I miss a green for example, I'm already upset.
When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my.
Ball in a brid egg Frida egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg, bride egg, Lie, I'm about ready to run.
Off of the.
Welcome back to another edition of the Friday Egg podcast. Today's episode is with me and Garrett Morrison. We are really excited and this episode is going to go into great detail about this. We are launching a new membership called Club TFE. This is kind of the next iteration of the Friday Egg. We are not going to be changing really anything about what we do and as far as what you've come to expect. We'll have our newsletters,
we'll have our podcasts as we've always had them. What we're doing is launching a membership for people that want more from us. So it's gonna be called Club TFE. It is available today to join. We will have a few things for members in the coming weeks, but it officially launches on January second. So you're probably wondering what is CLUBTFE And we will talk in depth about all of these different aspects that I'm about to list off with Garrett, but I just wanted to give you a
brief overview right off at the top Club TFE. What you'll get as a member is a weekly course review in rating, so we will go in depth and break down a different golf course every week and assign a rating to it. There will be a new Club TFE blog, so that will be a blog that has updated posts regularly. Again, we'll talk more about this with Garrett. A monthly virtual hangout with the Frida Egg staff, a monthly member only video, early access to the fridagg events, ten percent off the
Frida Egg Pro shop, and an annual gift. So that is the as it stands today offerings of Club TFE. We have some big plans and hoping to do more and more as the year goes on, but that's what we're promising today. And you get all this for one hundred and twenty dollars a year, so that's the price. Obviously, what that comes out to is about ten bucks a month, so we'll be doing it on an annual basis. As
I mentioned, you can sign up for this now. You can go do Thefrida Egg dot com slash membership and that's where you can sign up and find more information about that. Obviously, we will talk Garrett and I about this in great length, as well as a few other things.
In this podcast.
We're going to talk about the history of the Frida Egg as a company and how the golf media land escape has evolved since I started this thing seven years ago. Kind of crazy how quick time goes by. So I think this was a pretty interesting conversation. Those are the basics of CLUBTFE. Obviously, none of this would be able to happen without the support of you guys, listeners and readers. I really appreciate it. I'm thrilled about CLUBTFE and what
we could build there. What we're trying to do is really, you know, bring our community closer together and provide you guys with more content and more offerings from us. So, as I mentioned before, if you want to learn more, go do the fried egg dot com slash membership and that's where you'll find all the information about that. And thank you guys so much for all of support over the years. This has been an amazing ride and we just hope to make it better and better with this new platform.
Thanks first of all, Andy what specifically does Club TFE offer, What, what are the what's the content that we're making paid content that is, again in addition to the free content that we've always done.
Yeah, I think at the heart of of Club TFE, somebody is I think the question I get asked maybe the most the two questions, there's two part question that I get asked the most is what's what are your favorite courses? And then followed immediately by what when I answer when? When's the Friday going to have golf course ratings?
Right? When's your top one hundred coming out?
So you know, I I've needed to see a lot of stuff and one of you know, we've been I've been thinking about the golf course ratings standpoint and rank. It's not a ranking, We're we're going to rate golf courses and you know, one of the that's something I've been thinking about for the five years. How we would
do it differently and how we would present it. I think the thing that I want to really provide and what I think we can provide is unbelievable course reviews and write ups that give you all the information if you're want a person that wants information about a course before you play it public or private, that you know you're armed, and when you go to that golf course, you're really going to appreciate your day out there because you're going to have a baseline of information that makes
you understand the golf course more before you get there.
And then we're going to come up.
We have a rating scale and I am going to write a blog post about that, but it'll.
Be it needs a description, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it'll be a one, two or three egg rating, right.
So we're doing it in a unique way. We're not doing like a rating out of ten or a rating out of one hundred, you know, uh where where you know if you give if you get a one egg rating as a golf course, that's something really special. That's the basic idea. We don't need to go into detail about it. Yeah.
My thoughts on ratings are like their courses are in buckets, and you know, if you ask me, what what is your favorite golf course, it's like, well, what what am I in the mood for? And that's what I want the ratings to represent. So we're going to do a weekly course review. That's something that we've you know, we haven't done as many course reviews as we used to do because of time effort, how much effort goes into those course reviews, and this is something that paves the
way for us to do these more. Another big part of this membership is going to be the Club TFV blog, and I think this is something that you are probably most excited about, so I'll like kind of explain it.
I'm also excited about the course obviously because I got my start in golf media doing golf architecture writing, and so I think that giving ourselves an incentive to do more golf course architecture writing is going to be great because right now that's not strongly incentivized, and that's part of the discussion of the overall media landscape that we're
going to have in this podcast. But yeah, weekly course review and just to be clear, folks, you know, initially this isn't going to be like a big battery of course reviews right away. We're building it up over time. We're doing one a week and it's going to get bigger and bigger. But yeah, we're not delivering a database or an encyclopedia immediately. That's what we're building towards. So Club tf Blog Essentially, this is what it sounds like. It's a blog. It's going to be on various topics.
