TL;DR: Community Building Lessons from the Fairway
- Ship experiments fast: Three weeks is enough to plan, promote, and run your first event; feedback beats perfection
- Communities scale their founding demographics: Like a fractal, representation preserves its shape as it scales. The composition of your group at 50 predicts the composition when you scale to 500
- Events operate like machines: Design for logistics and throughput, test concepts iteratively, optimize for word-of-mouth growth
- Pay your organizers or burn out: Volunteer energy depletes faster than startup runway; sustainable community requires sustainable economics. Charge your attendees, they value what they pay for
- Cross-pollinate different worlds: Innovation happens at intersections; golf + entrepreneurship created connections neither could alone
- Many-to-many beats one-to-many: To scale a community, deputize dozens of leaders instead of being the sole organizer; more leaders mean more collisions of people and ideas
Every Startup Community Needs Fun Experiments
Buffalo Open Coffee Club was crushing it. Every Tuesday morning, 150 people showed up downtown at 8 a.m. for coffee and startup conversations. But we had a gap: no evening events. That meant we were missing the portion of the market that can't make mornings (parents and people with hourly jobs that started early).
My solution sounded comical: Bad Golf Business School.
Peers teaching each other on the course at night. Founders learn golf, golfers learn business.
I was in my mid-thirties and had never swung a club, but I'd always wanted to learn. Some of my friends in Buffalo's startup community were golfers, so I proposed blending my two interests: entrepreneurship and exploring a new hobby. They liked the name, so they agreed to give it a try.
A personal objective with this project was stepping back from being the sole organizer. Jack Greco, my friend, and boss at the time, and I had a goal at this stage in Buffalo's startup ecosystem development: many-to-many community building. Instead of one leading organization, deputize dozens and let market forces take over.
So I recruited two co-organizers to help solidify the mash-up: John Osberg brought the golf from his PGA and First Tee background, and John Kappel brought the business as Co-founder of 3D printing company and a passion for expirential marketing. More leaders, mean more collisions of people and ideas.
Why Golf Matters for Founders
Business culture still happens on the course. Like it or not, deals get made between the tee and the green. I wanted it to be easier for founders to learn to golf.
The Johns recommended Bob-O-Links, a nine-hole course in Orchard Park, NY with floodlights. Weekday nights meant cheaper tee times, which matched our scrappy startup vibes.
The framework was simple: casual golf pointers and etiquette mixed with entrepreneurship conversations in groups of four or five. Give people loose structure, then let relationship building do the rest.
Communities Grow in the Shape of Their First Members
Like a fractal, the structure of a group holds as it scales. The demographics at 50 anticipate the pattern you’ll see at 500.
The hardest part? Convincing underrepresented founders to join the party. Golf feels like foreign territory for many. The fix that worked: I personally invite a few of my founder friends and explained my fractal theory of community growth. Then asked them to personally invite their friends, that built critical mass. Photos from our first outing on social media reinforced the message: everyone is welcome.
The First Sessions: Classic Scrappy Startup
We met in the parking lot. Paid our greens fees. Gave some preliminary instruction on the driving range and putting green. Then set out to play nine holes under the lights.
People borrowed clubs to shanked balls into the trees. Lost balls into the black abyss outside the flood lights. Laughed at their terrible swings. But it worked.
After a few sessions, we were comfortable enough with golf to not embarass ourselves at charity outings. More importantly, our golfers built network connections and new friendships that lasted beyond the round.
We tweaked logistics each week. Adjusted scheduling. Experimented with invites. Worked deals with the golf course. Those are lessons you only learn by doing. Wrong action is better than inaction, waiting to ship doesn't give you the feedback you need to be successful.
Eventually, I completely handed the reins to Osberg and Kappel. They grew it for a few more years before winding it down.
Events Are Products That Don't Behave Like Code
Golf surprised me. It's meditative and ritualistic. A mental game that rewards continuous improvement, stoicism, and repeatability. That mirrors what I care about in business and what I love in jiu-jitsu.
But the bigger insight was reframing events as products. Events are operational machines. You design for logistics and throughput. Manage invitations and mix the right people. Test new concepts. Keep what sticks.
Getting to product-market fit with events is harder than software. People don't behave like code. You can't debug human chemistry or patch social dynamics. Every event brings constraints and surprises that demand real-time adaptation. Success requires as much people skills as process discipline.
If I Ran It Today
I would charge more and pay the organizers more. Volunteer energy burns out faster than startup runway.
I count the project as a success. People had fun. People learned skills. People built friendships. The event series survived beyond my involvement. Sometimes the best measure of an organization's utility is if it can exist without its founder.
The Three-Week Framework for Weird Ideas
Want to run a quirky crossover event? Keep it simple. Find a partner. Use AI to write copy and research your audience. Spin up a simple website with a signup form. Run pay-per-click ads or drop QR codes in coffee shops.
Then ship the first event fast. Three weeks is enough:
- Week one: plan
- Week two: promote
- Week three: run the event
At the end of the month, you have feedback and momentum. That's how Bad Golf Business School worked. A weird experiment that proved its usefulness.
Curious about community building or want to share your own networking experiments? Drop me a line – I'd love to hear what resonates and what you're shipping.