(upbeat music) - Hello everyone and welcome to Disc Golf Daily on the weekends of DGPT history. This week we have a great episode for you. We're interviewing Matt and Josh from Eudisk. I'll be honest, this is probably my favorite interview that I've done so far. Second, maybe would be the one with JVD and Terry. And so I really think everyone's going to enjoy it. It is a little bit on the longer side when we first started recording these interviews. I was really shooting for under an hour. We've since decided to sort of shorten up the format a little bit, so moving forward, these episodes will definitely be shorter than this one, but I think that it's worth the extra time to invest into this episode. So I hope you enjoy it. Matt and Josh are going to be recurring guests on the podcast as we walk through sort of each year as the stats and the technology behind the stats change. They were really integral to sort of helping the initial onset of the tour and they provide some great insights into what really shaped the tour, which was the stat platform that allowed everyone to see the events as they happened. And so I hope you enjoy it, please make sure that if you do enjoy it, you share it with a friend, like and subscribe, all of those great things. We really appreciate everyone who has been listening and we look forward to many more episodes in the future. So enjoy this one with you desk and we'll see you again next week. - Great, so we're here with Matt and Josh, the co-founders of you desk. And since it's your first time here on the show, Matt and Josh, I'd love to hear just a little bit about how you guys got into disc golf. - Can start, this is Matt for anybody not seeing video. I got into disc golf kind of slowly, but I first played when I was about 12. There was a course that went in very close to my parents' house that we used to take bike rides through the park and we loved throwing frisbees, playing catch and we saw people outside throwing these smaller frisbees and my dad went up to one of them and was like, what are you guys doing? And I told them they were playing frisbee golf and then they let me hold one of their discs and I don't know if I threw it or not, but I at least got the touch one. And then later on, my dad was shopping somewhere. I think it was Kmart and over the intercom, they announced that they had a red light special for like $5 you could get a starter pack of lightning discs. So my dad picked those up and brought them home and my brother and I ended up playing maybe four or five times when I was like 12, this wasn't like the late 90s, 98, 99. Played a few times and it was really hard. And so we didn't play anymore after that. And then once I got to college, I picked it up again, partially thanks to Josh and his friends that I met while I was there. So I think that's a good segue for Josh to tell how he got into this golf. - Love it, thanks, Matt. Yeah, so some Josh, the other co-founder, I grew up in Dubuque, Iowa, right on the Mississippi and similar, we got a course installed near one of the middle schools in Dubuque. Early 2000s, I think 2002 or so was my first round, a friend of mine found the course and he took me to the local shop selling this. I bought a shark, an orange shark and went and played my first round in the snow in Dubuque, Iowa and head of all and played quite a bit at that course in Dubuque and then went to school in Ames at Iowa State. That's where I met Matt in the career engineering program and I was eight at a lot of disc golf. We have two courses which he now 20 years ago was a lot and one of them was just across the street and so would work on like the career engineering projects and then walk over to the course and definitely played quite a lot of disc golf in college and that's when our love for this part really developed. - Great, so if I understand the timeline correctly, you guys met because of your major and then sort of started playing disc golf together. - Yeah and a lot of, I grew up in Iowa, not from Minnesota and so I had a lot of friends already at school and there was a whole group from my hometown and then some people that we met the mutual friends and I think Tony Hinker may be a friend of a friend who was Matt's roommate or I don't know exactly what he was in on your football. - Yeah, I can fill in. So Tony Hinker was a guy that Josh was friends with. He lived on the same floor in the dorms as me and so like I knew him and there were a couple other guys that I kind of slowly discovered as I was taking classes with these people that they all knew each other and so Alex, our mutual friend Alex Deitmeyer was one of them. He was an electrical engineer and so we shared a lot of classes together and kind of slowly I figured out that like all these guys were friends and then I kind of like knew Josh, like he was in my classes but I didn't really know him and then eventually, one day we're all just doing homework together I think because friends invited friends and turns out that we had pretty much all the same classes and we all kind of played sporadically as a group. I played a lot with Alex because he ended up being one of my roommates junior year I think. So, yeah, we all played at various frequencies. Yeah, yep. - So, you guys in college playing disc golf and studying to do something I guess somewhat similar to where you disc is today but like when you guys were finishing up your studies was disc golf on the brain as like an industry or were you guys just sort of had your areas of expertise that you were looking to try to get into? - Yeah, the way that the engineering programs at Iowa State worked is for your senior year you had to take a class that was called senior design and the point of it was to do like a year long project in a group and have some kind of deliverable and presentation at the end to just kind of, it's kind of like I think they call it a capstone project at some schools. And the way that it worked was at the beginning of the semester there was you know, a list of 100 different project ideas that were submitted by typically I think it was like local businesses or community members. And there was one in there that was disc golf disc tracker and I was already super hooked on disc golf at this point like I was playing every day and I had been for a year or two at that point. So of course, you know, I picked that as my first choice and I think Josh probably picked it too and I don't know who got to decide who was on which