94: Shot Pattern — Eric Duffett

Eric Duffett (00:00:00):

Shot Pattern is essentially bringing the money ball ideas of baseball to golf in a very personalized way. So it's a golf GPS app, of which there are very many. And the thing that makes it different from the others is that it's designed around personalizing your encore strategy based on your data. Here in early 2026, I hit a million dollars in total sales for the app, which is mind blowing.

Charlie Chapman (00:00:26):

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the developer behind the Golf GPS app shop pattern. Eric Duffet. Eric, welcome to the show.

Eric Duffett (00:00:36):

Hey, Charlie. Great to be here. Great to talk to you again.

Charlie Chapman (00:00:40):

It's fun having a fellow Midwesterner here. Usually I'm talking to people all over the world with different time zones and I realized you experienced the same little storms probably that I did us the other day.

Eric Duffett (00:00:52):

Yeah. I mean, honestly, just the fact that we can schedule this using one time zone was amazing. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman (00:00:58):

It's a rare treat these days, isn't it? It

Eric Duffett (00:01:00):

Really is.

Charlie Chapman (00:01:01):

So before we get into your background and everything here, I've started trying to do this quick elevator pitch, let you explain what the app is because sometimes we get into the story so far and we don't even describe where we're leading. So what is the elevator pitch for Shopatter?

Eric Duffett (00:01:17):

When we talked it launched live at Deep Dish Swift, it was pretty evident that the audience doesn't really know golf. So I'll try to keep it as a very broad description. So Shop Pattern is essentially bringing the money ball ideas of baseball to golf in a very personalized way. So it's a golf GPS app, of which there are very many. And the thing that makes it different from the others is that it's designed around personalizing your encore strategy based on your data. So it basically helps you track and then understand and then apply your personal data to a round of golf so that you can pick smarter targets and shoot lower scores.

Charlie Chapman (00:01:57):

Before we get into shop pattern itself then, I want to give everyone an introduction into who you are. So the three questions I always ask everybody to kind of kick off the show is where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you do? And then what was your career that kind of led into shop pattern? So

Eric Duffett (00:02:14):

I'm from the Chicago area. I grew up here. I went to the University of Illinois and I majored in finance and I'm a high school teacher by day. So my background started with a Udemy course that I nearly finished and then I just started building. And I got lucky that my high school sent me to an in- person training and basically a year long bootcamp to start to learn iWest development. And that was back in 2016, 2017.

Charlie Chapman (00:02:40):

What was that for? Did they want you to become a programming teacher?

Eric Duffett (00:02:43):

So I basically pitched this class where we were going to start teaching the students how to build iPhone apps. Our school was fairly early in having a one-to-one iPad program. So every student in the school had an iPad and I thought it just made sense with the Swift language coming online to teach the students how to build apps. And so I pitched the class and then shortly thereafter got trained in how to teach it.

Charlie Chapman (00:03:09):

That's pretty cool. Okay. So you kind of have that with the app side, but then also you're a teacher and you teach, did you say you teach finances like your-

Eric Duffett (00:03:18):

Yeah, I teach business. So yeah, intro to business and personal finance and I'll teach sports marketing next year. I've taught basically corporate finance.

Charlie Chapman (00:03:27):

Which funny enough, all of these things feel relevant to what you do now in terms of the business side of app development. But also you have a lot of experience with golf, right? So what's your background there? Yeah,

Eric Duffett (00:03:40):

I've been playing since I was a kid. Both my parents played. I remember I loved it as a kid. I loved it as Tiger Woods is becoming cool, but it wasn't cool when I was a kid. I used to stand in the yard and swing the golf club, was hoping to get to play, but I would hide the club behind my back as cars would drive by because I didn't think it was cool to be golfing. And then Tiger Woods changed all that and here I am over 40 years old and loving it more than ever.

Charlie Chapman (00:04:05):

Golf was like my sport too, but I'm a lefty or at least like I was a switch hitter in baseball and this happens a lot where every pitcher you face is right-handed so then you just become left-handed when you swing and only when you swing. So that happened with golf, but at least in the '90s, whenever I was trying to get kids golf clubs, there was no left-handed clubs anywhere. So we would shave down my dad's bigger clubs that he had to make them small enough for me. Yeah, it's funny because I went from that to I would get golf magazines as a kid and now it's like this massive industry. I guess it probably was before, but I feel like Tiger Woods changed everything about that sport.

Eric Duffett (00:04:48):

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he really did. And there's more money in golf now than ever before and more technology in golf. And it's a really cool time in gold, but yeah, it's still surprisingly hard for left-handed players to get clubs, especially kids. So hopefully it'll keep getting easier.

Charlie Chapman (00:05:04):

You also coach golf, right? Is that correct?

Eric Duffett (00:05:07):

So I've coached boys golf and I coached girls' basketball and then as I was getting married and making a family, slowly I had to wind down coaching responsibilities. And I actually started building shot pattern because I found out I had my second child on the way and it just wasn't going to work to coach basketball anymore. And so I stepped down from basketball and I sat still for like five seconds and then I started working on- Immediately found a new side project. Oh my God, I can't even tell you how much trouble I was in at home, but I think I have another one of those hobbies that's kind of a job again. It had been a matter of weeks.

Charlie Chapman (00:05:43):

Oh man, that wasn't your first app, right? So if we roll it back, you had gotten this education on app development. Did you take that and immediately think, all right, I'm going to start making apps and putting them on the store? How did you get into the indie app making game? So it

Eric Duffett (00:05:58):

Was actually the other order. I was self-taught first because I had an interest. I wanted to make an app and I had nobody to pay somebody to build it for me. So I started learning on my own on that Udemy course and then just building. And it was a year later that I went to the bootcamp and actually learned a few best practices and essentials and understood what things meant more directly. But I wanted to build a meditation ap for athletes. I was a high school coach. I talked about coaching golf and coaching basketball and I saw players struggling when the pressure was high. I coached a ton of really great players, people playing division one golf and basketball and it seemed like the best players had the most to lose and were most wrapped up in their identity around the sport. When it came time to get a college scholarship was really the pivotal moment, many of them were miserable in their sport because of the expectations from theirselves from others.

(00:06:56):

And I saw an opportunity to help them with that moment with the pressure they were feeling and wanted to build an app to support them since most of the meditation content at that time felt a little too foo-foo for an athlete's identity. And so I wanted to build something for them.

Charlie Chapman (00:07:12):

Yeah, that's an interesting one too. I feel like a common thing I'm hearing always, but especially lately is the build for niches, like build the X for X, the duolingo for middle-aged moms or whatever. And so that feels like it's almost exactly doing that kind of thing, right? It's like building a meditation app, a very well-worn field, but for this one specific niche. What was your approach to that? What made it different than a normal meditation app then?

