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Comment by cmaxwell | Hacker News Reader

-$20/mo from http://www.golfingstat.com. Can't get any traffic and the traffic I do get doesn't click on ads. FML

That's really a pity because I expect the golf demographic to substantially overlap with the middle-aged-white-guy demographic which I've seen have high CPCs.

How are you driving folks to the site?

I can't speak for other countries, but in Australia there is an 'official' handicap tracking system already in existence: http://www.golflink.com.au/index.aspx?from=menu

To the best of my knowledge, every registered club golfer is allocated a Golflink number, and the result of each competition round is recorded for calculation handicaps. I don't recall what detailed information is recorded - it might be nothing other than the round result - but for many people this would be 'enough'. I had thought about developing such a system too, but thought that without creating an 'official' relationship with Golflink my semi-parallel system would (in Australia at least) go nowhere. However, I still think it is a very good idea, as many golfers really love to track all sorts of stats and info.

Dude, charge for this. Seriously. Add some value by providing personalized practice tips.

If this had a mobile app I could carry around a golf course and map my every shot, I would pay plenty of cash for that. Automated stats that would help me focus on the shortcomings of my games and let me understand the trends of my shots.

In fact, I may have given myself an idea...

I would have loved this kind of thing when I played junior golf. I spent a lot of time making spreadsheets with all of my statistics. Have you tried marketing towards junior players? AJGA and some of the really competitive junior tours have a lot of serious players who would love to have comprehensive stats on their rounds.

My 3 cents worth.

* General design needs rework especially the blog.

* Can you make an app to allow quick data entry.

* Most importantly why not try and build a social aspect? Forum / Leaderboard functionality. Is that too 2009?

It looks similar to StrokePlay (http://www.strokeplaypro.com/).

The developer has a really good blog describing his micro ISV experiences, but it hasn't been updated recently.

I built something similar to this back in 2007 and while it did ok for a few years it eventually fell off of a cliff. It's difficult to compete now against free alternatives and cheap mobile apps.

I had $200 of adsense free credit. Ended up getting users (like 100).

Then I had $50 of Facebook credit and that turned into like 20-30 users.

Just don't know what to do at this point. Don't want to spend more time adding features if it is not going to lead to anything.

Was thinking of making it like $10 a year or something and trying to get paid users instead of ad users. Just not sure if anyone would even pay $10.

The beauty of golf is people spend a lot of money on it. I'd charge people a premium to use it. Couple recommendations: Lose the pop-up for Facebook sign-in. Optimize it for mobile (you're probably going to use this while you're in the cart). For marketing, try going directly to some clubs and getting in front of some of their members. Some exclusive clubs probably won't let you, but start small. Can't hurt.

Thanks... I introduced the popup for facebook sign-in and it didn't change my conversion for new (adwords) visitors but like 10% more signed up with facebook so I kept it.

My site posts a timeline post when a user creates a new round (unless you have turned that off). So it is kind of a free impression so I prefer facebook sign-ups. Maybe that is a project for the winter make it mobile (jquery mobile?) and implement some sort of payment system. $10/year seems fair to me. Just have to figure out an amount that will cover my hosting + adwords spend on a typical month.

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