project but I got lucky and got picked to be on that one with my friend Alex who was my roommate and we played all the time. And just what that project was was it was they wanted us to build something that you could stick on a disc and then have a button to push to make it beep so that you could find it. And what it's cool that these days they're actually our products on the market just like that. You know, now we're as far as tech disc and there's other things I think neat, neat is one of them that is a way to, you know, like make your disc play a sound so you can find it and just locate it with various technologies. But this was a very rudimentary like we, I think your budget for the whole year was like $200 and so we had to, you know, hand solder all the circuits and write all the code ourselves and we ended up with something that was, that resembled a hockey puck in size that we would, you know, like glue onto the bottom of a disc. And again, the only thing it could do was beep but we're able to get a key file with like five buttons and pair each button to a different disc and then we're able to, you know, get something that actually worked. - That's, that sounds super cool. So it, but it didn't seem like that, that became your first disc golf job. - No, it's, you know, I've been asked this before and it's always hard to remember the specifics and I've tried many times to dig up like some of the materials we've put together for that project. I found some of it, but part of the one component of it was you had to do some market research. So, you know, like as you would do if you're starting any kind of business just to see like what else is out there and if there are competitors and all that kind of stuff. And I do remember when I was researching the sport, you know, I played, I was very casual but I played all the time as, you know, many disc golfers do even to this day. I had no idea how big the sport was even. This was 2007, 2008. Even back then the sport when I found some numbers about it, I was just kind of blown away by how many courses there were and how many people played. And I remember thinking to myself like, you know, someday, you know, there could be some kind of like business that could be built in the sport but that was never the intention or the goal or the focus. Like you need to be able to make money and pay after seeing loans and support yourself. And disc golf certainly wasn't my first thought to accomplish that. And then I should probably talk to you about his path which is totally different. - Yeah, that's what I was gonna go there next. So, Josh, what was your senior project first before, you know, we get down into the rest of the path? - So, we worked on that, it was an air quality sensor that you would put into the tailpipe of a car and it was a miserable failure. - But a lot of senior design projects don't actually work. I mean, the point of it is really just trying to simulate a little bit closer to what work life is. Most classwork in engineering is really just about problem solving and learning and learning how to learn. And so this was the first time that you have a really open-ended project and then you have to design a solution. So, you know, that's what we worked on. I was very jealous of Matt and a lot of other friends that got to work on the disc golf project but it was just a lot of fun to help them test some of these things and ultimately, you know, I don't think either of us at all thought we would be working in disc golf. We didn't think we'd be mobile developers. I distinctly remember a mutual friend of ours and a land partner of ours got the first iPhone and this is before you could program it. And all of us as developers were trying to figure out how we could hack it and start writing mobile software. But I think I went to visit Matt a year or so after graduation up in Minnesota and that was when you could just finally build your first iPhone apps. And Matt and I had to run together. We were, I'll tell the story, but we were typical post-college grads and we built the beer tracker to figure out how many beers we were consuming. - Yeah, yeah. I feel like I've heard that story before from you guys. But yeah, so, you know, a year post-grad, your building, your first app, were you guys both working in the industry and app development or was app development sort of like a side gig? - Oh, we both went to. - Yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah. - We both went to the commercial, which is a nine. - I think at the time 200,000 person consulting company and really working on solving big company problems. And yeah, I was mostly working in Excel and spreadsheets and, you know, not having a whole lot of fun. - Yeah, I went into, so I worked at Boston Scientific, which is a medical device company. I was more specifically working on pacemaker software. So I was writing a lot of code, but it's like totally different than what a mobile app is. It's like enterprise stuff, which is, you know, you work on one really tiny piece of a really big project with a lot of other people. Super rewarding. You're, you know, helping people live more healthy lives and, you know, helping physicians stay in touch with their patients and monitor their patients and all that kind of fun stuff, but it's not anything like mobile apps at all. What I can say about that too is that I do remember when, like when the first iPhone came out, like Josh said, one of our friends, Nick got one. And as things progressed over the years, I always in the back of my mind was like, I would love to learn how to build apps for these things. Like it's just was something I thought about a lot. And then eventually an opportunity came my way via my job at the time where we went to a conference. And before the conference, there was like this extra, you know, session that you could pay for on Android development. And so I asked my boss if I could take that session. He was like, yeah, sure. It was like a hundred bucks, so he bought me an Android tablet. Actually, I think you got an Android tablet for going to the class, it was something like that. So it went and did that class. It was like, you know, four or five hours of programming. And right away, I was just like, this is so cool. Like you can write code, you can run it on this device that's right here. And that was kind of my first like actual, you know, dipping my toes. And Josh and I had tried to build that iOS beer counting app. And the tooling