Tuesday tee times became a regular thing for Nate Klyn and Gracen Kostelecky.
“We’d get out at 6 a.m., go play nine holes and then go start our day jobs,” Kostelecky said.
But wanting those early slots had them setting alarms at that same time a week before, when they were released to the public.
And that plan didn’t always work out for them, especially at their favorite courses like Lakewood’s Fox Hollow and Golden’s Fossil Trace.
“And a lot of times we’d forget, and somebody would hop on and steal that tee time,” he said.
Though they don’t get out and play as much these days – both now have kids and Klyn recently relocated from Denver to Kansas City – their startup Birdiewatch aims to solve that problem.
The site aggregates tee times and prices for the user, letting them filter out courses based on location, number of holes or cart preference.
The pair have 65 public golf courses and 20 simulators available to choose from across the Denver area. Golfers go to Birdiewatch, pick their desired course and then it redirects the user to the course’s homepage to book.
In the next few weeks, Klyn said Birdiewatch will also service Fort Collins, Loveland and Colorado Springs, among other Front Range cities.
“Itap like Google Flights or Kayak or Expedia, but for golf courses,” Klyn said.
Birdiewatch doesn’t charge any fees or take a cut from the cost of booking, like their main competitor, the Comcast-owned GolfNow. Instead, Klyn and Kostelecky plan to make their money through subscriptions, which run $60 annually or $8 a month. Those allow golfers to get custom text or email alerts for times and courses of their choosing, a key pain point from their playing days.
Out of the 500 registered accounts on Birdiewatch, 40 are paying members, they said. The rest get access to the site’s aggregation and redirection for free.
“GolfNow is great, but there’s an added fee and they only represent like 15% of the total golf courses,” Klyn said, explaining that courses won’t sign up for the booking service to avoid getting a chunk out of their game fee.
“So we want to represent 100% and we don’t want added fees,” he continued. “We don’t want to take anything from the golf course and we don’t want to add more fees to the user.”
The pair also hopes to add revenue through sponsorships and ads on the website. They have no plans to add fees like GolfNow to their service, betting that more courses will give them a broader reach and enough subscribers to keep the lights on.
The two met 15 years ago through mutual friends when they were in college, Klyn at Northern Iowa and Kostelecky at Iowa State. After school, they both ended up in Chicago where Klyn worked in data engineering and Kostelecky worked in web design. Klyn came to Denver 10 years ago and Kostelecky, who still lives in Lakewood, arrived four years after him.
They started on Birdiewatch two years ago, garnering feedback from their golfer friends before rolling out its initial version last August. They updated it in March and added the subscription tier, putting a total of $2,300 to date into the buildout.
They are still keeping their day jobs but are gearing up to expand out of state in the future.
“At the end of the summer we’ll have a very clear path of what the next 12 months look like for us,” Kostelecky said. “We’re going to go to X number of cities, and here’s our marketing plan, and do we need to hire more people? Do we need contractors?
“This does take a decent chunk of our time, and so if we’re going to expand how are we going to handle that?”
Read more from our partner, .