Eric Duffett (00:07:42):

It was really the way it talked about the athletes' experience. I was so naive at the time that I thought, I was like, oh, well, because I'd have this X4Y sort of approach, very niche mindset, I was going to build an app for golfers, an app for basketball players. And when I got to an app for athletes in general, but I really cared about these two audience, I wanted them to have their own dedicated app. And I thought I'd just like boom, boom, boom, roll it out. It would all be out released within six months of each other and that just didn't happen. So basically I could talk to the athletes in a way that they understood, that put context around what they were facing in the sport and how they could use mental training and mindfulness best practices and bring it to the context that they were familiar with and talk to them in a way where they were used to being coached.

(00:08:33):

That was really the thing that I saw. How am I going to get this education to the people who need it in a way that they're comfortable consuming it?

Charlie Chapman (00:08:40):

And then you got that to the store eventually, right? Yeah.

Eric Duffett (00:08:44):

So I started learning how to code in late 2015 within six to nine months. I had an app on the app store and I was off and running and said, "All right, here we go. Now we rake in the millions."

Charlie Chapman (00:08:56):

And did you rake in the millions? It immediately found a massive audience that just came to you

Eric Duffett (00:09:02):

No. If you build it, they will not come, it turns out they will go do something more interesting with their lives. And I just made every rookie mistake in the book and I'm so thankful I did now 10 years later. But yeah, I mean, I subscribed to the Eric Reese lean startup like ship it early. If you're not embarrassed of your first version, then you haven't shipped early enough. And so I shipped it really early and it was really bare bones and I was super proud to have gone from knowing nothing to having it on the app store, but the markets was uninterested. And as I went further and further and further, I learned that I really had made some pretty critical mistakes in the order that I did things and the way in which I understood what the people I was building for, how they thought about the problem they were facing.

Charlie Chapman (00:09:52):

When you say you made every rookie mistake in the book- What are those rookie mistakes if you were to just kind of list them?

Eric Duffett (00:09:59):

One of the big ones was, I guess one, assuming that if I just put on the app store, the downloads would start rolling in. But another really big rookie mistake was I sent an email to every single college golf coach in the country, division one, division two, division three, men and women emailed them all with my best kind of cold sales email of like, "Hey, I have something that I think can help your audience." Basically nobody responded and a few responded unsubscribe. One wrote me a really nasty email and then one coach said, "Hey, I'm kind of interested, but I would need you to have an Android app because I have a player on my team that has Android, so I can't even look at this until you're on both platforms." And so my rookie mistake was one person requested an Android app and I was like, "Well, oh, of course I need to be there too.

(00:10:47):

How can I make this happen?" And I basically turned around right away and started figuring out how can I be on Android. And I rebuilt the app to be on Android so I can be on both platforms thinking that was the secret unlock to my success.

Charlie Chapman (00:11:01):

That's interesting because it's like most of what you described I don't think of as mistakes. Yeah, sending a thousand emails and getting done in response, it's like that is an unpleasant feeling, but it's shoot your shot, like what's the harm? But I guess the thing there is overweighting the first piece of feedback you got and in particular in that case, it's the fact that it requires a pivot to fulfill that request. It's one thing, like responding really quickly to feedback, even if it feels niche, if it's a small lift, that can be the thing that kind of generates momentum, I feel like for a lot of apps. But creating an Android app, it's not a small lift and it's a thing you have to live with for the rest of ... It kind of changes how fast you can move going forward.

Eric Duffett (00:11:48):

Yeah. The mistake wasn't the emails, mistake, it wasn't the marketing. This was one of the key things was jumping straight to Android and thinking that just being on that second platform, having more options for people was the unlock, was the secret sauce to marketing, to showing up in a way that college teams and others would want to use this. It just wasn't.

Charlie Chapman (00:12:13):

So that didn't take off. Did you keep at it, keep building? Obviously you made an Android app. Were you able to grow it into something or did it just kind of never get legs?

Eric Duffett (00:12:22):

To cut to the point, it basically never got legs, but there were a few key things that happened with that shift to Android. So I started looking for options for Android. I called around and said, "Hey, who can build this for me? " And once again, I still didn't have the money to pay somebody else to build an app for me. So I was like, okay. And a student walked into my office and said, "Hey, Mr. Duffet, did you hear about this new thing called Flutter?" I'm like, "No, never heard of it. Search it up and say, Oh, okay, this is interesting. Maybe this is what I'll do to be on both platforms. And so I started learning Flutter and at that time I had made a phone call to a dev shop near me where I had a small relationship with the founder and he said, "You know what?

(00:13:08):

We can't help you, but there's this school down the street from us where every semester they have students and they need a client to work with for their final exam and they're going to do design work for you to help you refresh your screens and make your app look better." And so I got to work with these three career changer UI, UX students to take a brand new look at the app and something in that process just opened my eyes to the difference that good design could make in just the polish, the presentation and just thinking differently about how to convey what a user needs to have access to and how they move through an app. Working with those students was like, I feel like it's such a pivotal moment and even though the app never made more than a thousand or $2,000 in a single year and ironically had its best years ever, the year I didn't pay attention to it at all.

Charlie Chapman (00:14:07):

Seems to be how it goes.

Eric Duffett (00:14:09):

It was COVID. So I think that was the key piece there. That was such a huge moment in my pay it forward to my future self, go through the hard learning experiences to now I feel like the design, the presentation of what I'm building now with shop pattern is part of what separates it and why it found a market at all.

Charlie Chapman (00:14:31):

What was it about that process that helped you gain those insights? Were you working directly with them and sort of trying to explain yourself to them and that's the process or were they bringing in lessons that they learned and techniques and everything that you sort of learned to then apply?

Eric Duffett (00:14:49):

I think it was more of the techniques because there's three of them. They each had to come with their own ideas for what the best look would be. I don't know if they kind of got pigeonholed into a certain aesthetic. O very gradient focused and I don't

Charlie Chapman (00:15:06):

Know

Eric Duffett (00:15:06):

If he was forced to be working

Charlie Chapman (00:15:08):

With gradients. Oh yeah, they each had were assigned a certain technique or something.

Eric Duffett (00:15:11):

Yeah. So I never asked and they never said, but I started to get that feel. But the way they worked through it of like, they showed me three dozen apps and said, "Of these, which of these are ones that you like and which are ones that you don't like? " And then every few weeks they would come to me like, "Here's our latest approach to what we think you should do with the app." And there was just these really nice touches of like how they would layer text on top of images and the way they would use like shading and blurs and gradients so that the text was readable, there's enough contrast, but yet it had all of this beautiful imagery and the way to fit those two together. I found myself using those concepts over and over again when I build a presentation for class or when I put together a little slideshow or when I make a screen of just like, you can use basically these layers in between the text and the images so that it all works well together.

Charlie Chapman (00:16:12):

That's interesting. It's almost like working with coworkers where simply through that process of being around and seeing other people's work, you're bringing in different ideas and everything because at the end of the day, you're always scrambling to get something done and you grab for the things you've seen recently and those kind of become part of the way you design and the way you work going forward.

Eric Duffett (00:16:36):

I think originally I was trying to be so creative and I was going to have my own design system and style and I was going to do all these new fun things and now I'm just like, what is the Apple default that's probably going to be better than whatever I try to come up with.