at the time was like really rudimentary. And it was super, super hard to build apps for iPhones. And we, I think both of us were kind of just like, yeah, you know, this is kind of fun, but it's really hard. And we only had like a weekend to work on it. So it was like, we didn't get the full experience, but that Android route for me was nice 'cause it was the same programming language that I was already doing at my job. So I didn't have to learn that. Whereas with Apple, it was like this totally foreign thing to learn. - Cool. So you're a year post grad, you've done this rudimentary beer tracking app, you're now taking a course. What, I've heard the story personally, but like what led to the creation of, was it called you disc in the beginning or was it called something else? - Yeah, well, it was called you disc MN for Minnesota. That was the very first name. I can tell a little bit about the name and just kind of the genesis to how I'll make it quick since I know people have probably heard the story or if you haven't, get ready. What generally happened was my friends and I, you know, I was like 24 playing disc golf constantly outside of work and we would try to play a new course every weekend since I live in the Minneapolis area. We've got, you know, 130 plus courses within a reasonable distance of the city. And we try to play somewhere new every weekend. One week we went to Bryant Lake Park, which is a very popular, very good course and I'd never been there before. And there were cops there turning everybody away because it was closed for the season. And I was like, oh man, you know, we just drove 40 minutes to get here. Like, where are we gonna go? I don't know this part of town. And I just remember sitting there, my friend pulled over and we're sitting there with our phones, you know, like early iPhones, like 2009, 2010, like trying to figure out where to go. And there just wasn't a good way on a phone specifically. Like there were websites that worked pretty well on your computer, but there was no good way on a phone to just say like, where's the closest course? That's what I wanted. So that was kind of the first time I thought to myself, this would not be hard to build, you just need to do it. And then the name, I was pitching around ideas once I, you know, started building a year or two later and everything was I, whatever back then. So I was like, oh, I disc, like maybe it'll be I disc. And then I told that to a friend and he was like, no, that's stupid. So I called you disc. I was like, why? And his response was, well, you're asking somebody if they played disc golf, what do you say to them? It's like, hey, do you disc? I was like, that's perfect. You already made my marketing tagline and everything. And you know, it's not a terrible name, I'm still pretty happy with it. So I'm glad that I do not name it, I disc. That would have been really dated, really, really dated at this point. So what was the, I mean, outside of the fact that for people who don't already know, it started out with just as a list for Minnesota courses. What was the idea of giving it that tag of MN? Was it just that because of that or was it, were you thinking you would do different iterations per state? Like, what was the thought process there? - Well, the ambitions at the beginning were not, you know, for it to be anything other than something for my friends. And so it was like, well, I live in Minnesota, like I want to find courses to play. And more than anything, like getting, you know, a course directory was challenging. And I got lucky in that there's a very avid course collector named Derek Tan, who used to be based in Minnesota. I think he moved out to the West Coast now. But he maintained, he's a map sky, like he has a business that does mapping. And he maintained his own Google map of all the courses in the state of Minnesota. And so I reached out to him when I was starting this project and I realized, well, this is useless if I don't have courses in it. And I reached out and was like, hey, you know, could I use this map to build this thing? And he's like, sure, and he just sent me, you know, a file with all the courses in it. And so that's why I was used to get MN because there was no ambition for it to be for anybody other than my friends. And then once I, you know, got something working, I was like, oh, maybe other people in Minnesota would find this useful. And so I shared it on Facebook and changed the name pretty quickly because I started adding other states pretty fast after that. - So one of the original ideas, which I think is something that people find really valuable today, was because of not knowing that a course was closed. And so I mean, I assume that the course closed sort of notification and that sort of information has always been sort of user data driven. It's not something that like you were seeking out to try to maintain yourself as like an administrator or something. - Yeah, sort of case by case basis. In the early days, there was no concept of statuses like that. So it was just purely like the name of the course, how many holes it was, the city it was in and a description that you could write. And so in the early days, you'd probably have to edit the course's description to say the course is closed until the spring. And yes, it was all, you know, user submitted, but when it was just, you just got mad, you know, I was pretty in touch with what was happening in the courses at least in the cities. And so I probably updated many of them myself in those early days to just say it was closed or there's a pretty thriving Facebook group in the Twin Cities where people would always be posting about stuff being closed or being opened. And typically I would see that and then go update the app. - Yeah, and I guess actually, as someone who lives in the south, something that we did sort of gloss over here too, is that if you're new to Northern Disc Golf, course is closed during the winter. And in some cases, they may even get pulled depending on the park, whether it is to keep people out of, I know in Michigan to keep them out of Toboggan Hills, in some cases or to keep the mud down in other places or other things that the park has planned. I know that the closest thing that I've ever come to living in the south is that I've known of a few courses that get pulled because Christmas lights get put up in the park and so they don't want people throwing around the Christmas lights. But yeah, so that's just a