The Month of June

Environment: New donut shop in Salt Lake City

This has been a month of focusing on big projects. This should probably be my approach every month, but saying no internally to any of my hobbies has historically not been a strength of mine.

Throw with the Pros Development

I haven't released any updates since my last post, but have still been coding a bit in Throw with the Pros. This has mostly consisted of minor bug fixes and quality of life improvements that I've discovered during my own personal usage of the app.

I finally announced the latest update to my email list for the app and still have a long list of potential feature to add, but have instead been focusing on marketing Throw with the Pros and growing its user base.

6-28 Update:

I implemented a handful of new quality of life improvements today based on feedback from the public round, and I'll plan on pushing all of these out in a new update with version 1.0.11 within the next couple of weeks.

Throw with the Pros Marketing

The Ambassador team is up and running, though it has somewhat unsurprisingly had a pretty minimal impact on subscription revenue. I certainly can't fault the ambassadors for this; Throw with the Pros is free to download and the subscription is so cheap ($0.99/month) that there isn't a ton of incentive for them to be sales people.

I still think it's worth continuing, as there is always the potential for growth and there's essentially zero maintenance cost for managing it. I would also consider adding another 20 or so ambassadors to the team over the next handful of months. I tentatively promised my current ambassadors some Throw with the Pros gear though, so I need to get that obligation taken care of first. I'm not trying to make this sound negative; I'm excited to have some of my good disc golf friends representing the app.

I'm also writing this the afternoon before I'm set to run the first public round for Throw with the Pros. I have the prizes all ready to go, and I've had at least a handful of people already RSVP. I'm sure it will be a pretty small event, but I'm excited for it and think it will be a fun time for everyone regardless.

Salt Lake City has a pretty big (and tight-knit) community of disc golfers, and I hope that the combination of a cool disc golf app and a developer who is local and also a top disc golfer in the area will help to build some engagement with Throw with the Pros. I'll provide an update below from the public round before this goes live...

Business pitches for Throw with the Pros are still ongoing with no major updates, but I'm certainly hopeful on the app's potential over the next couple of years.

06-28 Update:

We had a group of 7 participating in the public round today, and I'd call the event a success overall. Definitely not the biggest turnout, but everyone that was there seemed to have a fun time using the app, most went home with prizes, and I got some positive feedback on what Throw with the Pros does well and where it could be improved. At a minimum, I had a fun time and got a few additional users in the app. I had to eat a couple of leftover donuts and may not run another event for a while (trying to limit marketing spend as a bootstrapped app developer), but would certainly consider another public round in the future.

C1x Development

This has been my biggest project by far over the past month. I've thoroughly enjoyed it though, and the extra attention I've given to C1x has certainly paid off.

I completed my 20th development live stream today, and have in total spent roughly 35 hours building the app. That's less than 1 full week of work at a full-time job, but in those 35 hours I've built an alpha version of C1x which is finished, ready for public testing, and consists of roughly ~7,000 lines of decently efficient code and over a dozen self-made graphics. I'd love to make coding mobile apps a full-time ordeal, and I'd certainly take pumping out a full beta-version of an app every week.

All basic functionality in C1x is in the app and working properly. You can add to and manage a course list, score full rounds on those courses with an interface that's simple and intuitive, and then get detailed statistics on your performance during those rounds which are already a small cut above what's available on all mainstream scoring platforms. There is also functionality in C1x already to view your average statistics over a set time period.

I still have a ton of features to add into the app, but I'm eager to get this initial version into the hands of beta testers within the next week. I've been building up a beta testing list for C1x over the past few weeks using my previous contacts from Throw with the Pros, but I'll continue looking for more over the next couple of months - the more the merrier.

With C1x already providing more data to users about their game than any other available platform and a long list of features to add which will only improve this, I'm pretty optimistic about the app's future. I plan to get testing going and then continue live streaming development as I build towards a finished product and a public launch.

C1x Marketing

My biggest struggle with Throw with the Pros has been marketing, and I'm trying to create methods for improving on this with C1x. I've been posting occasionally to the C1x social accounts to acquire beta testers, but I'm looking more to the future on how I'll market the actual functionalities of the app leading up to launch.

I'm already off to a good start here with a number of post templates I've built which are geared towards advertising C1x as a tool for analyzing my own tournament rounds and the rounds of top pros on the Disc Golf Pro Tour. The templates are built to be easily adjustable for each tournament and are some of the nicest graphics I think I've ever made. This, coupled with the fact that C1x makes round scoring very quick, means that I'll have to put in very little effort to consistently create new advertising material each week as long as I continue playing tournaments and the DGPT continues to exist. For the first time ever I think I'm actually excited to post on social media.

