62 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf But I learned so much from that experience that when I came across what i found as a bit of a pain point at my golf club, I thought, well, you know boy, this problem could likely be solved pretty quickly with you know some smart people that could do the programming and myself doing the selling. And my career path has always been in sales, so I was always pretty gifted in being able to show a vision to someone to buy into our product very early. And so that's what ended up happening. I was talking with my head pro who was quite frustrated with the program they were using. 08:02.78 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf And he gave me a handful of other pros in the London area that were experiencing that same pain point. I'm not shy. So i reached out to those other pros, introduced myself and said, "I know you don't know who I am, but i'm I'm thinking of starting this, could you give me a bit of guidance if we were to do it?" And I got an unequivocal, "yes, we are in if you build it." And so I went through all the minimal viable pieces that it would have to have to make it to make it work. And so after talking with guys like Jason Wyatt at Sunnydale Golf and Country Club, guys like Mark from from the Oaks, 08:41.11 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Mike Silver from Highland and Rick Perrow from Highland, along with a a number of other pros, even going as far as Toronto, like Jeremy Broome, who's now at Burlington Golf and Country Club, all gave me this nod of, yeah, it sounds like something, if you build it right, we will use it. But then it was this long journey that we realize getting it right is means a different thing to every single pro. Every pro does things a little differently. So that was where we have quite a bit of scar tissue built up now is, we've gone through the pieces that work at some clubs, excellent, and then you go to another club and it's it's not excellent. It's actually completely opposite. So that is the journey in that going from never being an entrepreneur to being an entrepreneur and understanding that you're definitely not going to have it right on the first 50 tries. But by the 51st try, you're going have a ah large group of people thinking, boy, you've thought of everything, even though you still never feel like you've thought of everything and that the the mountain is not only half climbed all the time, it seems like. 09:46.22 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast Right. well i saw firsthand over lunch that we had before we're doing this recording that downstairs that a member came in after playing and he was more than happy to give you some feedback of the of the app of what wasn't working and now that it is working. So you're seeing this face to face here. Not only what people are responding to online, but you so you get feedback ah immediately from members, both the stuff that's working and stuff that perhaps isn't. 10:12.18 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Yeah, I think maybe it's just my overly friendly demeanour all the time, but people are certainly not shy to come and talk to me about things that they love and things that they think need to be changed right away. And I'm more than happy to take that feedback. I'd rather get that feedback than nothing. So it's just part of the job. 10:55.93 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast I was spending a couple hours this morning on the Smart Golf website looking at some of the videos and the onboarding you have. And one thing I can see part of your differentiator is your onboarding, the learning curve is way shallower than some other products that are out there. And you've got these short video series, three to five minutes of different points so people can get up to speed on it and learn more on their own. so I'm assuming that also works very well for you as the company because i'm sure you're a lean mean team here even though you do provide provide customer support and service but you've got a lot of those questions that are answered at the beginning and also during on there. So on that note one of the things i saw and i want you to expand on here, you said and i didn't know this because my world that with golf clubs that the majority of leagues that are run within the club, whether it's juniors, men's, women's leagues, that those are run by individuals of the club members and perhaps a captain. 11:33.50 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast And they do that themselves. And that becomes problematic for the course sometimes because they can't control the messaging. They can't control the branding. And they can't vertically integrate some of the other pieces, F&B, hospitality, and encourage that sense of community around the club. And you're seeing that was, like you mentioned to me earlier over lunch, that clubs now are seeing that real opportunity that they want to reclaim ownership and don't look at this as something, well, it's another thing on our list that we don't have staff or capacity for. So you can talk a little bit about that, about the value that you found at clubs that they are seeing in the expansion and the growth that these leagues are seeing? 12:14.04 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Sure, yeah absolutely. So I'm a huge advocate that a league is a a vital part of any great club. At our golf course, we started a league. It would have been before my time even started at Highland, and I joined in 2018. But we had this league night that was every Wednesday. We had a number of players in it every single year. And then when COVID hit, we changed the booking process so that you get preferential treatment on the booking if you are in the men's league. Well, our league then skyrocketed. We now have over 350 members in our men's league, which plays only Wednesday, every Wednesday. It's one of the largest in Canada. 