Charlie Chapman (00:16:51):

Okay. So you said it never really took off. It was kind of sitting there. It was earning some money but never became this like sort of massive business. So where did you go from there?

Eric Duffett (00:17:00):

I built a couple free apps at school and I watched what it looked like when you built something that people actually wanted. Basically my school has a very confusing bell schedule and so I built a really simple app to help people understand what the schedule looked like for the day and where they're supposed to be and it caught fire and still people use it on a daily basis and it was really eye-opening to see like, oh, this is what it looks like to get some product market fit. And obviously there's nothing to sell, but the fact that people wanted to use it, that was new. Nothing had to be forced upon them. And so it really opened my eyes to kind of just better understanding how to fit into a person's existing workflows and needs and not try to really push this new practice upon them because in the end that's why the meditation out failed.

(00:17:54):

The teenagers I was building for didn't already meditate. It was going to be something so new and so out of their comfort zone. They didn't have a problem that they wanted to solve, which is what I eventually found out in my user interviews years after launching the app. And then since then, I've watched what happens when you just insert yourself into something people are already doing

Charlie Chapman (00:18:17):

And searching for an answer for in some capacity, or I guess in your case, I guess it's different. So there's like product market fit and there's distribution. And in the case of the app you were just talking about that you made for school, you had distribution, like the school network is pretty tight and you can talk to them directly and product market fit and so it could naturally just spread and then word of mouth kind of does its work. Whereas with the meditation app, it's like even if you had product market fit in the sense of this is a thing that's useful and people would like, people don't already know to be searching for it in the app store where you just kind of naturally get downloads. So maybe you could have found that audience through some other mechanism and then you'd see that all spike up, but that's like a totally different thing.

(00:19:05):

But yeah, once you get a feel for when something's working, you realize that all the grinding for extra couple of downloads, it's like, "Oh, maybe this isn't worth the time it feels like it's worth."

Eric Duffett (00:19:16):

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think that was a big shift. And yeah, I've talked to some app developers since I started Shop Pattern and they're talking about the struggles that they're having. I remember one conversation in particular just like what I'm hearing you say is like, "This isn't it. This isn't quite the approach. People don't want what you're offering to them and so we need to figure out something else."

Charlie Chapman (00:19:40):

And so in your case, what kind of led to the next attempt then I guess at let's make a capital B business for an app that will make money?

Eric Duffett (00:19:48):

Yeah. Having gone through all that, when I started building Shop Pattern, one, it was just going to be for me. I didn't even know if I could build the first iteration of the app. I just wanted to see with like ChatGPT had just come out essentially and I just want to see like, can I build this thing I've been thinking about and use it for myself?

Charlie Chapman (00:20:07):

You stopped doing the basketball coaching and you're like, "I'm going to do this little side project." In your head at this point, it's like literally just for you, you might not even release it.

Eric Duffett (00:20:15):

Yeah. I had kind of sworn off app businesses because I had spent so long working on this thing. I'd sacrificed time with friends, time with family, time on the golf course, time feeling like I was having fun to chase this dream because grit and resilience are these amazing skills that you must have. And if you don't keep grinding as an entrepreneur, then you're a failure. And so I just kept delaying gratification and I was just sick of it at that point. And so this was just a hobby. It was just a side project. I just flip opened the computer while we're watching the show and I was going to have fun with it and it came together pretty fast at the end. I thought it looked pretty good.

Charlie Chapman (00:20:55):

What was the idea, like the initial core of the idea?

Eric Duffett (00:20:58):

So the very beginnings was so, so, so basic. When you open the app, you said like, "I'm ready to play golf." It would pull up the satellite version of Apple Maps wherever you were standing, had no context of if you were at a golf course or where the holes would be. It was just satellite view Apple Maps and it would draw two lines on the screen, a line towards where you're facing and then a side to side line that could show you the width of the area in front of you. For me as a golfer, I wanted no 300 yards in front of me, like where I'm about to hit my drive, I want to see a 95 yard wide radius or like cone arc, yeah. So I can see an arc to see if my drive, when I hit my driver, where might it land?

Charlie Chapman (00:21:46):

And you could switch between clubs and just kind of see it jump

Eric Duffett (00:21:48):

Basically. You could switch between distances. So basically there was eight different distances in there. So you could just kind of plop it down. And so early people would download it and expect all this polish and they'd open it up at their house and it'd be like pointing at their backyard and like, well, that's surprising. But it was free. Apple Maps is free. It just drew some lines. And then if you were on the golf course, it was kind of like almost like a compass. If you're holding a compass and you're looking for north, you can kind of figure out how to find your way on the trail. You just have to know how to piece the two together.

Charlie Chapman (00:22:23):

I was going to ask what drove you to do this versus download one of the many GPS golf apps out there? And I don't use them very much, but I've used them or the ones built into the golf carts or whatever. And I guess the thing that they all do is they tell you how far you are from the hole, especially at the beginning of a hole or not to the hole. It's too ... When does it bend? Where's the water or whatever that I'm trying to avoid? So is that the core kind of feeling that drove you to make this was I don't want to know how far I am from the hole. I want to know how far I am from these things that I'm aiming for.

Eric Duffett (00:23:00):

Yeah, exactly. And so if you imagine yourself on the golf cart, they look up at the screen, they're like, "Oh, I can see there's some water up there." And you just tap on the screen itself and then you like, "Oh, it looks like it's about 200 yards to this spot that's just before the water." What I need was a way to measure sideways that area next to the water or just before the water, just beyond the water to say like, okay, I know what it is to that spot, but I need to know how hard is it to squeeze my bat at golf dispersion into that area. And do I have enough room to hit a normal shot and be able to find my ball? Because essentially that's what the money ball of golf is. All the money ball statistics had already been done, but there wasn't a platform where it allowed you to see kind of that width factor.

(00:23:53):

All the existing apps just showed you a generic circle as your aim point, but it didn't give you any context for how big that fairway was or how much room there was between the trees and the water.

Charlie Chapman (00:24:05):

So that was the initial idea. You made it free and it was very bare bones.

Eric Duffett (00:24:10):

I wasn't even free. It was $20 a year, again, basically for these little measuring tools on the side.

Charlie Chapman (00:24:16):

Okay. So you had very basic app then at the beginning and presumably you put it out there and nobody cared at all and this is another app that just kind of is a little side project for the rest of your life and never really took off.

Eric Duffett (00:24:29):

Well, I think we're here because we know that that's not where we landed, but right away it was different. One, I started marketing it before it existed, which is a big change. I didn't assume if I published it, people would find it, but the bigger change was that when I was marketing it, when I would send out a tweet and it would get a few views, or when I was talking about the app on Twitter, when I was sharing screenshots, when I was in conversations, downloads and trials and purchases would come in without me ever really understanding who it was or where they came from. It was so much more frictionless straight out of the gate that basically within two months I was like, "This is different. This is working. What I thought was just a silly little hobby might be a lot more than I initially thought."