There's going to be some golf architecture. There's going to be some discussion of the PGA Tour. There's going to be short posts, there's going to be long posts. There's going to be some jokey right, and there's going to be some serious, excellent writing. It's going to be a mixture of all of those things. And part of this blog is that there's going to be a comment section.
And this is where you know, Club TFE members can kind of respond to content that's going up on the membership site and where they can you know, discuss among themselves things that are brought up on the blog. So why I'm really excited about this is that blogging has kind of gone away in a lot of ways in Internet culture. I mean, there's still blogs out there, but they've lost their centrality to Internet discourse in a big way. They've been a lot of their functions have been replaced
by social media and by podcasts. And I like social media sometimes, I really like podcasts. I think those are good additions to the Internet landscape, but I really miss blogs. I think that blogs brought a lot to Internet life, and when they became kind of an unsustainable business model. When the business model that supported the blogging industry early on shifted and went to other things, I think we really lost something. We lost some really good writing. We
also lost some really bad writing. This is not to say that all blogs are good, right, Like ninety nine percent of blogs were pretty bad, but there was a one percent of blogs out there that was just that were brilliant, and that brought a lot to my life,
you know, ten fifteen years ago. And part of what we're hoping to do with this membership is to reintroduce some good fun writing into what we do on a daily basis and to have a nice, lively comment section, you know, like think of the old dead Spin comment section. The old dead Spin comic session had some issues and I don't want to shy away from that, but it was also like a really fun place, and so we're trying to create some of that culture within the membership. That's the club TF blog.
Yeah, And I think like a way to think about it too is like it in a way, the comment
section is going to enable this blog. Like in some of the posts are going to be like kind of thought starter posts like ways to create almost like a daily guided discussion where it can be a topic on a golf architecture topic, it could be something about the PGA tour, but the idea of you know, there are going to be essays that are going to be you know, well thought out written takes on different things, but there are also gonna be days where it's really like, you know,
so many times I think about stuff that's like, you know, this isn't a take, And I think this is one of the things that's happened with writing on the internet is it's always got to have a take. But some of it I think the most powerful stuff is just asking a question and you know, coming to a question of like is this what do you think?
Like is that? Do you like this trend of this? Like is this a good thing?
Like A good example of this would be like I don't think I have a take on it yet, it hasn't been finished, but like, you know, what, how would everybody feel about more leados?
You know, is that a good thing?
Right? What do you think about AI in golf course design?
Yeah, Like I don't know what my take is, but it seems like that's going to be something that's going to become a bigger trend in golf architecture. And and like, I think there's things that are cool about it, but there are also like I don't think I necessarily want to have, like, you know, the next generation of golf architects, like not you know, recreating courses and not building fresh ideas you know, right.
Right, or designing on a computer as opposed to designing on land. Yeah, I think you know. Part of what you're saying that resonates with me is that the take economy implies that everybody has it all figured out, that the take givers have a settled opinion and they're delivering it to you. And often that is so false, right, and you know, we don't have everything figured out. And part of why blog culture was fun a lot of the time was that it didn't end with the post itself.
There was that comment section and that ongoing discussion that's not a feature of podcasts. And so what we're hoping is that that comment section can be a healthy place to discuss things because right now, you know, the place to discuss things is Twitter, it's Instagram, it's social media sites. That have some major problems with toxicity, and you know that's that's not going to be the vibe in the Club TF blog. We're not going to be big enough
to let in all the all the toxic stuff. So it should be it should be a really fun place to have conversations.
Yeah, So moving on to other things that we're gonna So we've.
Done We've done the weekly course review, We've done the Club TF blog. We can go through the other ones fairly quickly because they're I think they're pretty self explanatory. But what are the other features of the Club TF membership.
We're going to have early event access, so a week ahead of our public registration. For TFE events, which have been very popular. We did I think twelve of them last year. We're planning to do around that number next year. We will have early access for Club TFE members to those events. Obviously, some of these events sell out in two minutes, and what we want to do is we want for the people that are supporting us, we want to give them a head start at getting into the
events that they want to get into. Also, we will have a monthly member only video, so these will cover wide ranges of topics. We last year hired Cameron Hurtis, who's really taken our video platform, our YouTube channel to a new level. What we want to do for members is provide more video. We have a huge library of golf video of golf courses and topics of architecture and that we want to dive into and uh, this is
a another reason to do more of that. So we will do a monthly video for members only that will be posted on the club TF blog.
So that'll be exciting that.
I mean, I think off the battle will probably be a lot of golf architecture stuff. But like we said, you know that we envisioned this becoming more and more as it grows and as we as it evolves. So those videos will be member they will be member only, and then every month we will do a kind of a digital Q and a hangout. So the software that we've been using for a couple of years riverside, it's
been under used. I think we did it once with a shotgun start during a major during like I think of weather delay.