12:54.84 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf And the nice part about our league is it's run by the pro shop. Rick Pero is our head pro and does an excellent job of fielding what is an endless amount of calls and questions about the how the not only the program works, about how the league works. It's just such an important part of our golf club. And I've seen it be so successful for not just getting players onto the tee sheet, but going and having food and beverage afterwards. Normally, Kyle, one of our managers, ties in specials for food or drink specials. So it gives you a reason not only to play your men's league round, but to come in for a beer afterwards. and turn a Wednesday night, which I don't know what this place would look like without league, but I certainly don't think it would be even remotely as busy as it as it is now. But you don't necessarily have to do it on any specific day. You could do it on a Monday, Tuesday. You could have a a multi-day league event. But if you have players committing to weekday play and tying it into food and beverage, you're going much healthier bottom line at your golf course. And that's what we sort of guide pro shops in understanding when they take on the league. If they have a player that has run the league for many years, and we've seen this before, where the management has bought Smart Golf and now one of the players who's run league on a spreadsheet for 20 years now has to get accustomed to SmartGolf. There can be certainly some friction points when we're when we're doing that. We try our best to emulate whatever it is that they've been doing, but sometimes what they've been doing is not in the best interest for the entire golf club. So we try to explain how some of the games are better suited for all playing abilities and not just the high handicappers or the low handicappers. So it's somewhat of an art when we're talking with our clubs about getting them on board, happy with the program, getting the players bought in. But certainly there sometimes can be a little bit more legwork at the beginning, getting the players bought into, oh, this is not going to be on a spreadsheet anymore. You're going to have a digital scorecard in some cases. You're going to have an online broadcast link where you can go and see the stats for the year. You'll get auto reminders for entering your score or recap emails at the end of the week. And it should really elevate the league experience. And sometimes it takes a little bit of coaxing so that people can see the forest through the trees and that this isn't going to be a hindrance. This is going to be a massive time save while at the same time really elevating the experience for the players at the golf course. 15:40.01 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast So to build on what you said there, Rob, I'm interested to learn as far as the player journey here. Well, using with Highland here as an example, you have the men's group here. Let's talk about, let's say the women's league that you have for a woman that's joined that league. Let's say, especially for women that are a little bit older, maybe they're not quite as comfortable with technology. They use their smartphone as a phone. Maybe they text every once in a while. Maybe they look at an email, but they're not as comfortable with the technology. So why don't you talk about that as far as the kind of the onboarding for people that are, want to call them Luddites, maybe that's a bit cruel, but people that aren't as technically savvy as younger people are. And also on that, talk about the the journey that you they would have during the during that tournament day, before the round, during the round, and then after the round or what they have with Smart Golf. 16:35.31 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf OK, so to have a little bit of fun with you, just so you know, the women at Highland are extremely tech savvy. They are on top of the stats. They know how the Smart Golf program works better than the men do. But in terms of the experience for them, they know what to experience because the captains use the program very well to explain what the entire season is. I believe for Highland, we do for the women's side, there's the team game one week and then there's the skins game the next week. So it sort of oscillates between the two. But every week the pro shop sends out, I believe like a reminder or an announcement to the league players, just reminding them, hey, this is what's at stake this week for the league, and then they play their league. When they post their score, they get a reminder email showing what score was posted hole by hole, and that's sort of the first line of defence if there has been an error from when they played to when their score got got posted. So they can raise any concerns to the pro shop, and then by Friday. So at the end of the week, the results will have been finalized. And then they get an email recapping the week. So you tell them what they're about to do. Then they do it. And then you tell them what they just did is sort of the mentality that we have, not only with leagues, but also tournaments as well. Of course, you have to sign up for 200 players in a two-man scramble event or whatever. It might be a 666 or whatever. They sign up. 18:04.89 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf They send an announcement a couple days before the event to all the players, letting them know what the is going to happen that day they play. And then there's a follow-up email that usually includes the prizing, the games, and whatever. And it just makes it for the player if you follow that formula, a very you understand what the expectation is as a player. you know If you you have any questions, you can look at the announcement email that was sent out, you can reach out to the pro shop if you have any other questions, and then of course you're waiting for a follow-up email at the end of the round, whether it's a league or a tournament. 