Charlie Chapman (00:25:17):

And where do you think that was coming from? I can understand it's a thing that people want, but were people finding it because you happened to land on some important keywords and so people were finding it through app store search or do you think it was you're sharing pictures and the pictures were very visual and people immediately understood it and they would download it and then there was some sort of word of mouth thing happening

Eric Duffett (00:25:43):

Yeah, more the latter because the best practices that the super nerdy golfers, the very strategic, very competitive golfers had been taught was to go on Google Maps. Google Maps has a measuring tool and you would measure from the tee box to the landing area however far your drives typically go and then you'd reset and then you'd measure sideways across that area to see how much room you had to see if you could fit your driver

Charlie Chapman (00:26:09):

Into that area. So this exact mechanic was already a thing that nerds on presumably like Reddit or something are all sharing with each other and there's techniques that people have, but there wasn't a tool to automate essentially that process.

Eric Duffett (00:26:24):

Yeah. People were already doing this as a way to kind of plan out and fantasize about their next round of golf and that workflow already existed. And so I think that was a key moment. I didn't have to convince people that they should spend their time doing this thing. They were already doing it in a time-consuming and painstaking way and I showed up with just a little bit easier of a workflow and that's where the downloads started to come from. And then there's this golfer on a low level professional tour that's like, "Hey, I love this. What if you added this? What if you added this? " And just the occasional message from legitimate golfers saying, "I really like this. And if you added a little bit here and a little bit there, it'd be even better."

Charlie Chapman (00:27:08):

This reminds me of the episode I did last year with Asia Beckett about, which is like a GLP-1 app. And it was similar because there was this big community of people who were building these big spreadsheets and sharing around spreadsheets to solve this problem. I think it was her or somebody said in that episode, "If you can find yourself a community that's doing in crazy spreadsheets and sharing them around, you probably have an opportunity for a big app because the product has already proven itself out in the sense that there's value here and people are going through crazy lengths to extract it. If you can make that easier, you have a long way to go. " And it sounds like you sort of inadvertently did exactly that.

Eric Duffett (00:27:56):

Exactly. And honestly, I listened to an episode with Asia. I'm like, "Whoa, we're so different, but we feel

Charlie Chapman (00:28:00):

So

Eric Duffett (00:28:00):

The same." I know that story, yes. So

Charlie Chapman (00:28:03):

That's so true. Oh, that's so funny. We connected that. Did you also then, did you have specific communities that you were sharing it with? Was this on Twitter or was this, were there Reddit threads wherever you were seeing people do this Google Maps thing?

Eric Duffett (00:28:16):

Yeah, it was really just Twitter. That was my social media of choice for talking golf content and there was people in there sharing ideas about analytics and strategy. And so that was the place where I showed up and really didn't have my own audience, but when I jumped in with the screenshots or a perspective in a conversation in a very legitimate way, that's where a lot of the early momentum came from.

Charlie Chapman (00:28:40):

Okay. So it started kind of taking off. You had pro, pro am type people using it and giving you feedback. Was it pretty much like there was an immediate trajectory to this is becoming a business or did you have to make a choice at some point, I'm going to really pour gasoline on the fire and then do a bunch of things to kind of make that happen?

Eric Duffett (00:29:01):

Yeah. I feel like there's a couple of really pivotal moments that forced me to go from this is fun, this is a hobby I'll work on it when I feel like, to really treating it seriously like a business. And one of those first ones was like two months in, I'm noticing solid uptick in users and a little bit of negative feedback on just how bare bones it is. And like I said at the beginning, it had no context of what a golf course was. It couldn't point you towards whole one, it didn't know what the par was. All of these really-

Charlie Chapman (00:29:35):

But you could use that in your backyard and it would show you how arc of what houses you could hit with a golf club.

Eric Duffett (00:29:41):

Exactly. And so I was like, in order to take the next step, I need to buy golf course data so that it knows where to point you. For this point, you had no

Charlie Chapman (00:29:51):

Costs, right? Basically. Yeah. The

Eric Duffett (00:29:53):

Cost of my time it was really it. And I'd maybe done 800 or $1,000 in sales and it was like Holy cow, this was all I wanted for this summer. This is amazing. But this leap was the next thing that was really going to be critical in order for this to be anything. And so I looked at all the options. I was really disappointed to find out that the only way to get started was to spend $5,000 upfront on an API to download the golf course data and have it available in the app. And I forget, it was like 75,000 credits. I'm looking at my few dozen users a day. I'm like, "Well, I'm never going to need that money, but it's five grand upfront." And I go to my wife and she's like, "What are you doing? How are we back here already? Is this a hobby or is this a business?What's happening with this?

(00:30:43):

" When I wrestled with it for so long, obviously I paid the five grand to buy the golf course data and the next day I'm playing golf with a buddy and I was just like, "Man, I didn't want to pay $100 for somebody else's golp. And now here I am $5,000 in the hole."

Charlie Chapman (00:31:03):

So then you had to integrate that, obviously. At this point it's still you doing the development?

Eric Duffett (00:31:09):

Yeah, it's still me. I'm doing all the development. I love that aspect of it. And so now I have this liability that I have to go chase after. And so I'm

Charlie Chapman (00:31:17):

Hustling a lot harder. I guess it's a nice fire under your butt a litle bit to be like, "Well, now I have to do this.

Eric Duffett (00:31:22):

" Yeah, and made a big difference. And so I implement it and it's better and it's working better. I'm like, "All right, I got to make some money." And so I'm pushing harder to sell it and a litle bit, like you said, more fire in my belly to do that.

Charlie Chapman (00:31:35):

Did you immediately see an impact from having the course data in there or was it like, uh-oh, it didn't really change the arc at all.

Eric Duffett (00:31:44):

And so it just kept going up. I'm like, okay, I'm probably fine. I'll probably be at zero at the end of the year, but next year it'll be easier sort of thing. But I was like, "Man, I had $1,000 in my pockets and now I'm probably not going to have that at the end of the year.This might've been silly." I think this is

Charlie Chapman (00:32:02):

A

Eric Duffett (00:32:02):

Theme

Charlie Chapman (00:32:03):

That's coming up as well if I remember correctly.

Eric Duffett (00:32:06):

Yeah. Anyway, I looked through the API to see all it has to offer, all the data parameters. And I find the stuff that I didn't even know I had purchased that basically has outlined the entire course, not just the distances, but the shapes of the fairway, every bunker, every water hazard, every green was these geo points. I had read in a golf analytics book of the reason why the strategy is what it's supposed to be is because if we run this simulation of you play the whole a hundred times or a thousand times and your balls go in 20% out of bounds, 80% in the rough, or I guess probably hopefully not that, but you get the idea that we can do the math on what your expected score would be based on your data. And I'm like, "Oh, now I have these geo points are the thing I need in order to run that simulation for myself." And so I whipped up a little prototype.

(00:33:04):

It was halfway ready. I shared a screenshot on Twitter and like, "Hey, this feature is highly illegal if you were to use it during term and play, but it's coming soon to shop pattern."

