Golf tech's real problem isn't the product. It's distribution.

I've spoken to a lot of golf founders recently who have spent years solving a genuinely difficult technical problem, only to discover there's a second, harder problem waiting for them once the product actually works: getting people to buy it.

There is some genuinely brilliant technology being built around golf right now. Software, AI, booking platforms, coaching tools, equipment, data, range technology, customer experience products, and plenty more I see in a normal week of conversations. Almost none of these founders lack ability. What most of them lack is a commercial engine that can get the product in front of the people who'd actually pay for it, more than once, in more than one market.

Having a good product and having a commercially successful business are two completely different things. A founder can build the website, exhibit at the shows, email every club in the region and post on LinkedIn every week, and still be sitting at the same revenue number a year later — because none of that answers the actual question in front of them.

The questions that actually decide the outcome

Every golf tech founder I've spoken with eventually has to answer a short list of questions, and the ones who struggle are almost always the ones who haven't sat down and answered them properly:

• Who actually buys this — the club, the member, the operator, or someone else entirely?
• How do we get in front of that buyer consistently, not just once at a trade show?
• What does the proposition need to look like for that specific buyer, at that specific price point?
• Could someone else distribute this better and faster than we can build our own sales function?
• Which international markets actually make sense for this product, and which are a distraction?
• Who could we partner with to accelerate the whole thing rather than doing it alone?

None of these are product questions. They're commercial architecture questions — and they're exactly the ones that get skipped when a founder is technical, product-obsessed, or simply assumes that a better product will naturally find its market. It won't. Not on its own, and not fast enough to matter before the runway runs out.

Why founders default to the wrong playbook

The default response to a stalled growth curve is almost always more marketing activity: another content push, another exhibition stand, another round of cold outreach to clubs. That's treating go-to-market as a volume problem when it's usually a structure problem.

A 40-page marketing strategy telling a founder to "post more content" doesn't fix a business that's selling the wrong proposition to the wrong buyer through the wrong channel. It just produces more activity around the same broken commercial model. I'm not particularly interested in producing that kind of document, and founders who've already tried it usually aren't interested in reading another one.

What actually moves the number is upstream of marketing entirely: opening the right conversations with operators, building a GTM strategy for the stage the business is actually at rather than the stage it wishes it were at, working out whether entering a market like the UAE makes sense now or in eighteen months, finding the distribution partners who already have the relationships a young company would take years to build, and improving the proposition itself so it's easier to say yes to.

Distribution is the actual product decision

Golf has no shortage of very clever people building things right now. What it has a shortage of is founders treating distribution with the same seriousness they gave the product. The next genuinely large golf technology company probably won't be the one with the cleverest engineering. It'll be the one that worked out earliest who its buyer actually was, how to reach that buyer repeatedly, and which markets and partners could compress years of organic growth into months.

That's the shift I'd encourage any golf tech founder to make: stop asking "how do we get more people to see what we've built" and start asking "who is this actually for, and what's the fastest, most repeatable route to them." The product got you to a working demo. Distribution is what turns that into a business.