A new startup called Noteefy has helped golfers and golf courses with a time conundrum.
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At the height of the pandemic, Jake Gordon was like many golfers Los Angeles area. A relative new to the gamehe could hardly get enough of it. He also could hardly take a short time.
“I was the designated booker in our group,” says Gordon. “So if you caught me on Friday, I was the guy constantly refreshing the page for every course in the area, looking for an opening. The pain and suffering were real.”
This was not a new story in LA, the nation’s busiest year-round metropolitan golf market. But it had become more common since the Covid boom. And crowded sheets weren’t the only problem. The rise of bots and intermediaries had complicated the problem. Unsolicited brokers grabbed many bookings almost as soon as they appeared (and often canceled them at the last minute, leaving gaps in the score sheet that were almost impossible to fill).
None of this was good for golfers. It wasn’t good for the course operators either.
Clicking and refreshing his search lately, Gordon, a twenty-something with experience in tech startups, reached the classic entrepreneur’s conclusion: There had to be a better way. In collaboration with his friend, Dathan Wong, a software engineer and fellow golf fanatic, he decided to create one.
As Gordon saw it, despite the increasing demand for working hours, capacity was not really the problem; after all, if he waited long enough and looked hard enough, a place in a tee sheet it would usually open somewhere around town. The problem was hassle and inefficiency, which caused courses to lose revenue and golfers to lose their minds.
“The process was very manual,” says Gordon. “It was also impossible to know real-time inventory across all the different courses. And then on the flip side, you had these courses that were getting hundreds of phone calls that they couldn’t answer and no way to get those golfers on a waiting list to fill those last-minute cancellations.”
The solution, he determined, was to make access more equal by building a group-time digital assistant that could match supply and demand in real time. As soon as a certain slot opened up, the system would send golfers an automatic alert. And if nothing was available in their intended direction, the system would guide them to openings at other nearby properties.
For inspiration, Gordon and Wong turned to Open Table and Resy, which have alert functions to inform customers of availability, and online travel services like Google Flights and Expedia, which sync customers with airline inventory. By the spring of 2022, they were ready to go. They called their product Noteefy.
Unlike some popular digital platforms in the golf space, Noteefy (pronounced “notice”) was not developed as a third-party booking service. In fact, Gordon and Wong weren’t going directly after the golfers. Their client was the course operator, who would pay a software licensing fee and share the benefits at no cost to the golfer via a free downloadable app.
“We weren’t looking to handle this from the consumer side,” says Gordon. “This is where you get things like bots and middlemen who are out to monetize the process against the will of course. We had to get buy-in from suppliers.”
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The first supplier to bite, in 2022, was Brian Reed, then general manager of Simi Hills Golf Course, a busy public facility just outside L.A. As with many area courses, the reservation line at Simi Hills was flooded daily. Keeping up with the calls was difficult. Keeping a list of names and call numbers was out of the question.
“So when Jake called me out of the blue and said, ‘What if I could create an automated waiting list?’ “I didn’t really have to think about my answer for a long time,” says Reed.
It didn’t take long to see a difference either. Shortly after signing with Noteefy, Reed noticed fewer blanks on his score sheet. Last minute cancellations were being filled. At the same time, call volume dropped, as golfers now had a quieter option than trying to call the pro shop. The result was less consumer appeal and more revenue for the course. By the end of the year, Reed says, Noteefy’s bookings had accounted for over $40,000 in revenue that might otherwise have fallen.
“We went from catching almost none of those cancellations to getting at least a few a day,” says Reed. “That may not sound like much. But when your average green fee is $50 to $70, and every day you’re getting more of it, it adds up.”
As word spread, other operators bought in as well. Next up was golf course management company KemperSports, which installed Noteefy at three of its properties, two in LA and one in North Carolina, before adding the software to its national portfolio. The pace of growth accelerated. Over the next 18 months, Noteefy expanded to more than 500 courses across the country, running the gamut from rural 9-hole courses to high-end destinations such as Kohler Destination and Cabot Citrus Farms at TPC Scottsdale and Valley of sand.
By that point, Gordon and Wong had quit their day jobs.
Meanwhile, not much had changed in Los Angeles. Landing a time was still a lot of work, especially on crowded municipal courses. Local golfers were fed up. Last spring, simmering frustrations reached a fever pitch, spilling into national stories about bots and brokers and what many saw as the muni system’s failure to deal with them. In March, five golfers went so far as to file a lawsuit against the city alleging that “nothing was done to ensure that the book process was fair to all golfers who wish to play.”
The wheels of government may grind slowly, but all that creepiness sped things up. In August, under increasing public scrutiny, Los Angeles City and County courses began requiring a $10 nonrefundable deposit per player for all golf reservations. An additional fee of $10 per player was also imposed for no-shows and cancellations were made within 48 hours. These new policies put a damper on bots and brokers, but local operators weren’t done.
Last month, American Golf, which operates more than 20 courses in Southern California, including 13 LA County municipalities, adopted Noteefy.
As Gordon is keen to point out, the system was never meant to be a “squasher bot”. But he says this is a mitigating effect. “Technology makes inventory accessible to everyone in real time at no cost to golfers,” says Gordon. “By doing this, it renders bots useless because there is no access or information advantage to bad actors.”
Bots or not, Gordon says he expects the LA County courses to see millions of dollars in increased revenue, a roughly 30 percent reduction in calls and “thousands of happier golfers.”
What kind of impact it has on the county is too early to tell. Rick Crowder, American Golf’s head of revenue management for LA-area courses, says he’ll have a clearer picture in a few more months, but that he’s optimistic.
“I believe in technology,” says Crowder.
The licensing fee for Noteefy varies from operator to operator depending on the number of courses they run and the volume of play. But Gordon says the average cost is “the equivalent of one to two times a month, and we deliver several times a day.”
And it sees applications in other industries. By Gordon’s calculations, golf courses leave more than $100,000 a year on the table from last-minute cancellations that go unfilled. Losses, he says, are as great or greater elsewhere. Hence his plan to expand Noteefy into other services, such as hotels and spas to help solve what he believes is a “$1 billion problem” in the high-end hospitality sector.
Muni golf in LA may not be considered high-end, but it’s hard to put a price on a short time with your friends.
“It’s still hard to get one,” says Gordon. “But our luck is much better now.”