Charlie Chapman (00:33:16):

That's a tasty headline right

Eric Duffett (00:33:18):

There. Immediately, that was the first time where I sent out a tweet to a cold audience where it got some momentum and like, "Oh, now we're off to the races. Now we have something." Shortly after that, I got a couple of phone calls from Waffling influencers, from coaches, from people who were very interested in what I was doing. And that was a key moment of the leap to buy the data, unlock something that again, propelled it forward.

Charlie Chapman (00:33:48):

Oh, that's so interesting. Okay. At this point, you started getting notice in the community. Was that also translating to sales or were you still seeing a linear track going up or was it a bump at this point?

Eric Duffett (00:34:04):

At this point, it starts to turn a little bit more exponential. It's still so early that a little bit of growth. Let's just say I make $500 in July and I jump to a thousand in August the rate of growth on that if it was bigger numbers as Claude-esque. So yeah, it's growing quickly. And the next thing I know, I'm getting a phone call from a golf business with two people that I have immense respect for, like ManCrush in the golf world. You are brilliant people. You have a successful business. People all around golf admire you for your thought leadership. And they said, "Hey, we used it. We love it. We're thinking of building something similar, but we want to buy it. So what's your number?" And I was so flattered. I was so blown away that I built something that these people I admired wanted to buy and I was excited at the prospect of potentially working with them.

(00:35:10):

But as soon as we hung up, I started thinking about like, "Oh, but it's so early. How would I even come up with a number for what this is worth

Charlie Chapman (00:35:19):

By the day basically if you're growing at that rate?"

Eric Duffett (00:35:22):

Right. And even if we did a multiple, it would still come out so low that I would basically be giving away for free. And so I called around and I remember that I had just found the state of subscription apps reports and all of these benchmarks about what good performance was within an app. And I listened to the podcast with Jacob and David and like, "Oh, I wonder how mine compares to these different benchmarks." And they had asked me to put together a little slideshow about what I use within the app. So I put these slides at the end. I'm like, "Oh, the industry average trial start is this and mine is, I don't know, 25%. And trial conversion rate, mine is 75%, whereas everybody else's is like, I don't know, 35 to 40. And my conversion to paying is like 17% and I'm looking at these numbers like, oh, no wonder they want to buy this.

(00:36:17):

This is an amazing app. This is really working." And so we go back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I asked for a big number that I like, no matter what happens, I could be happy with this. I started at like a quarter million dollars. Again, I had done like 12,000 in sales. So I asked for a large, large multiple of revenue. In the end, we went back and forth and their final offer was $75,000 and you're not allowed to work on any other golf app. And they threw in that non-compete at the very, very, very end. And between seeing the monetary offer is not quite life changing, not a year's worth of salary, just like it would've been a nice cushion with a new kid just in the household, but it's going to be gone pretty quickly. Plus this last second that felt like a gotcha, I was like, "You know what?

(00:37:09):

I don't know. I just can't do it. I'm going to keep it. I'm going to keep working on it. I think there's a momentum here. I looked at the social reports and I have something. I can't walk away with it for that number. It just doesn't feel right to me. " So I said no to the 75,000 and I had a high for maybe a couple of weeks before just falling into this dark, dark hole of like, "What have I done? How stupid are you to think that you are going to outrun that number anytime soon?"

Charlie Chapman (00:37:41):

Yeah, you had $75,000 in the hand and now again, you have a fire in your belly to make up for that. I don't think we've mentioned it here and maybe it hadn't happened to you yet, but my guess is that golf like other apps I've had on here like Slopes is very cyclical in nature. So was there a point where all of a sudden you just saw everything slow down and you started freaking out or did you know what you were getting into?

Eric Duffett (00:38:14):

I didn't know what I was getting into. I knew, but I didn't know and I certainly

Charlie Chapman (00:38:17):

Wasn't ready. Intellectually knowing and emotionally knowing are different things, right?

Eric Duffett (00:38:21):

Exactly. And that's a key difference and I'm just now getting comfortable with the emotional side of it. But no, basically I think I gave a final no for our negotiations in October and like that is- So then it's like peak pain financially with peak desperation emotionally is like a bad cocktail. And so I was just feeling pretty overwhelmed with like, what are you doing? And then I have this four month old baby and so I'm not sleeping and all of that together is like, you really screwed this up. You're an idiot. And they had mentioned during the negotiations, essentially we put this on our roadmap, we're going to build what you've built. We just haven't had time yet, but we are going to build it. And so if you don't sell it to us, we're just going to crush you because we have more distribution, more brand power.

(00:39:17):

We have a full-time developer and you're teaching and you have a newborn and another child, so it's over for you.

Charlie Chapman (00:39:24):

So all that's hitting you as you go into the winter season. I'm presuming that everything started either flatlining or at least slowing down quite a bit during that time.

Eric Duffett (00:39:35):

Yeah. The revenues drop, the trials drop, the subscriptions drop, everything goes backwards from basically October through February. And I think that's going to be the case going forward is just like that is a decline where at the very least your monthlies are smartly turning off their auto renew and hopefully they'll come back next year, but everything is going to take a big step backwards.

Charlie Chapman (00:40:03):

And I'm guessing while emotionally it hurts, you knew that this was going to happen, but you're just sitting there anxiety thinking about the next season. Is it just dead now or will it come back? Is it still going to be okay?

Eric Duffett (00:40:19):

Well, I think it was both. It's like if I don't keep marketing again, I don't have any paid channels. It's just me trying to think of this organic contact. If I don't keep marketing, if I don't build the next features in the app, then they're going to swallow me whole. And I did my taxes and I looked at the numbers and that added even more guilt and shame to this like, oh, $1,000 in profit, it's going to take me 75 years to catch up to the number that you could have just had and not had all of this stress. Oh my God, you really screwed this up.

Charlie Chapman (00:41:00):

But then the next season started and what kind of played out from there?

Eric Duffett (00:41:05):

So actually I tried to sell it, but nobody responded to my email. So then I emailed Curtis Herbert and he gave me some really good advice. So I do want to give him a shout out of-

Charlie Chapman (00:41:13):

Oh, you tried to sell it in those down periods.

Eric Duffett (00:41:17):

Yeah. I basically like, "Hey, I'm kind of interested in being done here and I just didn't get any traction." And Curtis talked me off a ledge. I was like, "Okay, I'll just keep plotting along." And so March, there's a couple influencers that talk about it. It gets a big jump and things are growing in May and June and I'm working on this big feature release and I finally shipped the feature release after school is out end of June and now I'm like, "Okay, it can't just be this organic push. It's not going to go fast enough. They're coming for you. You have to push harder. You have to do this this year because they told you they're going to build your app. And so if you don't do it this year, it's over." And so I decided to try my hand at advertising with Meta.

(00:42:04):

So mainly Instagram and obviously someone Facebook and I put together a handful of videos and I paid some content creators and I had learned either through Subcloud or another podcast, you got to have a litle bit of inventory and let Meta find the best creative. And I threw together this haphazard, very raw screen recording voiceover at the last second and put in the ad library and just said, "All right, can you find me a winning ad?" And somehow some way that voiceover raw organic video- The

Charlie Chapman (00:42:36):

One that you did that you didn't pay an influencer to do.