18:41.72 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast Got it, got it. I want to go back a little bit. So you've been at this for over five years since you launched. So you mentioned your minimal viable product. I'd love to hear what you first launched because, of course, you've you learn from Eric Ries and as far as the startup culture and what you should you should do with a minimum viable product. You don't want to be everything to everyone. and try to have every single feature that I'm sure you've got 100 people with 1,000 different ideas. So what did you first launch? and let's kind of build on that. What did you launch? And then how did you course correct? I want to hear because not everything works out right. Maybe there was some feature you thought was going to be awesome and amazing. Then you realize, No, we need to tweak that or maybe that didn't quite work out and then but it inspired you to do the next thing from the feedback you got. So tell us a little bit about the journey and where you started with the features that you had as the core benefits with SmartGolf. 19:36.38 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf So we started with the league program because we knew that there were at least 100 leagues very in very close proximity that would likely buy our program if we nailed it. So we started with the league where it was team play. You post your score, and then you your score gets added to the team component, whether it's a net or a growth side. So we did that. And then we, of course, had to build the skins with flights. And so our innovation with how the flights work worked really well across the board for whenever you're organizing players in groups. So when we built that, we knew that that was 10 out of 10 for if you had multiple players that you wanted to put into different flights or skins divisions, we created that tech very quickly so that it was extremely easy for anyone to to build skins and get the skins running. And then we started getting asked about proximities, which of course you can put the closest to the pins, and then deuce pot. 20:36.28 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf So that was the first year, what we came up with. And then we started having ideas about the statistics on the program. A lot of players, were really interested to know not only what they shot that week, but their stats for the year, stats for their career. And those are now all available to the players on Smart Golf that have been on the program for multiple seasons. And so we really leaned into that. We put player profile pictures for all the players. So some clubs really leaned into that as well. If you're on Smart Golf at certain clubs, They just take a picture and then your picture is on there. So if you have a team, you might not even know the team members that are on your team, but you're going start recognizing them because their faces are all on on your team page and whatnot. So that was really the minimal viable product. I know it sounds very large when you look at the full scope of the team component, the skins, and the individual, but that really needed to be 10 out of 10. And I feel like we kind of got lucky. It seemed like the programmers mixed in with our design team, they didn't have the most expertise in golf, but every time I looked at it I was like boy, this is better than anything I've ever seen before. So we're just gonna keep running with it. And we launched in, it would have been for simulators in November, and this was in 2022. 21:59.35 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf And so by the time the season rolled around for the regular green grass, we felt like we will we've um almost gone through a full season. So we didn't even feel like we had a minimal viable product at that point. we were still debugging stuff but we felt like we had a really compelling program to show people and right off the hop we got Toronto Golf, Mississauga, some of the bigger name clubs in the Toronto area and it was really because that program that we built just seemed to get lucky. It just spoke to them, it was exactly what they were looking for. And then I talk about the deuce pot. The pro that that asked me for it this year, he wanted a flighted deuce pot. He'll laugh if he ever hears this. But I said, well, we've never really done that. And he's like, can you do that? Well, now we're at the point where we are starting to make it a little bit more elaborate and we can start saying yes to the more finicky things. If you really want to run a deuce pot with flights, you can now, of course, do that. But at the start, we would just tell the pros, it's a deuce pot. And that's all you have. But now we're moving past well past that, which I'm sure you'll ask other questions about it. But it is really, if I look back on it, thinking of the pros that bought in, and if we told them no, they would just say, okay, we'll just make it work with how you guys have built it for this year, and hopefully next year you guys can keep building towards what we're hoping for for the next season. 23:24.54 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast There we go. And by the way, if you don't know what a deuce pot is, that is if you get a a birdie on a par three, which with my club, I've only got a deuce pot once. So I have to play better on Sundays. 