We had one.
So yeah, you and you and Brendan, Yeah, and we.
Had we had a few call ins. We had. It was fun.
So we can do these digital hangouts where people it can be like live Q and A sessions people can call in and and they're really fun, interactive, and we're going to do one of those once a month, and you know, it'll be kind of like no questions off
limits for the most part. Maybe there are some off limits questions, but you'll have if you can't make it, you'll have the opportunity to submit questions beforehand, and then if you can't make it, we will obviously post the audio and or video uh to the Club TFE blog for people to digest.
On their own time.
So that will be once a month and that will be just like almost like an additional Q and A podcast.
And then UH.
One other piece is we'll just have a constant ten percent off discount in the Frida Egg Pro shop. The neat thing with this is obviously, if you know from the standpoint of like if you're looking, if you were if you've been eyeing prints or something, and just use this as an example. But if you've been eying, like hey, I want to redo my office and you buy some prints,
you get ten percent off. You you're clawing back your investment in the Fried Egg with every time you purchase something or want to purchase something, I'm not saying you have to, but it's just an added.
Perk, right.
We want to give you a little bit of a thank you for your investment in our membership that we hope to really grow the company with. So that will be all the time. And then uh, and then finally we'll do an annual member gift, So that'll just get mailed out to your your address on file and uh, it'll be just another thank you, and that'll be you know, Club TFE branded and sent out directly to you. So that's the offering as of now. As I've said a few times in this like, we envision this becoming much
more and we're really excited about it. And and you know, I think, you know, from day one to where we are this time next year, I think it'll grow a lot, and we're really excited about about this.
And I probably said excited about twenty times right now.
You're thrilled, so thrilled.
I gotta think about saying.
As yeah, but yeah, we'll come up with some other ones.
But that's the basics of Club TFE.
Weekly Course Review and Rating, Club tf Blog, Monthly Virtual Hangout monthly video, early access to TFE events, ten percent off the TF Pro Shop annual member gift. That's the list right now. How much is it per year?
It is one hundred and twenty dollars per year.
Okay, are we selling out? Is this a crooked money grab? Why are we doing this?
I don't think we're selling out. If anything, we're doing the opposite. I think the the number one thing when I started the Frida Egg that I wanted and that I saw an issue with in golf media was the lack of independence. And I don't think that's necessarily much better. Obviously there are some some like no laying up's a good example of a of an independent another, but there's you know, I think that if anything like what live in the PGA tour has reminded us of is like
how little independence there are is in larger endemics. And and one of the reasons that we are doing this is to have the ability to grow our team to where we want to get to. Like we we have very high ambitions of what we what we can provide, you know, for people that love golf, and we want to keep doing that and in order to reach our goals of what we can do in golf coverage. We
have to grow our team. And one of the reasons that we're doing this is is so we can invest back into our team so that we can continue to add talent and produce more content. And that doesn't mean just like more paid content, that's more free content. What we want to do is do more. We have a lot of ideas. We have hundreds of content ideas, if not thousands, that we want to do. But our biggest issue at this point as a company is a lack
of bandwidth. Like you know, we have we have six staff members with me, me, and you included, right.
And if people think that's a lot, just keep in mind we don't have a hidden army of people who edit our stuff and people who post our stuff to the website or to the podcast feed. We do all of that ourselves right now, right anybody who's a publicly known member of the Friday Egg and that's pretty much all of us, that's all we are right now.
So you know, in terms of that, like, what what this does is, you know, it provides us the opportunity to reinvest in our team and grow and add like people want more and and this is the ability to do that. The best way for us to provide more is to be able to add talent and support for our for our teams. So so that's a big reason. And I you know, I don't think it's selling out.
Like the big thing.
I think we were all as a team, very steadfast on was attempting to not take away anything from what we are a provide.
Yeah, the Friday podcast that you're listening to right now is going to continue to come out at a rate of like six to eight a month, depending on the time of year. Shotguns Start is coming out three times a week. The newsletter is coming out three times a week. That's the that's the core offering. We're also going to keep doing the stuff that we've been doing on the website and on YouTube. But uh yeah, we're not. We're not putting anything behind a paywall with this, so that's
important to note. Now, I want to say something about why I'm excited about the membership model, and that is is because what this kind of subscriber driven thing does is it aligns our incentives as content makers with those of the audience in a much better way, I think than the general model of the public Internet does right. Now, take Cameron Hurdis's videos for instance, that we've posted on YouTube.
They're brilliant, they're intricately crafted, they're really artful. But those videos don't necessarily do better in the YouTube algorithm than things that are made in a much more kind of haphazard quick way. But you know who appreciates the videos that Cameron Hurdis makes are Frida Egg listeners, viewers, readers,
people who really like that stuff. And what we think that the membership model can do is encourage us to do great, well thought through content as opposed to stuff that just kind of does numbers, right, that just kind of drives traffic. We would prefer to do stuff that's well crafted and that we think is a good product. And I think that this is the best way that we can be allowed to do that, both in the membership and also publicly.