note as to sort of the course being closed for the season thing. I know that some people might not be accustomed to that. - Yeah, I do need to put a caveat there. Like in Minnesota, we really don't close many courses. Bryant Lake is really the only one that I can think of that closes in the winter and it's because it's a city owned, like very, very nice piece of property and I don't want the grass to get destroyed kind of like a regular golf course. Our courses stay open, Wisconsin, I know in like Madison, the Madison area, almost all of their courses get totally pulled in the winter because, I think because of cross country skiing. So there's a lot of like multi-use things but like here typically they're not closed just because it's cold, we still play all year. - Yeah, so you've developed this app. At what point does Josh sort of reenter the picture? - When he was at 14, so I think Matt had been running the app. I was one of his earliest beta testers actually really early on just to support. And then 2014 in January, I was still working at the big consulting company and took a month off to go hunting in New Zealand. And when you're hiking in New Zealand on a long three day hike, you really start to think about life and what you want to do. And I realized that I really wanted to work on a mobile app. And so I came back from New Zealand. I put my consulting job and reached out to Matt and said, hey, would you like some help? I'm willing to work for free. I just want to learn how to write mobile software. So first thing I really worked on was the, what we called like Yudis Cloud at the time. So it was the syncing feature more called card cast now, a little bit where you could play with other people on the same card and have a shared scorecard and link up your accounts and just have that stuff. So all this really fun stuff. So I was in sort of the summer of 2014 is when I really got so at Yudis cool. Two years into Yudis existence over 10 years ago, right around 10 years ago. - Awesome. And so yeah, that was, I was having a conversation today about something completely different. And I said, oh, that was five years ago. And I realized like it's, it doesn't feel like, I think, you know, whether some people blame it on COVID, people blame it on other things. It's kind of crazy how much the sport has definitely grown and changed since COVID, but even in the past 10 years as people who've been around it that entire time. So, so 2014 you're working on, you know, some of the new newer aspects. It's no longer just a directory of courses at this point or it's starting to shape into new things. Then the whole sort of point obviously of this podcast is to sort of get into some of the background and history of the Pro Tour. The Pro Tour starts to come or officially comes on to the scene in 2016, but in many ways for it to come on to the scene in 2016 conversations with you guys at Yudisque had to happen before then. So, what was sort of the genesis of Yudisque going from a course tracking app and a scorekeeping app to being introduced as a like stats platform for professional disc golf? - This is a fun story that I like to tell. So towards the end of 2015 for anybody that wasn't around disc golf then, there suddenly popped up multiple new tours that were gonna start in 2016. I think there was the Disc Golf World Tour, the Disc Golf Pro Tour, which I think were announced in like the same week, middle to end of 2015, like after the summer, I think. And then there was also the American Disc Golf Tour, which I think if anybody knows about that, go look at a fun YouTube. That I think was of one event. But anyway, these tours started popping up and it was late 2015 and I'd been following the news. Like I kind of followed the pros at that point, not like a ton, but I remember watching Worlds and some stuff on Smashbox TV that was live. But anyway, I was in the Boston area randomly for the first time in my life. And I get an email in my inbox from Steve Dodge and right away, like I had a few friends that were very big into Vibram. And so like I knew who Steve Dodge was because he was the head of Vibram Disc Golf and one of my friends in particular, it was like very obsessed with Vibram. Anyway, I get this email and I see it Steve Dodge. I'm like, oh, I know who that is, that's cool. And it basically was like, hey, I'm Steve Dodge. I'm starting a pro tour for Disc Golf is what he called it. I'd love to talk and see if there's a way that we can work together. And so I looked him up and I realized that he was based in kind of the Boston area and I was like, this is crazy. Like I replied to him like, hey, I know I'd love to talk. I'm actually randomly in this area right now. And he replied with, let's get dinner. Are you free tomorrow? He was like, yeah, sure. But you'll have to come to me 'cause I didn't have access to a car on this trip. So anyway, we made plans to get dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in the Burlington Mall. I think in Lowell, Massachusetts, I think is where it was. And it's always hard to remember all the specifics about it but I remember him showing up and the restaurant was super busy and we had to wait for maybe an hour or something for a table and we went and sat on the floor in the mall, like pulled out our laptops and started talking ideas and was getting to know each other a little bit and learning what his vision was and talking about what you just could do and how many people were using the app and what our reach was and all that kind of stuff. We attended together, we chatted about everything and by the end of the meal, I think we were pretty aligned that there was something we could do together. Yeah, we were already talking about building some kind of live scoring for just the regular EDS gap and we wanted to start scoring tournaments and all this other stuff. It was just kind of a natural progression of what we were doing with the app. And now that Josh was around more or less full time by then, it was something that seemed like, yeah, we should totally do this and we've got enough people to do it, two people. So yeah, that's very serendipitous meeting that we were able to meet in person. So, yeah, one and a half. 