Eric Duffett (00:42:39):

Exactly. The one that I did and cost me zero and it was just so sloppy, it went bonkers and I was getting installs for like 50 cents or 80 cents and my RevenueCat dashboard is showing me a 30-day LTV of like $4 and I didn't know you could do this in the post ATT world and I'm like jumping for joy in the morning and I'm telling my wife, "Honey, I'm going to go get a line of credit at the bank. I'll be right back." She grabs me by the collar. "What? No, no, come back here. We were talking about this first.

Charlie Chapman (00:43:09):

"Well, and just to roll it back a little bit, so you said you were seeing the ad spend was what, 40 cents you said?

Eric Duffett (00:43:18):

So I forget. I think I kicked it off at a pretty sizable number because I had heard you need to spend in order for it to get enough data. So I think I put in $300 a day for an ad spend and then Meta will let me set the goal of like, I just want installs. And I was seeing after a couple of days of running the ads that the total cost per install was like 80 cents.

Charlie Chapman (00:43:43):

So 80 cents and your LTV was over $4?

Eric Duffett (00:43:47):

Yeah. So basically just make it easy numbers, spend a dollar, make $4.

Charlie Chapman (00:43:53):

Right. Hence the, I want a line of credit. But my question is that LTV number, was that what you were seeing before you started running ads or were the customers you were getting through those ads actually way higher intent because of the video?

Eric Duffett (00:44:07):

I knew those numbers before I started running ads, which is part of why I knew that I could probably make paid work was because I was already seeing this pretty high conversion that the LTV of a download was solid enough that I could probably make the numbers work.

Charlie Chapman (00:44:26):

And that to me is the biggest thing for most indies I talk to that they struggle with is they hear these stories of making ad spend work and it's kind of like, in their head it's like, if I'm willing to spend the money, I know I could do this, but I'm just not willing to. But it's like then they eventually go to spend the money and realize, well, if I put a dollar in the money printing machine, I'm getting 80 cents back and hold on a second, that doesn't work. What do you think is what made your LTV so high? And we're saying LTV, just so everybody knows, that's like lifetime value, you said over 30 days. So it's like how much money per download are you getting after 30 days of that user downloading your app basically? And yeah, how do you think you got yours up over that $4 mark?

Eric Duffett (00:45:13):

Yeah, I think again, the product platform fit of like I was talking about this way of thinking about golf and I had this product that supported this way of thinking about golf with an audience who already had these workflows. And so the lowest hanging fruit didn't need a lot of convincing. They had a workflow they were already doing, they had a way of thinking about things and this was just a slightly better mousetrap than the one they were using before. It was new and interesting and a lot better looking than some of the other options that were out there if you wanted to pursue this way of doing things. And so again, it just was for the right audience that was kind of willing to take a step back on some common features. My app, I focused on the differentiating features first, the ones that you couldn't get anywhere else.

(00:46:05):

And so that was the reason why even though most things were behind the subscription, people were willing to pay because they're serious about their golf and they couldn't find these anywhere else.

Charlie Chapman (00:46:16):

And I guess when it came to the ads that you were running, those were also targeted at that same audience Because it feels like if you just aim for a broad golf category, you're going to get a huge amount of people who are interested in the generic GPS thing but maybe aren't into the sort of money ball part of this. So were you explicitly targeting that group or did you just kind of end up landing or am I wrong and actually most golfers are interested in that level of detail?

Eric Duffett (00:46:50):

I think that's where the creative really did the job. It showed the app screens, it showed what it did, it talked about what was happening on the screen and for those people that were already doing those things, it just was a perfect hit for what they already knew and what they wanted. And so the creative did all the work of finding the right people and stopping them in their tracks to get them to pay attention and said, "I've never seen anything like that before. Let me look further."

Charlie Chapman (00:47:17):

I'm not an expert at these types of ads. So maybe somebody who knows this stuff is screaming at me or maybe you will, but there's an interesting bit too where the creative ... On one hand, you want it to be highly successful stopping people in their tracks and making them download it, but you want it to be inverse or negative, not have that reaction for people who aren't going to eventually pay. So because the Meta's algorithm is tuned for installs specifically, right? It's not downstream of that. So they're going to say anybody who clicks on the ad and installs the app, they're going to go, "That's a success." And so if your creative was really good at targeting all golfers, then they would be getting like, "Hey, this one's doing gangbusters." And they could send ... I talked to, I don't think this wasn't in a launched episode, but the people who make cocoa notes, they ran an ad that did incredible.

(00:48:14):

It was just the best ad they've ever run in their life and it drove an incredible amount of downloads and it even drove an incredible amount of trial starts and completely flatlined in terms of the people who actually converted on it because it wasn't targeting their audience. It was just a really, really successful ad and it feels like you just succeeded, but it doesn't actually help you downstream. And so it kind of sounds like in your case, you successfully made something that resonated with the right audience and the algorithm found that and then it could start hitting that button really hard.

Eric Duffett (00:48:46):

I wish I could say I was smart enough to do all of that upfront and know there's the thesis and we're going to just approach it this way. And honestly, it was mostly just dumb luck and desperation along with enough, I guess, empathy and intuition for people like me.

Charlie Chapman (00:49:04):

That's the key, I think. It's like it wasn't strategic in the sense that you're thinking of all those details as we just outlined them, but you know your audience and the way you talk is aimed at that audience. And so that may be why the one you made is the one that really worked.

Eric Duffett (00:49:19):

Yeah. And I think that's exactly it. And that's how it all came together. And again, because I had all of this time pressure from another job and a young family and trying to figure out why did I stop coaching if I'm just going to have something else that takes up all my time. Mentally, I wasn't going to play the freemium game of like, oh, I'll get the vanity metrics of downloads and monthly active users and the revenue will come later. I really needed it all to work from the business perspective upfront and yeah, that ad, it just resonated in the right way with the right people and it just hit perfectly.

Charlie Chapman (00:49:58):

So then you had this thing succeed, you wanted to take out a giant loan. It sounds like maybe you didn't do that. How did you scal these up then?

Eric Duffett (00:50:08):

Basically it was mid to late July when this is all coming together. It's going really well, but now we have the tail end of golf season, the tail end of paid ad spend is probably Labor Day-ish for the golf market plus school starting. And so I kind of ride it as long as my budget will let me. I wind it down as I kind of get into the school year and I just say, "Hey, we had a really good first year, but we ran out of time and money to push this as far as it will go. " But when we added the numbers up at the end of 24, I look at it and like, I did it. I outran the 75K offer and I already beat that with not just my revenue, but my profit and what I was able to pay myself.

(00:50:53):

And now I'm like, "Oh, I'm the king now." I'm back on the other side of the rollercoaster. I have the money and I still have the assets and I'm back to enjoying working on it. I'm not feeling so desperate and overwhelmed by the pressure to succeed.