Yeah, and to give people an idea.
And this is a little like inside baseball, like running a media company, but like there are a couple of ways in which you could grow your team and provide
more content content to people. One of them would be you could sell more sponsorships, And obviously, like that's something that we're still going to try and do because we want to provide more free content, and sponsorships and advertisers and partners are a great are great avenue for that, and we have great partners like people that really allow us to do some great stuff, you know, but we would need a lot more partners and not every partner
is a great partner. Like what happens a lot of times with partnerships is that you're you're they want specific types of content. You know, come attend to this tournament and do something on this tournament. Come attend X, Y and Z and do something on this and like that. That's great and all, but that's where you you begin to lose your independence. That's you know, like we're going to still attend the major, Like I the thing that I really think where I want to go attend golf
tournaments as majors. Right, you know what would be more valuable for our core audience me attending a B list PGA Tour event because we're getting paid money by a sponsor to go do that to that event, or me going and seeing a bunch of new golf courses in in the UK or something and providing like insights into
what we thought about golf courses. You know, you different listeners would have different opinions, but I think where most would fall would be, like, I'd rather see them go, you know, discover some golf courses that I might go see at some point in my lifetime, you know, versus covering said tournament.
So with that, like, that's one avenue.
And we're still going to have advertisers and advertising on our free channels.
Like that doesn't mean that's going to end.
But like advertising, finding great partners isn't like an easy thing to do, and.
The ones we have are fantastic and it allowed us to do what we want to do, sometimes incredibly so right, like I can't believe that, you know, we got an advertiser to buy into some particular project that we've done. So we have found those sponsors. But the thing is, we turn away a lot of sponsors because a lot of other ones kind of want us to do particular things when it comes to content. And so the ones that we have, you know, you're hearing from that sponsor
because they've allowed us independence. That's that's the red line. But behind the scenes, there's a lot of sponsors who you know, would prefer content that's more along what they envision and and so that's the that's the issue with the completely ad supported content operation. Am I right about that?
Yeah? It's the tricky thing.
And you see, you see these challenges with a lot of outlets, right you know, Like I mean, I think Golf Channel and the PGA Tour's partnership in a way like rights partner, rights partner versus and that's like, listen, they're a rights partner. They have to be that way, but they can't be an independent outlet because of that. You know, they can't talk about certain things that happen on the PGA Tour because of that and what we
want to do. And you know, I think, like I can say this with real confidence, like I don't want to do this if we can't say what we really believe about things. And I think I hope everybody that has been a listener and a reader for a long time believes when I say that, Like I think like we've we've pretty much spoken our mind about every single topic that comes up, and like I don't try and sugarcoat things. I try and say exactly what I think.
And if the day when we don't do that is probably the day when I have no interest in doing this anymore. So with that, like, another option would be to raise outside capital and grow that way, and that's something that we you know, have have discussed and might potentially still do, but but that's not something we're doing
to date. So it leaves you with like, okay, like the membership and a a you know, reader and listener supported model is the best way to grow your team in a sustainable way without giving up you know, all of your voice in your potential integrity, like and also providing the content that you know the readers want more of that maybe an advertiser is not going to buy,
you know. That's the other aspect of this is that like we want to provide content that are we know our readers and listeners want, and that's going to be part of this too, is like, you know, what what people want is going to shape what we're doing in this membership. We obviously I think I have we in our team has good instincts on what what you guys want. But we will listen and take feedback and produce content more content if you if there's things that we are
covering that you want more of, we will. We will strive to do that, and that's the exciting thing on top of what this membership from a community sense, like
we we do we really like. I think that's been one of the most rewarding aspects of since I started this that I never imagined that it being was the community that's been built around, you know, and when we go to these when we go to our events and like the people we meet, you know, you see these these strangers that become like really good friends by the end of the day. And you see people that had never met in the morning or setting up golf for when they're back home in a couple of weeks. Right,
that's the rewarding thing. And we want to create something that can foster even more community, and we believe that this membership can do that.
Cool, all right, So that's Club TFE. Why don't we rewind a few years. I kind of just wanted to do a review of The Fried Egg to this point. You know, I know you've told this story in a few places, but I don't think that you've done that in full on this podcast really really talked about how you started this company and how you built it. I think Club TFE is a major moment in this company's history. We're moving towards something new and we're doing well right now,
but we're trying to add to that with this. So I thought it would be a good time to kind of rewind and and you know, figure out where this started. So why did you start the fried Egg? Where were you at in your life and you know what possessed you to like start the company?
