How a golfing app used by more than 60k golfers was made in 3 years

In one line, what do you do and what is your most significant achievement?

60k golfers in Malaysia use Deemples to connect with golfers and make life-long friends.

Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is David, and I started a golf app that golfers use to find other golfers to golf with. Today it has become the largest golf app in Malaysia where golfers use to find each other, book and pay for golf, manage golf handicaps, and review golf courses.

What's your backstory?

I didn't grow up in a golfing family, nor have any friends that golfed to begin with. I was always a sporty person, playing competitive badminton, bowling, and doing many other activities like rock climbing, billiards, poker, basketball, futsal, etc.

After graduating college, there were a few years that I wasn't in a job and the thought came to me, “What's this golf thing all about?”. It was a very distant sport to me. I didn't know anyone who played it, I didn't know much about it, how it's played, how much it cost (except that we all hear it's a rich man's game etc), etc. The only image I have of golf is people playing it on TV, and the news occasionally, and I thought then “Wouldn't it be cool to be able to tell people, hey I play golf”.

So curiosity got the better of me, and I started to explore and ask around. Found out that going to the golf course driving range was pretty affordable, about RM10 per 100 balls. So I gathered a few friends, borrowed another friend's dad's golf set, and went along.

Golf was slightly easier for me to pick up since I've been experienced in racket sports, but I heard that I should get proper instruction if we were going to want to take golf up properly. So after 3-4 sessions at the range, we decided to get a coach, so that we “ride the bike” the correct way.

After golf lessons, I was ready to get onto the golf course, and in Malaysia/Singapore, you require a minimum of 3 players on the weekends to play. Unfortunately, after golf lessons, my friends didn't really like the sport as much as I did. So I wasn't able to play, since I didn't know anyone else who did. The golf clubs didn't help much as well at matching you up, since on the weekends everyone comes in groups of 4s.

This was 2009 when Facebook groups weren't a thing yet, but forums were still around. I was on Malaysian golf forums desperate to find a game anytime anywhere. I didn't care who I played with, as long as I had other human beings, since they were a requirement for the golf course (and it would be nice to make friends who do the same thing as well).

Thankfully I made a ton of friends from these forums, who then eventually led into a bunch of WhatsApp group chats. Whatsapp group chats grew, and so did the spam. More banter, less golf. Good morning messages/videos flooded these chats, and whenever I asked if anyone was able to play, that message got buried under all the other junk. Then you realise that knowing a lot of golfers is irrelevant if they are only available to play whenever you want to (and I wanted to play a lot at that time).

The year became 2013, and everyone was building an Uber for something. There was MyTeksi for cars, there was Foodpanda for food, Airbnb for homes, and Tinder for dates, I was pretty sure someone in the world would have built something to connect golfers. I went on my merry search and was disappointed.

Most of the existing golfer matching platforms were in larger golf markets ie USA, AU, and UK, but even then, none of them performed well.

At that point in time, I realised that golf requires 2 things 1) money 2) buddies. I had money because I had a job. Money is supposed to buy things you love to do, but if I can't even spend my money because the golf courses wouldn't let me (because I didn't have enough players), then money is useless. So I went on to try to solve the 2) buddies problem and Deemples was born.

What should be the first steps to take to enter your industry?

The golf industry is a small one, so you can test things pretty quickly. For that matter, looking back now, I think for a lot of tech companies in any industry, we could have started without a product. Do things manually, find customers, and then build tech to solve the manual problems (at least there was proven traction, and ready processes to automate).

How did you spend your First 100 Days of launching your business?

I'm going to answer this question as the first 100 days AFTER the app was published on the app store. There were also a lot of days to get the idea out, finding people to build it, reiterating, failing, finding a new tech team to build, etc. But we can talk about that in another question )

Once the app was launched, marketing had to begin. The best app is as good as the number of users on it. Very quickly, we realised that without games on the app, no one would be able to join any games. So it was a question of getting game hosts, and then game joiners.