24:04.18 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast So you mentioned, the iconic clubs around the greater Toronto area and in Southern Ontario that you've managed to get into. So I'm curious to hear about the growth and the trajectory of how many clubs are you in right now? And see you're scaling up in Canada here. You've got some great partnerships with the National Golf Course Owners Association of Canada. I also saw with OFFSA which is the Ontario federation of high schools. So all the sport teams there and also with Golf Canada which is where we met it met each other in person for the first time and we'll talk about that experience in in a minute or perhaps we'll even have that on the ModGolf YouTube channel because Rob and i are going jump over to a video call afterwards. I'll tell you what we're gonna hold off on talking about what went on at the, with the experience there for the ModGolf video on the YouTube channel. So yeah, talk to us about the growth and the excitement, and how you're scaling and what's going on with that opportunity south of us here with 10 times as many golf courses in the United States. So tell us about the growth. 25:14.94 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast Are you getting any contacts or inbound from Europe also? So yeah, tell us about where you're going and the in the scale and the growth that you've had over the last couple of years. 25:29.37 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf So we have about 350 clubs on the program now. About 75 of those are south of the border. So obviously, the majority of our clients are in the Canadian market at the moment. In terms of our growth, we've had some great partnerships early on, the NGCOA being one of the best decisions that we made as a company. 25:47.38 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf We are the exclusive scoring program provider for the National Golf Course Owners Association in Canada. And their program is just solely so highly regarded by the community of golf course owners that when we joined up with them, it was such a a great nod to the pros to really consider using us as their scoring provider for leagues and tournaments. 26:12.47 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf And now all of them tell each other about this Canadian built program. And it's just such a great fit. And the team at the NGCOA Canada are just so complimentary of our program, how it works, and they just are a great partner of ours. So I'll definitely give ah a shout out to the NGCOA of Canada. If you're a owner or a golf course, you should certainly be leaning into their program because they offer a wide variety of discounts for not only just Smart Golf, but the other programs that they have in their buying program. So, That would be an area that we just saw an extreme amount of growth over the last two seasons since partnering up with them. 26:55.74 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Of course, we're a scoring partner with Golf Canada, and what that means is that we have the ability to pull indexes and post hole by hole scores on behalf of the players, which is a a huge part of the golf experience. Whether you're running a tournament or a league, you can have your scores posted directly to Golf Canada with a click of a button. It's extremely easy, almost like too easy sometimes. The pros, when they go through the process, they're like, is that all I have to do? And i'm like, that is it. And there's a confirmation. 27:25.94 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf with every single score that gets posted on the round. And we think that our duty as members of the golf community in Canada is to promote the Golf Canada score posting. And if you play around, you should be posting your score onto Golf Canada Some of our leagues do league indexing or league indicators, but we still post those scores to Golf Canada because it's extremely important that your scores are part of like the gold standard of of running a Golf Canada handicap because as soon as you get outside of a league play or a league night, if you want to play in any type of net event, you need a Golf Canada index. So we find that is an extremely important part of just our role in the golf industry and that making sure that players are getting their scores posted every single week. And then beyond our current growth within Canada and the US, a lot of courses in the US haven't leaned into leagues like Canada has for some reason. It's a little different there. 28:47.38 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf They seem to be running a lot of men's nights or ladies' nights, and I say it like that because they'll just do a different game every single week, which you can certainly run that on Smart Golf, but the most successful leagues on our program run a very similar game every single week at Highland. What we do is it's a college style format where we take your team of 16 players and we combine two gross scores and seven net scores. And those are stable for points. And so all of a sudden you now have the Stableford team score. You get posted against another team in the league that week. And so now you're having a head-to-head match. And one of the guys that came into when we were having lunch mentioned that he was playing my team this week. And you have this camaraderie within your team and then this fun, competitive nature with the other players in the league. And I don't know i don't need to know what the game of the week is. i already know that I need to post my nine-hole score, make sure I count for my team as the captain, and then hopefully my team beats the other team because we have a season-long points race. You get points for a win, tie, and loss. 29:45.40 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf And at the end of the regular season, then we move into the playoffs and the playoffs is a bracket style, so you get seated, and so the higher your team is in the regular season, then you're playing the low seed in the the playoffs. So it's a real fun format, and I find some of the leagues get a little bit more convoluting when it's a different format every week, you have different team members