Yeah, so I was. I was a golf nut. I was a member at a club in Chicago. I was working in the tech world there. It was called the built In and it was a it was like a hybrid media slash media company that had this job board and we had these sites, local sites in different cities that had big tech scenes. It still exists today out of built in dot com.
And see it.
But you know, I was working there and that's where I learned a lot about media. But I was in you know, as I learned more and more about media, I wasn't a writer or anything.
I was.
I was a business guy, and I just started to think more and more about golf and in other sports media and how nothing was really curtailed to like what I as, like a devoted golfer wanted. You know, I played every weekend, I watched tournament golf, and I would read. I'd read articles and on the l going into work on a daily basis and be like, why did I just spend like three minutes let's reading this or five minutes reading this like this, I just didn't get anything from the.
Days of blogging, as we were talking about earlier.
And so you know, I kind of got a lot of ideas from what we were doing at built In and some of what we weren't doing at built In that that got shot down.
Like I was an avid podcast.
Listener, and I was I really believed in the newsletter concept that companies like the Skim and the Hustle had had developed and were at their somewhat early parts of their existence. I like that kind of email that's delivered right into your inbox that has all the content in it, so you don't have to click out to like some article and you don't get served vibe ads. It's like, oh, I can just like read this email and be set.
I know what's going on if I missed something. So that was kind of like the basis, and that's how the Friday started. I had I told a friend of mine who was a founder of a company and a really big golf nut. His name's Andy Mack. I said, I sat in his office. We were talking about a couple of things, a couple of business things, and I told him I was like, I got this idea for
this business. And he was like, you know, Andy, like I spent the last like I spent six months before I started the company that he had founded at that time. I spent six months making sure everything was perfect, dotting all these i's, crossing all these te's, and like, the best thing I can tell you is just start doing it. Don't worry about it being perfect day one, launch it, and let it go from there and see what people think, because that's going to be the most valuable and most
you know, important feedback that you're going to get. So that day, I like I went into work and I didn't work. And I was at this point an awful writer, horrendous like like no background in hiding, yeah, and like widely known as like very bad at writing emails, Like.
You had a reputation, yes, as a guy who wasn't the guy to write emails well.
And I worked at a company with writers and editors and like you know, they so there's a lot of It was funny when I started to tell people that I started this thing, They're like.
Wait, what you're writing?
So anyways, I went to work that day and I just wrote a newsletter and thankfully Kaylee, my wife is it was a journalist journalism major, and.
She edited it.
And I mean she she didn't know anything about golf. The first first newsletter, it took her I think like two hours to edit and she she at one point was in tears over the writing. So that was our humble beginnings. It went out to ten people and the list grew from there. It was like friends and family and then and then the next email I sent to like basically every email I could find in my in
my email history. That was somebody that I had played golf with or knew they were really into golf, and I sent all of them like an email beforehand.
And then that's what launched it.
I think it was like two hundred people got that second email, and then we were off and going and it became just kind of like a pet side project for for a number of months, and eventually I quit my job and and started just going and jumped off the cliff and uh and it was it was you know, those those early days were crazy, you know.
I in a way and one of the things that appeals.
To me about this membership is like one of the my favorite things about the first couple of years of the Friday really like the first you know, two years, is like every day I would wake up and it would be like, Okay, what am I going to write about today? Or what am I you know, like and in a way like and this is something that happens when you're when businesses grow, is that like you have I have a lot more responsibilities now than I had then in terms of what I have to do for
the business. And you know, we we obviously have a staff and and like my day is only partially devoted to content. But like I think think one of the beauties of this membership is that it it adds more emphasis to my daily basis on producing content and waking up and like, I think that's the beauty of that club TFE blog waking up And you know what, what do I want to talk about today?
Is A is? A is A beautiful? It was it was it was simple.
I had like no money, I was making nothing, and I was like sitting in my apartment. My my wife at the time, I think she was my fiance. She would she would go to work and it would be me and the dog just sitting in the.
Apartment all day, Like what are we going to write about today?
At what point did you start doing golf architecture content? Because the early newsletter wasn't necessarily focused on golf course architecture, right, that wasn't really a baked in concept in the business. So what made you start writing about golf architecture? And you know that eventually became kind of one of your calling cards or your early major calling card.
So when you're a startup, I.
My content strategy was like if I'm if I'm generally interested in something, there has to be thousands of other golfers interested in that same topic.
Like that was my theory about content.
And and so that was kind of like and I had always been really interested in my whole life in golf architecture. I grew up caddying, like as Tom Doak says, like caddies have a would make like the best golf architects because they in some sense because they like navigate
a wide range. Like if you go caddy for like a senior or a woman or a junior who hits a lower trajectory shot, you know, you understand hazards and strategy and how to get around them, like if you're a good caddy, like it just innately, because that what you're doing is you're like trying to like navigate around the golf course and get your player into a position
where they can attack, you know. And so I had been reading Golf Club at lists when I from like when I was in college, and I was always really interested in it. And and so we had started the website. We had moved from you know, obviously the just the newsletter at the start, but we had launched a website
where we wrote because like the website's purpose. When I started, I was like, well, like I need to get people to sign up for the newsletter, So I'm going to write blogs that then make people want to sign up for the newsletter.