Charlie Chapman (00:51:12):

So that was what, two years ago then at that point. It's been a few years since then. Has it been a continued rollercoaster or have you been on more of a kind of growth trajectory, you kind of have been figuring the system out? I guess basically I'm asking, have there been a lot of ups and downs since then or has it been pretty steady?

Eric Duffett (00:51:33):

There's still the seasonal ups and downs, but it's been mostly ups. 2025 was an unbelievable year of taking what worked the previous year and putting more fuel, more money behind those systems, building more brand awareness, building more features, just staying in tune with like, what is my audience asking for? What's going to deliver them more value and how can I create videos that both give them value and teach them what the app is all about to resonate with the right audience? And so here in early 2026, I hit a million dollars in total sales for the app, which is mind blowing.

Charlie Chapman (00:52:10):

Yeah, that's crazy. A little bit from the 75,000 that you walked away from.

Eric Duffett (00:52:16):

Yeah. I mean, a lot of that money goes to Apple for their cut and then Meta for all of the marketing spend, but still it is far and away the most valuable employee in my household and fun to work on. Yeah, it's very surreal to think back to 10 years ago when I sat down with that Udemy course of like, "I'm going to make an app. I'm going to figure out how to have an app business." And I still think that's one of the coolest things and not for me because I think I'm important, but just because I think it's so cool to be able to do that, to sit down and solve this puzzle with your mind and then show it to people and give them value in exchange for dollars and have it feel like a win for everybody. It's just so cool to me to teach business and have a business and be able to live in both worlds.

Charlie Chapman (00:53:13):

And you still teach regularly, right? You still identify yourself as a teacher and that's kind of your main gig in your head, even though you have this big kind of golf app business on the side, I guess.

Eric Duffett (00:53:27):

Yeah. I'm still a full-time teacher. I love my teaching job. My school is amazing. My students are great. My coworkers are great. And so I plan to keep teaching and having the business right next to it as long as I can do both without burning out. I really enjoy having the chance to share these stories and lessons at school and I get to teach sports marketing for the first time next year and I feel like there'll just be so many practical insights I can bring back into the classroom. But I have a funny story from recently. So I hit another viral video with a feature that I just released just in the past week and I had just gotten done teaching my students about marketing, thinking about their intended customer profile and like, what are they thinking about? What do they look like? What's going to resonate with them?

(00:54:14):

And so I show this video. I'm like, "Yeah, I'm really proud of this. This is like my best ever viral video. It's like my best every day for downloads." And my target customer, they look like me, they dress like me, they probably think like me, they're bald like me. And I have a student, he raises his hand, he's like, "Hey, Mr. Duffet, yeah, I'm working on ... " And he pats his belly. "I'm working on getting a litle bit more of this so I can look like you guys.

(00:54:38):

"Basically, I'm trying to get a little bit pungier so I could fit in with the middle-aged men. I'm like, " Okay, thank you for that. "He didn't mean anything by it, but he just thought it was an innocent comment, but it came off as quite the dis.

Charlie Chapman (00:54:53):

But that's how you resonate with the audience, right? You got to have a little dad bio. A softer

Eric Duffett (00:55:00):

Midsection.

Charlie Chapman (00:55:02):

Oh, that's really funny. It makes me think a lot of my favorite professors in university were adjunct professors who were currently living in the field while they were teaching. And it's almost like you get to do that, but in a high school setting, which I don't feel like is very typical.

Eric Duffett (00:55:19):

I don't know how many other people there are like me in the United States that are living in both worlds, but it's really, really fun. Obviously when I'm teaching freshmen intro to business, their very first ever foray into the world of business for some of them, if they can do revenue minus expenses equals profit by the end of the year, you're a master of finance. And so it's very different in this complexity, but it is so fun to be able to share stories and to keep coming back to introducing students to the world of business and what I'm teaching app development to the world of coding. I have students who are in their 30s now or former students or in their 30s. I have a former student who works at Apple. And so it's really, really cool to try to just be excited about what they might do with their future and be one of the first people that gets to be excited about it with them.

Charlie Chapman (00:56:15):

So to your point about not burning out, have you brought people on? Have you thought about bringing people on so that it's not totally on you to keep up with everything, especially in that middle ground of it's not quite off season but school has started or hasn't ended yet?

Eric Duffett (00:56:32):

Yeah. So one of my blessings and curses, I love the development side of things. That's probably the last thing I want to give up. And so, okay, I'm not giving that up. And the understanding of the golf piece of things is a little bit harder to give up than I first realized. And so I'm looking at these hats that I wear, I'm like, "What can I offload to somebody?" And so back in March, I hired a contractor for a 90 day contract to help me with some things. It's been amazing just from an email automation standpoint to get the onboarding sequence of emails to get the website a little bit more polished to take a look at the paywalls and he's like, "Hey, what if we ran this experiment? What if we ran this experiment? I need this blog post from you. " And it's almost like having a coach by my side of like, "Hey, here's what we need to work on the business today.

(00:57:27):

If you give me this, I will go finish out that job for you. " And so I got lucky to be introduced to this person through a mutual colleague and he's just really seasoned in his career and has the bandwidth to take on some extra contracts. And so he works, honestly, it's not even on the hours, it's just by get the jobs done. So I imagine it's about 15 hours a week for me at a pretty substantial rate. But again, because he's so good and he manages up with my ADHD is kind of like, "All right, here are the checkpoints or we're going to schedule a meeting today so we can communicate to make sure we're on the same page." It's such a perfect fit of someone that's supporting me in the business with the systems and the processes that are going to now make these incremental moves upward that for me to run the business as a business are fundamentals that need to be in place.

Charlie Chapman (00:58:22):

I feel like normally people, a lot of people I have on here because it's more indie, at least initially indie focused, it's a lot of engineers and it's the same thing where it's like, I can't give up coding and that's often a last thing or it's like a different platform Android or iOS, the opposite of what they do. Usually I feel like it's like support or something like that. I think this is the first one I've heard where the first person you brought in was almost like a general contractor to help with all the things around what you think of as the core. It's like, yeah, that's kind of the thing I need is somebody, which I have a team now who honestly, that is what they help a lot with, but it's kind of the like, I feel like you just run around to whatever Fire looks the biggest at the time and having somebody who their head isn't consumed by those things and they can focus on slightly different things or come at the same problem from a different angle than you can make a really big difference.

Eric Duffett (00:59:17):

Yeah. And he's had the experience of working inside much larger organizations

Charlie Chapman (00:59:22):

And

Eric Duffett (00:59:22):

Like running experiments and basically all of these building blocks of basic marketing, much of it content marketing just so obvious to him. And I've been so strapped for time that I head down building a huge new feature release, everything else gets neglected and I'll come back to it later when I decide that I have the time. So yeah, it's been very different from what I imagined my first helper being, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. It's been really valuable. Last night I was sitting there with an hour's worth of support tickets like, "I got to stop doing this. Yes, but we'll see.

Charlie Chapman (01:00:02):

Yeah, that's often one of the first ones to go. Although it can also be hard because you want that direct line with your customers and-

Eric Duffett (01:00:10):

It's so valuable.