'Cause I still had a full 10 job at this time. That's where Josh and Josh were at. Yeah, that's for people who haven't caught on yet, we're taking a really slow roll through the history of the Pro Tour. And so you'll have to come back to figure out at what point in the history of the Pro Tour, Matt decided to go full time for you disc because it might take longer than you expect. Or maybe as sooner, I guess you can place your bets now. But so when in 2015 was that meeting and so 'cause, I mean, we know, I guess we'll get to bike at what point in 2016, you had to be ready to launch, but yeah. - This was November of 2015, like early November, I remember correctly. So it was almost winter and the tour was gonna start next June. - Yeah, so you had basically seven months if you wanted to stretch it to the day that the tour started to get something up and running. So what did that development process then look like? I mean, I think one of the things that is sort of a foregone conclusion now is like all of the different stats and even kind of how we track the stats. But I mean, none of that existed before. - Yeah, I can jump in here. So, I mean, there was probably still a month of back-and-forth emails with Steve. This was a big decision for Matt and me at the time because we were still operating with, it was growing really fast. We had over 100,000 people using utis. There was gonna be a really big sacrifice as Matt mentioned, event scoring was on a road map, but probably a year or two down the line. And so we had to make this big decision of, do we wanna focus and spend the next four or five months building this really complicated scoring platform for this still made up disc golf road tour, right? We didn't know if it was gonna be successful. And so we had a lot of conversations on, is this the right decision for us? And do we wanna spend this amount of time? I mean, it was packing years worth of work into a few months realistically. And so I think we probably got that all figured out by sometime in December, and then really got to work at that point. And it was a... - In retrospect, knowing what we know now, pretty crazy decision and really big risk. But I mean, that's what... - We didn't really call ourselves a company at the time, really even. This was still a hobby project we were just having fun. But taking risks is sort of what we're all about. And just a lot of fun. It was a fun challenge. And I mean, exactly the kind of thing that we love to do at U disc. So happy to get into, like you said, the score entry. That was something that I'm really proud of personally. I mean, it's a... Sorry, I hope you can't go. It's a noise behind you right now. But really just at U disc, we think a lot about the experience. And it's for the fans, of course, but also the scorekeepers, the people that have to volunteer and enter the information. And I think Matt even built a really early concept and the way that we could control the stats was you said, "I got a three on this hole. "I took two putts in circle one. "I got one OB stroke." And it would seem like eight questions at the end of every single hole. And we put that together and it worked, but it was a terrible experience. And I think the other two are actually went with something similar to this and they had it all on paper. But we just weren't happy with it. And I just kept thinking there had to be a better way. And at that sort of aha moment, where it was just, let's blow this all up and let's not try and figure out what stats and all that. Let's just take it back to the basics of where did the just land. And so we came them up with the landing zone methodology and the new score entry system and put that together for our prototype pretty quickly. And it just, it felt so much better. - Yep, we recognized that, I think one, I remember asking Steve actually at Cheesecake Factory because he was like, "We're gonna have, we need all these stats. "We need stats for the tour." And I was like, "This is gonna be very challenging "because you're gonna have to have somebody walking "with every group." And he was kind of like, "Don't worry, I'll take care of that. "I'll make sure that there's people with every group." And so then from that point, we realized, "Okay, if we're gonna have people with each group, "they're not necessarily gonna be very seasoned disc golfers "that know the rules and have played "in tournament situations and know that you can't, "that put from inside 10 meters and things like that." And so one of our big design constraints once we got past my initial very bad prototype was that somebody's mom that's never played disc golf should be able to come out and successfully keep track of where the throws are landing. So once we landed on the like, where did the throw land and you're just tapping on the zone that it landed in. And all the stats are being calculated. Nobody's actually entering any stats at all. That was just such a huge turning point to be like, "Okay, we're really on to something here. "This is easy." And it is intuitive once you understand the terminology. So then our kind of big hurdle is explaining to people what the terminology meant. - And what circle two was. - It was hard enough to explain, circle two didn't exist before we invented it. And that was hard enough. I just kind of imagined trying to explain. Here's what a scramble is. You need to understand what a scramble is and calculate this. And so I mean, people, that was the biggest learning curve. Initially was just trying to educate people. And so we put a lot of time into that scorekeeper experience and the education and into the rollout planning and the strategy and the testing and all that. And even that saying, having somebody walking with the groups, that wasn't an obvious thing either. We talked about having one person per whole and then we'll have the end of our fives. And if you have two groups on the whole and what if you have one person every few holes that captures the stats and you want some of the information, but we set the constraints early on. We wanted this to be a, we called it an instant scoring system when we first released it. 