Yeah, so that you know, that is all centered around the newsletter. I think the podcast started kind of in a similar way, right, you were like, I need I need more avenues for getting people to sign up for the newsletter exactly.
So that was the idea and and then you know, with with the blog, it gave me the ability to write about more topics, right, And golf architecture was one that I always was interested in, and I was like, you know, I think I think people would be super interested in it. And outside of golf club aut lists, there wasn't really anything on the Internet that that was like writing about golf architecture at that point.
Right, you know, and some of the legacy magazines had golf course writers would have you know, one or two maybe golf course or travel writers. They would have their top one hundred lists. But as far as like in depth golf architecture content was concerned that focused on like the design of golf holes, there wasn't like a whole lot out out there aside from golf club atlists. Golf
club batlists was different. And so this was a kind of area where, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it would have been hard to notice that there was an appetite for this kind of content, yes, because it was so rare for it to exist on the Internet.
That's the thing.
And that's what everybody said to me at the beginning when I started writing about it. They're like, you can't build a company that writes about golf architecture and make it. There's not enough people. That's what everybody always used to say, there's not enough people. And I think like where I was different, and I think one of the beautiful things this is like a challenge, honestly, Like I think about
this a lot. And what makes it a little bit harder at this point to write for write about golf architecture is like in the beginning, it was like I wrote as I was learning, you know, I was learning stuff, and it was kind of like me writing and taking people along for the ride. You know, there was like this. I go back and read it now and I kind of like cringe a lot. But it was like this this like it was me learning.
Now you weren't talking down to people. I think that's a big deal that you weren't, you know, delivering insights and knowledge from on high because you were learning this stuff at essentially the same time that you were writing it.
Uh huhm.
And And like now it's like some of the things, like you know, I you look at things and you're like, well, like the things that I look at and care most about, and nobody will care about, you know, So it's like going back to like kind of that base level is always an important, important aspect of of of it. But yeah, that so I started it was funny I wrote this article on her Dan holds, Yeah, and my wife was like,
I mean she was she edited everything. I mean, I just think anybody that's got a partner that doesn't know anything or like golf, like she was editing everything.
I mean, it's like a comical thing to think back to.
She I mean like she was in this she was working you know, hours a week on this thing too, like in an editing capacity, because I could nothing I wrote could go out on editing like nothing.
So like she's.
Reading this about Dana Holes and she's like, this is the most boring thing I've ever read in my life. And and then I posted it. I think I posted on the fourth of July and it was like post it. Yeah, awful like history like if you web traffic day, like one of the worst days of the year that you can post something on the on the web and expect to get traffic. And it was like our website for there that day's like that point standard like exploded and
there was so much interest in it. I bet if you found the tweet of us tweeting it out, you know, in the archives, like you know, there was a lot of retweets. It was like this article in it in what it did to me it was Chris lies like you know what. Like it was it went back to
the belief like I really I like golf architecture. I'm super interested in this and other people are too, you know, Like that's the thing if like you're super into golf and I give this advice to a lot of people that ask me for advice if they they're trying to get in and break in, is like, don't look at what other people do and do and try and be them. Like you can't look at No laying up and be like, oh we're gonna be just like No laying up. They
have their own personal style. What you have to do, Like this was a great let I guess, like example of that is like righte about what you care about and like because if you're really like a golf nut and you have like things that you're passionate about, there are other people that are passionate about those same exact things.
Or you can recruit them into your passion yes, because the key is that enthusiasm. People do tech, that they know it when they see it. It's rare, and so people are attracted to it. And I think that that's part of what happened with golf architecture. I think there was a I think there was a kind of silent majority of people who were already interested in it, and that there were more people out there than maybe we assumed.
But there were also people who became interested in it because they noticed, you know, the passion that was starting to build up around it. And I think that's one of the most kind of surprising and fun things that's happened on the golf Internet in the past several years, is that building of a community around people who are generally getting into the weeds about golf course architecture. That's not to say that this the first time that this
has happened anywhere. You know, we've mentioned Golf Club atleast a couple of times. Want to be clear that a lot of this stuff happened in its own way there, but there has been something in the past few years when when you know, more people have just gotten into it.
Yeah. I think.
I mean one of the big things was making everything accessible and inclusive and open, because you know, I like golf club at lists, and I like would I would. I figured out when I was in college how to use their message board. Their message board has some of the most amazing information about like you know, in its heyday, when they had a lot of the great historians posting there, when Tommy Nacarado was active, when when Tom Paul was posting on.
There, Thomas Wood like these guys Thomas mcwood sadly, but man, he's done some of the best golf history architecture writing in.