Charlie Chapman (01:00:11):

So I guess the last thing then before we start wrapping things up is where do you see things going from here? This is year three, I think three or four.

Eric Duffett (01:00:23):

I guess finished three full years of being out there. So I guess this is into year four. I used to think that it might be finished at some point, but it's just so much easier and faster to build things and to not just for the sake of like, oh, I got to have another feature in there. But there's still so much value to deliver to the golfers that want this kind of thing that I have just more and more to help them achieve what they want to achieve. So right now we're doing a good job of helping them gather their data and the ones that know the game well are taking that data and they're applying it to their upcoming round. They're thinking about how to use it for their practice. But one thing that I did at the end of last year was I did this end of season report with all of these stats and all of these benchmarks and this synthesis put together with AI where it's like a few pages of a narrative report of their golf season.

(01:01:25):

AI can't do that by itself. You can go to AI and most people listening will know. It'll confidently tell you here is the answer, but it doesn't do it well in golf without lots and lots of context and benchmarks. And so I think that's a place where there's so much more to help golfers with as it relates to how can I use my data to play better, to play smarter, to understand what to work on? Much in the same way that I think just this week, Strava released an MCP connector to Claude so you can kind of query your data in Strava from what I understand. Something like that will exist within Shop Pattern soon enough.

Charlie Chapman (01:02:08):

Oh, that's very cool. I don't hear you saying we have to keep adding features to stay ahead of the competition. So to roll back to the sort of side talk of we're about to crush you, you might as well sell to us, I guess that didn't happen or do you have a plethora of customers that you're racing ahead of at this ... Or not customers, competition that are building the same thing as you?

Eric Duffett (01:02:31):

Yeah. So the people who tried to buy it who said that they're going to build it never did. They've built lots of other great things, but not this. And it's like a double-edged sword. So is the competition in golf fierce? Yes. And is getting fiercer with all sorts of people like me that want to try to make something. And I've seen stuff I've built show up in some of the best in class apps, which honestly feels good as much as it feels like, "Hey, that's my kind of thing." But I've been inspired by what other people are doing as well. So

Charlie Chapman (01:03:07):

I feel like maybe it's just because I've never made anything worth copying, but to me having a clone thing like that is almost like a bucket list thing because it's validating, right? It's like you made something that, especially if it's a big player that if they clone it, it's like, yeah, this thing was so validating that this big ship noticed and either felt threatened, felt like it was a good idea, or their users were requesting it directly, which working at a big company with competitors, I can tell you that that happens. Customers demand things of you if they see it out in the field. And as frustrating as it can be from a business standpoint, it's really validating from a creative standpoint that something you made is sort of proved out to be genuinely valuable.

Eric Duffett (01:03:51):

Yeah, that is unbelievable. I don't approach this with an ego need of like, "Oh, I'm going to put my stamp on the golf industry." But it is cool to see things that I've built as software show up in other pieces of software, at least with little modifications. So that's really, really cool. And then from the other competitive standpoint, I think a lot of it is just like I'm an athlete, I'm a coach, I enjoy competing and the thrill of competition can take you in a number of ways. I think you just have to embrace it. And going back to the meditation app at the beginning, part of what that talked about was like, are you using competition to like, I am better than you or you are better than me and that defines our worth? Or do I see you as a necessary part of my own self-development?

(01:04:44):

And

Charlie Chapman (01:04:44):

Without

Eric Duffett (01:04:45):

You, I could never be as good as I'm going to become because I have to try to compete alongside you. You're just helping me recognize what I'm capable of. And I think always coming back to, yes, it's hard. Yes, we're fighting over the same users and resources and all trying to be better than each other, but we are all in the same ecosystem actually supporting each other. I

Charlie Chapman (01:05:15):

Think that's one of the fun parts of this whole business is when you see it that way. There's definitely people making apps that are just making them as money extraction machines. And that's not necessarily bad. I believe in capitalism or whatever, but it's a lot more fun when it's people who kind of have the same belief system but come at it from different angles and you can have a respectful competition with a bunch of people. It creates a community. Even in my apps, there is this kinship you have with people because it's like, "Ah, I see what you ... I've been there. I know what you did to deal with that problem, whatever." Only you really have experienced these same things. And so I think it's more fun to have a relationship there to some degree, even if it's obviously competitive.

Eric Duffett (01:06:04):

Yeah. And whether it's with a faceless, nameless behemoth or someone smaller, I think it feels a lot better to play dicey in the sandbox to recognize the same struggle in others. Yeah, as an indie developer, it certainly helps it feel less lonely. You don't have to be alone in your development because there's other people right there who know what you're going through.

Charlie Chapman (01:06:29):

I'll end this with the question I always asked to end the show, which is what's a person or people out there that have inspired you in your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Eric Duffett (01:06:39):

Yeah. One of these books on the shelf behind me is probably my most recommended book. The book is called The Only Way to Win by Dr. James Lore. And I read it near the beginning of my coaching journey and it's really a book dedicated towards high performers who often have spent years pursuing status and wealth and success in the traditional terms only to realize they feel just as empty as they did when they started chasing these things. And it brings you back to what's most important in my life. When I am on my deathbed, how am I going to hope to have spend my time, like who's most important to me and what do I want to dedicate myself to? And so I think having that with me as financial success comes, as time pressure comes and trying to keep my family front and center as it only matters if this is getting better, if this is for us, for them, that we all benefit and are brought closer because we have a little bit more flexibility to go on a vacation or time together or whatever that might be, that has to stay front and center.

(01:07:48):

So the book is the only way to win.

Charlie Chapman (01:07:49):

All right, perfect. And then where can people find you and your work? Well,

Eric Duffett (01:07:56):

If you want to learn more about the golf aspect of things, I'm shot pattern on all social media platforms, but if you want to get a little bit more behind the scenes on kind of developer persona and wins, try to share the occasional emotional struggle. You can find me on LinkedIn, Eric Duffet, and I'm happy to connect there. I've connected with a ton of people and it's been really fun.

Charlie Chapman (01:08:18):

All right, perfect. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for doing this. Our little live show segment thing that we did in Chicago was extremely fun, but I'm glad we had the time to dig in in a longer full episode here.

Eric Duffett (01:08:33):

Yeah, this has been great. Thank you so much for having me, Charlie.

Charlie Chapman (01:08:35):

Awesome. All right. Well, thank you all for listening. Launched is part of the RevenueCamp podcast family. If you want to learn more about the growth side of the mobile app business, you can check out Subclub, which is hosted by my good friend and colleague David Barnard mentioned many times on this episode as kind of an inspiration for shop pattern. And then you can check out revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business and learn more about launched at launchedfm.com where we're the same name on pretty much every social platform out there. If you want to check us out on YouTube, you can see that I'm in a weird setting right now. It's actually the same setting as normal, but my desk is turned slightly sideways because it's a guest room right now. So you can see the video version of this and see our pretty faces as we talk and yeah, that's it.

(01:09:29):

So I will see you all in two weeks. Bye.