'Cause there was another one that called itself live that was oftentimes 10, 20 minutes behind. And so we really wanted that instant feeling where you could kind of create that sense of, I'm not there, but I know what's going on. And also we really wanted every group to be covered. And that was one of the constraints that we sat really early on too, was that we don't just want one or two cards to have the stats we want every single player that's there to have stats because everybody has fans at home, everybody has family. And also it's really fun as you go down the line and you can look at some of the players that are top touring players now and look at their first event that they played back in 2016. And so it's really nice. Those are some of the constraints that we had set for ourselves. - Yeah, I think it's, I look forward to talking about future seasons where we started working together, the three of us and had to navigate some of those things. But so the circle two was created. How early on was that created as an idea? - I think there was some initial, like Steve had some initial concepts as like he wanted some level of putting. I don't remember, I remember being on the call with Matt and Steve when we were tossing back and forth. Like we thought about calling it the donut and the ring and there was just like the 20 meter circle. We had, I'm not even sure exactly where the name came from, but pretty early on we had that in our concepts that we were working through. - And then, yeah, and then scrambling. You made a good point about like helping people understand what a scramble is. I do still think that one of the biggest questions that I've ever answered for people that are scorekeepers is what's on the fairway and what's not. And so it's funny because even though we sort of solved, or I say we, you guys solved for like calculating what a scramble is, it's still a very interesting thing to try to navigate with people who don't, to your guys' point, someone's mom who is out there seeing disc golf for the first time or something like that. - Yeah, and it's easier on a course like Maple Hill than you're in Tor, like a Jones course or something like that where sometimes there's some subjectivity to it. But one of the great things with numbers is that once you get a lot of them, all that sort of works itself out. Early on talking about user experience, we used to actually capture exact cutting distances. And for a season, if you go back to 2016 and we decided you can see the exact cutting distances. We'll talk about this as we did in other seasons, but we made changes and improvements in streamline to really think about the experience of people, the volunteers, that's just been such an important thing. - Yeah, and one more thing on the fairway stuff before we move off, like in the initial version of You Just Live, we actually had left fairway, center fairway, right fairway and shortening I think as well. Because there was maybe this theory that there might be some statistical conclusion that we could draw based on people always landing left fairway, right fairway or something. And very quickly, I think we realized that that just wasn't really a thing. - It just wasn't a thing, right Matt? - Yeah, yeah. - I think that was going on. Because we did a lot of testing internally and we ran a test in Minnesota with a bunch of different groups. And we actually, our second ever test was in Urros in Norway. Somebody, Steve had just reached out and so he's the guy that runs the PCS open. And so that was our second ever test back in early 2016. And so we got a lot of feedback and tried to make sure that we could streamline the experience. - Yeah, so as you were doing that, how quickly did you get to the testing phase to be able to start streamlining those things? - Well, before we even got there, one of the biggest realizations, we were probably too unsinged to building this when we realized we needed a website. So this, all of our talk before that was, we're gonna build this mobile app and we started building a mobile app. So we had custom mobile apps and we kept this all very purposefully separate from the UDS gap because we didn't want UDS live crashing to bring down the UDS app. We didn't want issues with UDS to bring down UDS live. So we kept everything fully isolated. But we didn't think about needing a website until a couple of months in where we had the whole scoring system working and then we said, well, we need a leaderboard. And initially we were gonna build it all on the mobile app but then we thought, well, that's not a great experience for the fans, like getting back to that fan experience. And I hadn't built a website in 10 years. And so, okay, we need a website, let's figure it out. And so I did a bunch of research from the technology that would work that would give us that real-time deal that we really needed to top myself out of how to program and node and JavaScript. And we pulled that together pretty quickly. - So that was still all early in 2016. Probably testing started March, April timeframe would be my test. - Yeah, I think, I think like end of, we're beginning of April, maybe, it was like the first time that we could actually, yeah, I mean, I remember setting up some like fake tournaments with my friends and four of us would go play and it would be on, you know, UDS live. But there was no like test with, you know, lots of scorekeepers or lots of players or anything like that and if you're curious, we can tell you more about like what we did to actually test it versus, you know, launching. - Yeah, I think it'd be great to hear. I mean, I thinking about disc golf timelines. So for people who aren't inside the industry, Matt and Josh talked about how like at, for most of the time, this was sort of a hobby. It wasn't a job. And so disc golf timelines tend to be inside the industry a whole lot shorter than you would think or expect them to be. So to be completely honest, while as a programmer and as someone trying to bring this type of product to market, having three months to test and get it out is a nightmare, it actually sounds like a lot of time in disc golf time. So like first off, I think kudos to getting and getting what you had turned around in four months time and kind of less to the point of being able to test it. But yeah, what did that early testing look like? Besides just, I guess taking it from the individual card of you and four friends to, you know, the next levels. - Yeah, I mean, there's so many types of testing, right? Where first we wanted to test the user experience of just entering to make sure that that would work. And so, you know, Matt and his nights and weekends, 'cause she was still working a full-time job would be testing as we went. And then we would meet with Steve every few weeks and sort of get his feedbacks because, you know, we'd certainly leaned on Steve as an experienced TD and somebody that was more involved in this area and, you know, and just the event management and had a closer eye on what the players would like. - Well, and even, I think