First Step

Environment: Writing tablet at a local coffee shop in SLC

I’m oddly excited to be writing the first post on my website. Odd because I assume I’m the only one that will read it, but I think I enjoy the process of writing and am eager to put ideas down on paper (metaphorically). Before I jump into the present and plans for the future (which will be the goal of this and future posts), I’ll quickly recap how I got here.

I graduated college in 2021 with an engineering degree and very little idea of what I wanted to do. I was good at the general subjects which are only considered important until you leave school, and didn’t have many real-world skills which are relevant to finding a passion and making a career out of it. I started working in construction management right out of college because it was what my previous internship had been in, and I figured it would provide a stable enough salary and schedule to figure out what I actually wanted to do. I’m writing this nearly four years after starting in that position, and it has largely provided what I expected it to with the exception that I’m still not sure what I want to be doing. I've used my frequent promotions and raises to explore various opportunities however, and I’ve picked up actual skills along the way, including:

• Turning my casual enjoyment of disc golf into a professional side hustle with tournament income and sponsors
• Learning Swift and Flutter development for mobile apps with a handful released on iOS and Android, including my flagship disc golf app Throw with the Pros
• Working part-time as a chess and disc golf coach with a number of clients
• Learning website development using Next.js (CSS & JavaScript) which is what I built this website with
• Video editing and social media management for a number of platforms, including accounts for Throw with the Pros
• Experience in graphic design for all elements my mobile apps and website
• …all I can remember right now

I make a non-zero dollar amount from many of these projects but am nowhere near the point where I could turn them into a career. That roughly leads us to the present, where I’m struggling to determine what comes next and hope that writing my current ideas down might provide some inspiration. We’ll see.

Throw with the Pros is a finished product currently available for download on iOS and Android. I recently finished incorporating a third-party subscription and purchase management platform into the app, which I did for a few different reasons. Outside of just offering more monetization options in the app, I also wanted to have the infrastructure to expand my marketing efforts. I think the biggest barrier to the growth of Throw with the Pros is just getting people to download it, and I think (hope) that the app will sell itself once they do. My two best ideas at the moment for increasing downloads while minimizing the cost of doing so are an ambassador team and hosting public Throw with the Pros events.

The new payment infrastructure will make tracking discount code usage much easier, which I hope to utilize with the Throw with the Pros Ambassador team. Ambassador teams are extremely common in disc golf already, but I hope to offer ambassadors a cut of in-app purchases rather than needing to expend money up front for gear and apparel (the usual team structure in disc golf). My hope is that the cut of purchases will encourage ambassadors to sell the app for me, and that I can then put money in their pocket based on how much they sell. I’ve already started to set-up the team, but haven’t quite pulled the trigger. I want to make sure I create a structure that is easy to manage and scale, and that I have the right people representing the brand.

I also like the idea of public Throw with the Pros events, where I would more or less host a public round which would include in-app challenges and prizes for the winners. I believe in the power of building a local community around the app, and think that public rounds would be a great way to kick that off. I've set a date for the first event and have the logistics all planned out. All that’s left is to advertise it locally and run the thing (and hope that people show-up).

Best-case scenario is that both the ambassador team and public events are a huge success. The user base of Throw with the Pros grows exponentially as the ambassador team grows, and I build up the local Utah disc golf community to use the app more during casual rounds. Worst case scenario is that they both gain very little traction, and I still have an app which is stuck below 1,000 downloads in spite of the amount of potential I think it has.

If both of these fail, I'd be out of ideas for how to continue growing the app. I’ve started thinking about my contingency plan here in order to continue building around the idea, which mostly involves me either partnering as Throw with the Pros with a prominent disc golf company or with expanding the idea to other sports. To set this up, I created a couple of “one-pagers” which are single-page documents that summarize the idea behind Throw with the Pros, its main features, and prospects for monetization and growth. I created one of these for use in pitches to disc golf companies and one aimed at golf companies for pitching a transition to that sport. The idea was that I would send these one-pagers out via email with an accompanying pitch to try and create a partnership to facilitate either the growth of Throw with the Pros or a transition of the idea to golf.

The goal of these partnerships would be to secure either an investment into the app or just a paid-contract job to build out a brand specific version of the app, both aimed at creating enough flexibility and capital for me to leave my current position in construction. I sent these pitches out to a handful of companies a few days ago as of the time of writing, and am still awaiting solid responses on most of them. We’ll see what comes of this initial effort, but I’m hoping to gain some feedback at a minimum.

That more or less summarizes my current plans for growing Throw with the Pros, and next on my list is competitive disc golf. Winter in Utah always accounts for a rough couple of tournaments to start the year (I get a bit rusty when there’s snow on the ground), but I had a nice 1017 average in my last tournament and got my first win in a while. I’m registered for one DGPT event this year (potentially two) and know that I have it in me to at least be a top local pro. I had my highest round rating ever just six months ago at 1060 and would like to get to the point where I can register for and play in at least 4-5 DGPT events per year while competing for wins in all of the big local tournaments. I’m unsure if I’ll ever be able to make competitive disc golf a career, but I’d love to at least make it a fun part-time job. My goals are to get at least four more wins this year, hit 1000-rated, and add roughly 50’ to my backhand distance. Wish me luck.

We now get into the realm of projects still to come and other things I’m considering spending my time on. Still within disc golf, I had the idea of learning website development to build a competitor to Disc Golf Scene. I wanted a site that had all of the tournament management capabilities of DGS while also offering a scheduling and statistics management platform for competitors. I quickly realized that Disc Golf Scene is owned by the PDGA, which would make it very hard for any competitor to get off the ground, but I’m still considering making it for unsanctioned tournaments. This is on hold right now, but I did still learn website development and built this site while doing so.

I wanted to create a new website for myself that I was 100% in control of, as I was growing weary of the Wix platform that I was using for my previous site. I also wanted it to be barebones, providing only the necessary information with links to different projects should visitors want to learn more. I picked up the new coding structure pretty quickly and it only took a couple of weeks to learn the language and get this site built out and deployed. A more complicated site like a tournament manager would be much harder, but I think I could figure it out.

My last project at the moment is completely unrelated to the others, and that’s the development of a personal songbook for guitar. I’ve been playing the guitar very casually since high school and am entirely self-taught, but I do like the idea of being able to take it on the road or on camping trips and play a few tunes. I don’t like the idea of looking up songs on my phone or laptop while camping, so I’m going to create a physical journal of tabs and chords for songs I know to carry around on these excursions. It will take me a while to fill these in, but I have a preliminary list of songs I want to include and plan on slowly adding to the book when I find myself bored at home.

That about wraps it up for all of the projects I currently have. I plan on publishing occasional updates here as things develop, and I always have a “back burner” list of ideas to pursue if these dry up. I’ll likely hold off on starting anything new until I determine whether Throw with the Pros has a future partnership with any more established companies. If I strike out there, I may begin pursuing one of a number of other mobile or web based ideas I have related to disc golf. It’s not that all my ideas are based in disc golf, but it is a niche community that I’m already heavily involved with, and I think a project I create in disc golf has a higher chance of success as a result, at least compared to other industries.

Regardless of how these turn out, I plan on aggressively looking for a career change within the next six months. We’ll see what happens. Future "thoughts" will come occasionally with project and life updates, but we'll call it here for now.

Cheers,

Dylan