on your team every week, And, I mean, i don't know about you, but if I'm going to play one round a week on a Wednesday, i don't want to play an alternate shot or a shamble. I want to play my own ball and then, of course, compete for the skins, through the proximities, and all those other fun elements of men's leg. 30:26.87 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast And I'm sure you figured this out a long time ago, that if the league is 17 to 20 weeks long before the snow hits again here, that you've got that stickiness and that retention, the fact people want to play every single week, whereas if it's just a women's night or a men's night, it's like, ah, maybe I'll go that week. Maybe I'll, I've got something else going on. You don't have that incentive and that camaraderie also that you've, you've built in with that. Uh, next question I want to ask you is the massive explosive growth of indoor simulator golf, where it started out more of an entertainment, side with the Five Irons and others out there that are are doing that. We're now with a lot of these indoor clubs with their business model, they're realizing again that having leagues, so it's elite level golfers, people that are golfers, not just people who golf once or twice a year, come in and and play some games with their friends and have a couple drinks and and leave like a top golf type of experience, that that's what the real value is. 31:23.93 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast So so talk about that of how much of your business is between ah traditional green grass golf clubs and the growth in simulator golf. Let's focus on that for a minute because i'm sure that's a huge opportunity for you. So i'd like to hear about where the where the opportunities are and perhaps some of the challenges are also with setting up tournament golf at simulators. 31:42.39 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf So setting up simulator golfs and tournaments on simulators is definitely a little bit different. We have such a wide range of our our ideal client profile in the simulator business because we have some guys that come to us and say, i have The simulator at a bar, there's just one simulator. There's 30 of us who want to put a league together. Sure, we put together a small solution for them. 32:09.11 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf But for those guys, we tell them, keep it simple. You're posting scores. And most of the times, those end up just being individual leagues, where you're just posting your score every week, doing some proximities, and probably playing for skins as well. Our league handicapping, our league indicator for simulators, works really well for those types of players. And then we have the larger groups. you know There's a facility in Chicago that runs TrackMan, and of course TrackMan has its own league program, but they felt that the league program built in TrackMan didn't really fit their needs. They wanted something a little bit more dynamic, so they came to us, we built out their league program, and 32:48.50 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf I think they have over 150 players in their league that play every week, they post their score, they have the TVs running with the skins leaders, the sponsors for the league, and it's a much more larger build out. For the simulators though, we give them quite ah quite a nice discount because what we do with the Sims is we test our products for the next season. So in 2025, going into the fall and then the winter, We told some of the simulators, you know, you have the option to do some new mobile scoring. So we launched a new mobile scoring program. There were kinks. We worked them out. And by December, we knew going into the summer season, we felt very good about our new mobile scoring for League. So we kind of used the simulators as not, i don't like to say guinea pigs because they pay us. But we have a little bit more flexibility and it's lower stakes, I would say, than some of the larger simulators. golf courses that use us. So um yeah, we run about 90 simulators. We don't really count those as like customers of ours or like green grass facilities, but we would have about 90 simulators that run throughout the season. 34:00.44 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Sometimes they run summer leagues in tandem with their local league that runs down the street because the guys are just committed to going in and playing in the simulator every week and whatnot. There's a lot of people that I know that swear by playing in the simulators in the winter time and then there's others kind of similar to myself i'm sort of too busy i have three kids they're all in hockey it's just it's almost too busy to commit every single week to going to to a simulator but i have friends from high school that will reach out and say hey i'm in a league in Toronto and we're using your software like pretty cool and so then i can go and i can see their stats and take screenshots of their profile or put their own a profile picture from them when they're in like high school or something like that so I have fun with that. But yeah, the simulators, it's just so much larger of a range of competitiveness um and really what they want to do that it ends up being a little bit more work to get them up and running. But usually once they're up and running, it's very much hands off for the rest of the season. 35:02.00 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast There we go. All right. Well, the last question I want to ask you here, Rob, before we jump over to our video conversation for the ModGolf YouTube channel is the business side of Smart Golf. I've worked with hundreds and hundreds of entrepreneurs, the work I've done in the startup community over the years, both in golf and startup ecosystem. And early on with startups, one of the problems is, how much are you charging your pricing model and the revenue mix? So without giving numbers here, keep that to yourself, but I'm curious to hear of what your kind of your revenue mix is and well, quite bluntly, how does Smart Golf make money? 