I was still in a job at that time, and my boss then had extra Facebook advertising credits that he very generously shared with me. I got $500 to start which was plenty for Deemples. Coming from the marketing industry I thought I understood a lot about marketing already but oh boy was I wrong. I've always been in sales and management roles, but not the actual operations of marketing. There was no one else to help, and I didn't have the skills, so I started super basic. Taking any photos, designing ads on platforms I know how to use (Google Slides), exporting them to JPG, and then running Facebook ads.

At the same time, I was trolling golf forums and Facebook groups. Anytime, anyone was talking about finding people to play with, or completing their foursome, I'd jump in to suggest using Deemples.

On the offline part, I spent a lot of time at the driving ranges, talking to golfers and introducing them to Deemples. I also spoke with golf club managers who loved the idea and let us put up Deemples banners at the clubhouse.

These were some of the first few things that we did to get users. It was slow, but it helped us learn a lot about the market and what their feedback was on the Deemples product.

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain partnerships/customers?

We've had a lot of learnings of what worked and what hasn't worked.

Deemples was built as a matcher for golfers. However, matching alone doesn't complete the experience, since you'd still have to book and pay for golf as well. Then you also need to manage your handicap.

When we just had the matching function, it was very much like Tinder. You get on, you match, and then you take the conversation offline to Whatsapp and other IMs. Even worse when you “get married” then you're off Tinder 100%.

However, after matching, you'd still need to book, so eventually we connected with golf courses to allow golfers to book through, which golfers now continue to use Deemples regardless if they have or do not have buddies to play with. If they have no buddies, they hop into a game, make payment to the golf course, make friends, and the experience is complete.

Another retention feature was the scoring/handicap management tool. A lot of thought was put into this since golf handicaps are a very sensitive thing. There's no point allowing golfers to “declare” their own handicap since it'll never be able to be verified. So we built a flow where scores used to calculate someone's handicap would only be calculated from scores submitted by 2 OTHER players in the game that you have played. This encouraged golfers to come back into the app.

The last retention feature, an extension of bookings, was cashback. We make a margin for every booking golfers make with golf courses via deemples. We allocated a small % of the margin back to golfers in their Deemples accounts, so they accumulate credits that can be used towards their next game.

What has taken you from 0 to 100?

We're definitely not at 100 yet. But if we were to define today as 100, then for the Malaysian market, what helped tremendously were all the booking features that we put in. This helped us grow revenues and increase users both golfers and golf courses, since there was a tangible financial result to using Deemples.

What is one underrated thing in your industry that business owners should start doing/using?

The golf industry is super wide. But if we're speaking specifically about building community for golfers, the first thing to do would be to work on getting golfers together, instead of making a margin from each of them or from partners at the start. We have a lot of conversations with golfing communities where they want to monetise from day one. While it's not wrong to think that way, without a community it'll be super hard to monetise. So focus on building the community first (your product), then find ways to monetise after )

What was one failure you had to go through that others in your industry should look out for?

2-sided platforms are the hardest to build, and require a lot of resources. 2-sided platforms work best when there's a high velocity of both demand and supply coming together. If we were to start Deemples in another market, we would ensure that we have sufficient resources (financially) to create this high velocity of demand and supply, otherwise, chances of success are low or slow. Slow is no good because users will experience an underperforming platform, and churn will be high.

What platform/tools do you use for your business?

Trello - to keep track of all golf course details

Discord - for internal communication (because Slack was expensive and Discord is free)

Gmail - for external communication (easy to set up for deemples.com)

Canva - easiest design tool for the non-designer in us.

AWS - hosting

Digital Ocean - hosting

Mailjet - because it was cheaper than Mailchimp

Quickbooks - because it was cheaper than Xero (even though I've heard lots of good stuff about Xero and Quickbooks had some bugs here and there)

Onesignal - for push notification and in-app notification

Otomate Me - to replace SMS with Whatsapp

How are you doing today and what does the future look like?

Deemples is currently the largest golfer matching and golf booking platform in Malaysia. The business has doubled every year for the last 3 years. Continuous growth will come from more brand marketing, more business models, more partnerships, and more geographical markets, which we are raising a funding round to achieve.

There are 60 million golfers in the world, playing across 30 thousand golf courses. The goal is to help all golfers in the world be able to get a game whenever, and wherever they want to.