even one other thing that I think gets glossed over not to interrupt you is that Steve also was a statistician, right? - Yeah. - So like he is a numbers guy through and through. And so he also cared about it from that standpoint. - Yeah. And we got a lot of feedback from him on how we should and, you know, this predates Circle One X, what's called "Pell the Story". If we invented that a few seasons then, but just getting Steve's feedback on how we thought the best way to calculate a scramble would be and different ways that we could do all these stats. But we focused on, you know, the core experience of keeping score and having that swap on a leaderboard and the ranking first. And then we started to layer in the stats and layer and, you know, the little stats view of the scorecard when you've expanded down. And then we added, I remember adding the player profile pages and the season stats and the tournament stats. But you can start testing before you have most of that complete, right? The first thing we need to test is like, can you put a score in on your phone and it shows up on a website? And when that first happened, like that's a, that felt really cool. And the first version of the website was just a bunch of numbers. It was really ugly, but we could get an end-to-end enter some information and it shows up and that's, you know, that's the right way to build software is to make sure that you get the first part done and then you can start to add all the bells and whistles and, you know, even for season one, we didn't have nearly what we had for season eight. But there was a lot of the building blocks were already there. And another big, you know, as we were testing stuff, we were told, you know, we had never been to Maple Hill ourselves. Steve, obviously, you know, has been there a few times. But we were told pretty early on that the cell signal of Maple Hill was not very good. And even to this day, it's still not very good. But back then it was even worse. And so we knew that we had to do a lot of work around making sure that scores would actually get uploaded to make sure we had a way to retry over and over and, you know, failover and just make sure that it actually gets up there. And so we were doing a lot of stuff to test that and to, you know, simulate bad network conditions and recovering from the app crashing and all these kinds of crazy things that you may not think about unless you're the one actually building it. So that was a big component of testing. - Off of the code is just making sure that if there's a failure, like we can recover from that. - Yeah. And I think it was as someone who worked pretty closely with live scores for quite some time. It was always really interesting to see the shock on their face whenever you got to tell them, if anything bad happens, just close the app and reopen it or, you know, do this other thing to, and it's also gonna be there. And they, you know, would just be so surprised 'cause they were so worried that they were gonna have to remember or re-enter all of those things. But to you guys is crediting, you guys planned for that, you know, and built it in. And I think that that really, to your point about building blocks probably helped make things a whole lot easier as time went along to have all those fail safes in place. - Yeah, I think in retrospect, it's really good that that first tournament, like we knew that the network conditions were gonna be bad. So we had to do that from the get go of it probably made us design it in a little bit better way. We were just like not worried about that or didn't think about it. But, you know, being mobile app developers, we always do have to consider, you know, your connection. That's just something that is always-- - Airplane mode tests. So we're constantly putting our devices into airplane mode and taking them back off and turning off our Wi-Fi and just there's so many different scenarios. And it's hard to simulate real world, but we tried as hard as we could. - I guess, I mean, like, we've been flirting with it this whole time as sort of like the lead up to the start of the first season. And really for posterity sake, I don't really wanna dive into us getting to Maple Hill 'cause there's a lot to really just kick off season one with a bang. But like, what, is there anything, I guess, before things started between that April, start of testing to then that should be highlighted? - I think one of the fun stories was we haven't, we had a pretzemox, right? This is "Alty World" got started in 2016 as well. And Steve and sent out a press release. I don't know who we all sent it to, but we did a demo, Matt and I did a demo. And I think Steve Hill was the only one that joined. Matt says maybe one other person joined, but that's the state of disc golf moves back then. There was one podcast, it was the Smashbox podcast and there was one, I think this is after all things disc golf dating. And so it was basically "Alty World" and Steve Hill who now works for us, got this VS demo. You just live and wrote a story about it to build a little bit of hype for this new scoring system. - Yep, and this was like mid-May. So yeah, about a month before the first tournament was when we were able to like demo articles a little up. - Yeah, we think I did the article, I found it earlier that's good. - I think the crazy thing for me as someone watching from the outside, so I started following professional disc golf around 2012, 2013. And so for me it was really exciting to see these two competing tours, how is this going to happen? And the third tour of like the American tour, which is like that's like a ESPN 30 for 30 like waiting to happen right there. But yeah, so it was fine to watch. And I think I do remember seeing probably something what Steve put out about the scoring coming out because it really was something that even Steve dodged to that point, he really found it to be important to have a way to track. And I mean, for people who weren't around back then, PDGA live technically existed in this really weird format that you got numbers, you got the pars. And it was also only if some volunteer was willing to input it. And I do remember at one point even, at one point probably around 20, maybe 2015, it might have been as early as 2014, Terry would be out at tournaments. And because he was out at tournaments, whether he was doing Smashbox or just recording post-production for his channel, sometimes he would give the PDGA login code to