35:45.59 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf We charge an annual subscription to golf courses and to simulators. And that is our sole source of income. We charge a lot less than what other competitors charge in the marketplace. So we put ourselves in a nice competitive advantage when it comes to pricing. We think that our program also is the best in the marketplace. So we not only get can say we're the best, but we're cheaper. but yeah ah We've thought about a lot of different avenues in which we could work with partners, add advertisement to the program, but an annual subscription to the program is the best fit. And of course, we work with all different sizes of golf courses, but for the most part, everyone fits into almost like one bucket of of the type of subscription, which is they want to do, live scoring, leagues, tournaments. Basically, if anything comes up where they need to do scoring or announcements, and some use it as almost like an email platform, which is totally fine, they know that they can log into Smart Golf and use it. We don't ever put limits on the program. we don't put We don't take away features because you're a smaller club or anything like that. So yeah, that is how we currently make money. We've thought of a lot of different ways that we think could potentially bring in revenue, but we also don't want to bite the hand that feeds us. Our users like to put their ads and their sponsors on the program, so it would be tough for us to mix in our own paid sponsors if they're paying for the program. So it's the reason why we've never gone that route. 37:26.84 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Yeah, and that's basically how we run the business. 37:50.75 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast There you go. And I'm i'm sure, and part of your benefits is that the clubs for the leagues being able to embed dynamically event by event or week by week different sponsors that are positioned and aligned, that they generate revenue off of that which they wouldn't have had before. So I don't know if don't want to sound like I'm doing a sales pitch for you guys here, but I guess in some ways, I don't know if it almost pays for itself, but it certainly reduces the amount that they actually pay you with a subscription base that because they're unlocking new revenue streams also, are they not? 38:08.69 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf They absolutely are. If they are not able to bring in sponsor sponsorship revenue to cover the cost of Smart Golf, then i would recommend they reach out to me because I know that at Highland specifically, we would raise much, much more than the cost of the actual program. And that doesn't mean that we should be charging more. It means that they should be able to raise money with those sponsors to give out more prizes to the rest of the golfers that are playing in the league and whatnot. So... Yeah, but then there are some courses that don't want any sponsors. They don't want sponsors from us. They don't want sponsors from their members. They want a very clean, bespoke look on their program. And, you know, that's totally fine as well. 38:52.21 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast There we go. Okay, to finish up. So, hey, with our listeners here on ModGolf. So, if we have recreational players that belong to a club or a league that are disgruntled, maybe they're still writing down their scores on scorecards and someone's pumping it into a spreadsheet, or perhaps they are a golf course owner or operator or manager that is looking for a more frictionless, engaging experience like SmartGolf. How can they reach out to you? 39:21.82 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf I would recommend they check out smartgolfsoftware.com. We have some very easy to follow instructional videos that show you how the program works. And that's often where I send any new prospective client to to go and check out because as you follow the videos, usually light bulbs go off in people's head being like, wow, that would take a lot longer with my current program. So I would say start there. You can reach out to myself. 39:48.63 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf My email address is rob at smartgolfsoftware.com. You could also reach out to any local club around you. Certainly we run the program across Canada, so I'm sure there's a golf course nearby that currently works with us that can give you some type of referral or testimonial of what it's like working with Smart Golf. 40:10.87 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast There you have it. So as I always do in the show notes for this episode with Rob, I will include all the links that he just mentioned. So whatever you're doing right now, listen to a podcast, you don't have to find a pen to write all that down. So I'll make it nice and easy for you. Just like Rob makes it nice and easy for golfers and tournament organizers with Smart Golf. So with that, hey Rob, thank you for inviting me down to Highland here today to experience the Stanley Thompson course and everything else you have going here. And thank you for lunch. And thank you for joining me on the ModGolf podcast today. 40:41.21 Rob Sundstrum - Founder of Smart Golf Thank you very much, Colin. And sorry that I couldn't get you on the course. Wednesdays are strictly men's league players. So I apologize for that. 40:55.00 Colin Weston - The ModGolf Podcast That's all right. I guess I'll have to try to win a deuce pot somewhere else, Rob. That's great. All right. Thanks again for joining us. Talk to you soon.