The treasure troves of information on that on that message board incredible, but like you know, like I'm a Golf Club batlist member now, but I had no hope of being a Golf Club bat list member until it was it was this closed off, like I couldn't get on there and ask questions for you know, Tom doak Er like there. You know, there's great things about it, but like one of the big issues was it wasn't inclusive at all.
It was closed off.
It was like you have to know somebody who can get you a log in, and and you know, and then you might get one, you might not, and and and I wasn't that person at this point, you know. I think that that was like one of the other things I think there was. I was extremely naive to the golf world when I started it, and and you know, I didn't know anybody in the golf industry.
You know, I was just a golfer.
And and I think like, as you get into it, like you realize like how how connected everything is and how small the golf world is. But I think that was one of the things about starting it as a outsider and like being extremely naive was was actually a huge benefit because I, like, you know, I didn't understand how difficult that the job and building this would be. But I was like very enthusiastic and passionate about it because I love golf so much.
Right Well, okay, so on that theme of not really knowing what's going to happen next and maybe acting naively in a good way because you you didn't know how how difficult it would be. You started the Shotgun Start with Brendan poor Ath in late twenty eighteen.
I believe it was September.
I think September, okay, twenty eighteen, three days a week podcast. I think that this is a big turning point in the Frida Egg as a company. I feel like things sort of snowballed.
You just for glossing over when we hired you. Was that twenty nineteen?
Oh, that was twenty nineteen. That was post shotgun start. My theory is that, like you started the Shotguns Start and the company shifted and eventually you needed to hire somebody and you you hired me. But so so, what do you remember about how things started to change after you started the Shotguns Start? What did the Friday Egg evolve into? Because you know, okay, just to you've you've given an idea of what the Frida Egg was like early on when it was a one person operation with
Kaylee helping with the editing and some business stuff. You know, you were making the content right, You were writing the stuff, posting it on the website. You were doing interviews with golf course architects and posting those on the Frida Egg podcast feed.
Great audio if I might, Yeah.
It was really excellent early on, especially the first couple. It's quite something.
But I just rend I found episode one. Oh did you podcast?
The lost episode one? Yeah? People don't know. The Frida Egg podcast starts with episode two right now, which I believe is an interview with Jim Herman.
Yeah, yeah, I found episode one.
You found episode one?
Yeah, it was it was I founded my voice memo that it was a recorded voice memo on my phone that shows you the record, the sophistication of the.
Audio recorded voice memo. Okay, well that's going to be a club TF perk. Clearly we'll post that on the Club TFI website. But in any case, so that's what it was like early on, you know, really sort of in super indie operation. You were doing your own stuff. You start the shotgun start. How did things change after that? Yeah?
I think Brendan and I had talked a long time. We met. Everybody always asked like how we met. We met at you know.
This will just tell you like how far golf media has come since then. We met at blog cabin, long time listeners and followers blog cabin. At the twenty seventeen players they PGA tour invited like it was it was it was Chris Solomon, uh DJ Piawski was at the tour at Tron Carter of no laying up those two guys, Kyle Porter.
I think I think Bacon was there. I don't think No. Bacon wasn't there.
Bacon was I think actually doing like PGA Tour live stuff. Maybe? Oh was he Ryan Baljee from Golf News Net, Brendan from eSPI Nation, and I got I think I'm forgetting some people. But they invited us down for the players, and they had like a rental house for us to stay at and in like the inside the gates of Panavidra and and Panavidro, and they gave us like the bikes to ride to the course every day. So that's
where Brendan and I met. And it was like funny because like Brendan, you know, you just hit it off with certain people like we were we were the ones that were up to like three am at night drink and you know, thrown back. They dropped off like a truckload of michelob Ultra, partner of the tour and uh. And we were the ones like up up up late drinking talking golf, like just talking golf.
And so that's where it kind of started.
Was like it all kind of derives from blog cabin where we we kept talking about like, hey, you know, it'd be fun to do something and and Brendan and I kind of sat on, like, you know, what there isn't right now is like a regular golf show that talks about you know, at the time, like we were an episode whenever we got an episode done. No, Laying
Up was kind of in the same boat. They had like a you know, an episode a week, and it was a lot of interviews, and like, you know what golf doesn't have is like a show that's like a morning show, like a morning radio show. Yeah, and and so that's where the idea of it started. And like I think like one of the things that in general, like you know, this is what happens on the internet is like people are like, oh, like you know, I used to get people be like, oh, Andy's just a
golf architecture guy. He doesn't know anything about about tour golf. And it's like I write about it three times a week in the newsletter, you know, you know.
Like because there are different audiences for the Frida Egg, this is one of the things that I've discovered. There are people who kind of run the gamut and consume the newsletter as well as the podcast, as well as the website, et cetera. But then there are also some of these micro audiences, you know, like even people who just follow our Instagram feed and don't do anything.