someone to be able to keep the live scores. And so it was like this little treat if you were a fan of disc golf to be able to pull it up and see how the scores were. Because really, the PDGA only guaranteed it at NTs and majors. But they're-- - And even that not everything. - Right, I don't know. - And you have to remember back, like whole by whole scores weren't in the end, right? You went on the PDGA page and you'd only see the whole score. And so there was no view of how people scored on it at all. - You would be lucky if it was lead in chase card. And so if someone was winning off of the third card, no one knew it was happening. - So, say-- - Unless it's Twitter, but you still have a little Twitter at the bottom. That was the Marty Rigg while I thought it was time to go-- - Marty. - Enter that in by, you know, he would just be tweeting and that was the best one to follow. - Yeah, yeah, so-- - And that still felt great at the time. - Yeah, and it's, I mean, the, I really think that one of the things that gets overlooked and definitely I feel like probably now in the age of 2024 got overlooked a lot is just how integral having something like Yudisk was to making the tour successful and the fact that it was there from the beginning. I think that the one thing, there's a lot of people, actually, I can't even say a lot of people. There's quite a few people who have been around from the beginning of the tour that are still on the back end, helping in different areas. But as far as like frontward facing goes, there's really only four people that I think have sort of been really like out in public in it from the beginning. And that's you two at Yudisk and then Johnny V. and Terry. And like, those are the people that can really tell us a full history of like living and breathing almost every event. And outside of that, you know, we've got definitely a lot of people that have helped out either with individual events or on the back end. But there's really only the four of you guys that can give us a complete picture. And hopefully, I think that one thing that the whole goal of this for me, that I hope people start to pick up and understand is just really, and I've already said this before with other people on the podcast to just how few people there were in the beginning to help get this started. - We had one and a half of this is Martin the Pro Tour, had, right? Steve was off maybe at that time. He was still working full time, at least that I think at Vibram for a good amount of the time. I don't remember exactly when he quit, but yeah, he was juggling. - Yeah, the 2016 season. So we, if you've listened to the episode with Steve, he talks about how he made the 2016 season work, oh, working for Vibramand also sort of getting the tour off the ground. But yeah, it really is sort of a testament. I think that people don't realize like how lucky in some ways different areas of the business have been. I mean, Josh, you being willing to just sort of say, "I want to explore this career path. "What would it look like for me to do this "without compensation, you know, "is like one of those pieces of the puzzle?" I think when we talk to JVD and Terry, people get to hear some of the ways that JVD made live broadcast work back at the beginning. And it's, you know, it's pretty wild to see. - We got some fun stuff to talk about. I think in season one is probably when we talk about that, because I just sat right next to Johnny the app. I had Maple Hill and realized how he was doing things, and I said, "There's a better way. "Let me go do some things." So I think that's just such a piece prior to Steve Dodge, so is that he had nothing to work with, and he managed to bring this tour just out of nothing. And just what he did was he found really good people that were already working in disc golf. Ourselves included and said, "Do you want to be part of something?" And he sold us on a dream. And, you know, we made the decision of, "You know what, we want to help this out. "We think this could be huge." And also, this is really fun and disc golf needs it. And, you know what, we're willing to work on this for really nothing, you know, because we want it to exist. And I think just so much credit to Steve for being that visionary to make something happen. - Yeah, and I think at the risk of previewing maybe a little bit too much, for me personally, I didn't come into the scene until 2017. And the one thing that Matt's story about how him and Steve met, the funniest takeaway from when Steve and I talked on the phone for the first time whenever I was coming on board, he goes, "Well, I should add you as a friend on Facebook." And then he looks me up and he goes, "Wait, we're already friends on Facebook." And just in a testament to Steve and what he was doing at Vibrom in 2013, I had won some prize from Vibrom and he had to connect with me on Facebook to get it fulfilled. And so, you know, I think that it's... Steve really is a guy who had a vision and he just sort of stepped out and took it somewhere. And it's gonna be great to hear, I think the ups and downs of that as we get further into the podcast. So I think unless there's anything else you guys wanna add, I think that's probably a great place for us to wrap it up today. I really appreciate you guys. I appreciate what you did in 2015 and I appreciate your willingness to sort of contribute to this as we go through each of the years moving forward. - I feel myself, it's been fun to walk down memory lane a little bit and reminisce. Definitely some things that I've forgotten as we went on, I can try to remember all the... The crazy work that people did in such a short period of time to bring this into existence. - I'll do it again, please. - It was at least this first season. I think there's some regrets and the personal sacrifices that we did to the tour, my gosh, a little, got to be a little excessive over the years, but yeah. - There's still a lot more of the story to tell so I'm definitely excited for future versions of this. We're not even to the first tournament yet. - Yeah, for sure. - There's plenty of really, really interesting and fun things that happened, especially that first year. - Yeah, for sure, awesome. Well, thank you guys and we'll look forward to having you on the next one. (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for watching. Please like, subscribe, comment, and share. It really does help us grow. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]