Now that I have a test version of C1x built, I plan on starting up these advertisements within the next few weeks. We'll see how they work!

Professional Disc Golf

I'll start with tournaments. I've played in a couple tournaments since my last post. The first was a fundraiser for a local ultimate frisbee team (Salt Lake Shrimp) which had roughly 80 competitors. The second was the Beehive Classic which is a DGPT Q-Series event meaning it's a qualifier for the Pro Tour.

The Shrimp tournament went well. Players had the option to purchase mulligans for use during the rounds, but I'm cheap and didn't want to buy any. I still managed to win despite not using any mulligans, finishing at a score of -25 through 2 rounds. This event was very casual and just a fun one to play, and I went home with a few prizes for my effort.

The Beehive Classic was a different story. I've been changing my form a lot recently, something I'll cover down below, and this made playing from Golds at The Fort (hardest course in Utah) a real challenge. To be expected I suppose. I played pretty terribly but still managed to finish in the cash and at least put up an even par round to finish which was nearly 1000-rated. Definitely not the result I was looking for, but I know that a part of improving my form is accepting lower results in the short term for better play in the long term.

I'm in the process of reworking everything imaginable in my form. My two DGPT events this year have solidified the need for more distance out of my backhand, and most of the habits I had built up over the past 4 years of playing disc golf were preventing me from getting anywhere substantial above 400'. I'm working now on a longer and more level reach-back, better footwork, and more engagement out of my lower body. I've added about 15' so far but still have a long ways to go.

I've also been changing my putt. I've never been a bad putter, but I really struggle to stay consistent outside of 25', especially when wind is involved. The best putter in the world right now is Gannon Buhr, and after a terrible putting performance in Portland I thought it would be silly to not give his motion a try. Long story short, I love it and am currently doing my best to copy Gannon's motion on every putt. I've added 25' to the distance I'm able to putt standing still, and have ironically noticed that my only issue now is shorter putts. This is 100% just an issue of limited practice, and I have no intention of reverting back to my old putt any time soon.

I've got a few weeks before my next tournament, so the goal is to continue making strides on my backhand and putting form in the meantime. I'd like to be comfortably hitting 450' and an 80% C1x putter by this time, and should have C1x ready to go for verifying this.

Last little shoutout is going to go to Kastaplast who is one of my sponsors this year. They are a disc golf manufacturer based in Sweden and just sent me the coolest player package I've ever received from a sponsor. All of the discs they make are great and I'm definitely hoping to stick with them for the 2026 season.

Substack

I've been thoroughly enjoying writing for Substack over the past few weeks. I started off just writing whatever came to mind, but I'm currently on a schedule of posting twice week. I'm publishing a long-form post every Tuesday which includes my thoughts on a general life topic, typically whatever feels relevant for me that week, and a shorter post every Sunday which includes planning and goal-setting for the coming week. The Sunday posts were something I was doing already, but I thought I could improve upon them slightly and get more practice writing by publishing them to Substack.

I also created a couple of social accounts for Substack (including my first X account) and have been advertising my posts to these. I initially wasn't going to do this, but I discovered a way to build automations which make this effortless after the initial set-up. Shout out to Zapier for making this a possibility.

It took me a little time to get all of the different customization options in my profile all set up on Substack, but it's completed now and the only thing left to do is continue writing. A link to the Substack is available on the 'thoughts' page of this website.

Physics

I finished the first homework assignment in the MIT special relativity course I've been working through. It was hard, and it was made harder by the fact that the course didn't publish any of the lectures from the class; I was essentially just working with the knowledge that I already had before starting the class. I was able to get most of the problems correct despite this, but felt pretty confidently that I'd hit a wall working on anything in the class beyond this first assignment.

To avoid just doing homework with Google and ChatGPT as my guides, I instead decided to find a new course to work through. Brian Greene, a well known professor and physicist at Columbia University, published a very detailed online course in Special Relativity that I'm going to give a try. It looks to be much simpler than the MIT course, so I may need to skip the first few modules, but I think it will be a much better intro to ease back into the world of physics. I haven't completed any work in the course yet, but I'm sure I'll have more thoughts on it by the next update.

Guitar

Brief update here - I've added a handful of new songs to my notebook and am still playing daily. This will continue to be an ongoing project that I pursue in my free time, but isn't something I'm typically setting aside hours at a time to work on.

That's it for June, see you in a month!

Onward,

Dylan