Else, or there's people that just listen to the pod, or people that just listen just read the newsletter. It's
all over the board. But anyways, so we started that and the idea was around like, hey, this can be like a quick update of what's going on in golf, and like it obviously changed, it's like everything, and like this is like I guess like one of the things with the membership that I'm most excited about out Like I think like this is an entrepreneurial take and something that like when you're a smaller company that you have
the benefit of. But like what I kind of have like really learned from this experience is like when you start something, you can have like all of the stuff laid out of exactly how it's going to go the first six months, and none of it is. It's going to change so much and it's going to evolve in
so much in for your eyes. And I think that's the thing I'm kind of most proud of of with with the Frida Egg and the Shotgun start is like what the original idea was and what it became you know, you know, it became so much more than what that original vision was, which was almost small minded. And I think like you know, the shotgun start. Yeah, we started that and and then I mean it added a lot. It was a lot of work.
Things got crazy for you. Yeah, you're doing that three times a week. It was a lot more thinking about and following PGA tour too, because although you were writing the newsletter about it, there's a whole other level of you know, kind of engagement that you have to put out if you're going to have three times a week of talking about joking about the PGA Tour and related tours.
Yeah, so that that changed everything. Then you came on like you know, that's kind of like when it just it gave us, it made us multi dimensional more so, right, So it was it was it was kind of a that was a moment where we were, you know, we became more than.
Just like golf architecture guys.
Even though the newsletter was was was there as as a you know, we'd always recovering PGA Tour golf.
Yeah. So right, so fast forward to today, we're three years on from the time we were talking about from from when you started the shotgun start. We're four years on from that point. Actually, I keep I keep thinking that it hasn't been as much time as how But you know, we're a company of six now, you know, we've we've grown a lot. We have me and you. Brennan Poorath came on full time earlier this year. Cameron heard us. We hired toward the end of last year.
Nights with us since. Yeah, Will Knights with us since early twenty twenty.
I mean will Is. Will was an early writer. You know, he started writing for us way back even before you.
He was Yeah, exactly, You and Will linked up before you and I were working together, and he started writing the newsletter basically on your behalf when when your time got consumed elsewhere. So so Will's been with us for a while and with us full time since basically right when the pandemic hit. That was an interesting period in the company's history that we don't need to go into.
We also have meg Atkins working for us on a part time basis, though it seems like she does as much work as any of the rest of us at least, and so it's it's a great team. I love working with these people. It's been such a delight, but we are looking to change and expand and do more. And so as you're kind of looking toward the future, what are some of the things that you're most jazzed about going forward? What's kind of getting you going thinking like about what this company could be.
Yeah, I think we've hit a few places where people are super passionate about. But what excites me about the game of golf is that there are so many angles to the sport that make people geek out and nerd out. And right now, I think, you know, we've hit on courses in travel and the competitive aspect of it, the PGA tour stuff, but you know, the beauty of the game is there's so many other angles that we haven't
really explored. And I'm you know, what I'm confident about is like we we're going to explore different angles of the game in our own unique way and that's what we'll we'll continue to do and we'll find people that
can that can help us do that. And and that's you know, when I when I think about what it can become, is is I just I believe that we can become a spot that, like, if you're interested in the game and what I always think about is like, we want to be a place that deepens people's affinity and love for the game of golf and makes them think about different things a little bit, maybe a little differently.
And you know, some of the most rewarding messages that I've ever I've ever gotten is like, you know, a lot of people have sent me messages that are like, I didn't know I didn't know anything about golf architecture, and I'm even crazier about this game that I than I thought it could be when I thought I loved
it as much as I could. And I think that's the you know, what we want to do for the game on a lot different levels, And you know, so that's that's kind of the goal, is like it's not you know, it's it's to become it's to continue to provide more and more content that make people think about and love the game more.
The beauty of golf is that there's so many different ways to do that, so many different avenues that you can take to do a real deep dive or become a nerd about. There's such an array of those opportunities in golf. I think it's pretty unique among sports in that sense, and yeah, Club TF is kind of the kind of the next step there. All right, Well, I think we can wrap up there, Andy, we should probably give people remind people of where they can go to find more information and to sign up, right.
Yeah, you can go to the website, the Frida Egg dot com.
It'll be right on the front page.
You won't be able to miss it if you If you subscribe to the newsletter, there'll be something that you get Tuesday from the newsletter. And yeah, we hope to see you in the club. And thank you to everybody for all the support through the years. Whether you know whether you join or not, we hope you'll keep listening. And every listener matters. And I can't believe that been able to do to us far and all that goes to people supporting us by just listening.
So thank you to everybody.
This episode of the Friday Podcast was edited by Meg Atkins. Thank you as always to Meg. We've done enough talking about what you can do to sign up for Club TF and the membership, et cetera. So I'll just stop with a thank you to our listeners and we'll see you again soon with a more traditional type episode of the Friday podcast