Hey!
As a business, we have started sending out quarterly reports to our partners like Turtlebox, Garmin and Holderness and Bourne. When I started considering this more deeply, I thought, We should do the same for our Normal Club members. They are such a massive and important part of our business and I’m sure they would love to hear about where we’re headed and how the company is doing.
We have done a version of this before, but it was more ad-hoc and less structured. I would call this version now an expectation from you toward us.
That we produce a quarterly report complete with relevant numbers and thoughts on where Normal Sport stands as a business.
So without further a do …
The three numbers (or charts) that I probably care most about as it relates to updating you on the health of our business.
1. Paid members by month
This is net members and probably to be expected when it comes to the second year of running a business like this. However, given the importance of paid members to our current business model, we are doubling and tripling down on adding features that make it more and more compelling for our paid members to stay on board (like our Slack channel).
2. Subscribers by month
This one has been a bit confounding given that we’ve been flat-ish for the last year or so. Again, we are doubling down our efforts to convert more of my 200K social followers into readers and also going to find more of the correct, obsessed, thoughtful audience — and not just more email addresses — in other crevices of the internet.
3. Business runway
This is basically how many months we would be able to operate if we stopped making money tomorrow. We have been consistent so far this year but not at the number I would like to be at (5-7 months, rather than 2-4). This is certainly typical for businesses like ours, and a chart I would love to grow over the next year or two.
$0
When you take into account printing costs, design costs, packaging and a host of other smaller things, $0 is roughly how much money we have netted on our Rory book.
And I actually consider it a huge success so far because we have basically broken before even fully printing the book.
In the same way that so many YouTube pages compound over time — the more you produce the bigger the library of content is for folks to watch — I’m hopeful that our physical products like this one compound over time.
That is the bet I’m making (see below).
I think about 1 million things all of the time, but here are a few that have been occupying my brain space in recent weeks and months as it relates to the business (and also a bit of the content) side of our company.
• We still have room for 1-2 more brand partnerships in 2026. Some of the deals we were banking on fell through in recent weeks, and we are hunting once again for a couple of companies to round out our stable for this year.
• I think we have figured out what we want our podcast rhythm to be. Finally.
The cadence of me talking to one interesting person in the broader golf space on Tuesdays about a Big Picture Thing has been great (recent example). Especially combined with talking on Thursdays to my friend, Hayden Martin, about stories we’re following (recent example). Both of these dovetail nicely with the newsletter and bring me a ton of energy. I think we will follow that rhythm for the rest of the year.
• Our YouTube/video strategy is messier. YouTube is more difficult than I thought it would be. Turns out, you can’t just throw stuff on there and watch it take off.
This is … obvious (?) to anyone who has grown on YouTube before, but we are still figuring things out over there.
I think the basic problem is that videos that do well and compound over time are very much made for YouTube and not just clipped up podcasts, but all I really have time for these days is clipped up podcasts (and I barely have time for that, considering I’m doing the majority of the clipping).
All of this creates an “I feel kinda stuck here” situation for me and our team but one we are constantly working on solving.
• We want to do more projects with Greig Anderson, who designed our Rory book. He’s so talented and understands what we’re trying to do and his work fits so nicely with our vision of wanting to be a business that creates more and more tangible artifacts and not just digital products.
• While we’re here, I have been thinking about how I believe a bet on tangible artifacts is a bet on the future of AI. Here’s what I mean: I believe people will become so worn down and exhausted of an AI world, that tangible artifacts will become increasingly meaningful. I might be wrong about this (!), but it’s a bet I’m willing to make, and we will position our company in a way to capitalize on this bet over the next few years.
• Two more things. One, we have talked a lot about branding unification over the last few weeks. I think I did not have an appreciation for how long it would take for me to realize what our position is in the golf media (and more broadly, sports media) landscape. Who are we? What is our actual corner? Things of that nature. I think I am starting to realize that, and at some point we need to create a unified brand around that so that you can see a piece of content out in the wild, recognize it and know right away what to expect from it.
• I love, love, love writing the newsletter. Truly. It is our premier product and the one I enjoy creating the most. Two questions have recently emerged from that truth. The first is how we can repackage some of that content and deliver it to readers and fans. One example that reader Brett U. thought of: A memory game of Jason’s illustrations to sell to all the dads (and moms) who read the newsletter. Brilliant!
The other question is how do we make the newsletter not as lengthy but with the same impact? Should it be a shorter daily newsletter? These are questions I’m always asking, and we even tried to launch a blog to solve this issue during the Ryder Cup last year, which didn’t really work out. But when I think about the newsletters I love (and actually read), almost all of them are …
Very frequent (The Athletic)
Short and amusing (5 Tweet Tuesday)
Often about one idea (Collab Blog)
I don’t think your newsletter has to be any of those things to be successful, but I am saying those are all characteristics of newsletters I love.
I recently read this from Nathan Baugh on writing and storytelling.
Maybe it’s the internet writer in me, but I often underdevelop ideas rather than overdevelop them. Sometimes, this means I need more words. Other times, this means I try to cram seven ideas into a story when focusing on one or two would be more impactful.
Nathan Baugh
I am for sure the last sentence. And I think it often undermines my desires as someone who curates, comments on and distributes information on a daily basis.
One of my friends recently told me, Building your own business is like going to a knife fight every day. You don’t know what you’re fighting or how it’s going to go. But that’s what it feels like.
Me thinking about that every day since he said it …
I wouldn’t want it any other way, though. As taxing as each day can be and as difficult as it often feels to gain momentum, it is still the coolest job in the world. One I’m so grateful to have stumbled into and one that continues to engender joy even after all these years.
Hey!
As a business, we have started sending out quarterly reports to our partners like Turtlebox, Garmin and Holderness and Bourne. When I started considering this more deeply, I thought, We should do the same for our Normal Club members. They are such a massive and important part of our business and I’m sure they would love to hear about where we’re headed and how the company is doing.
We have done a version of this before, but it was more ad-hoc and less structured. I would call this version now an expectation from you toward us.
That we produce a quarterly report complete with relevant numbers and thoughts on where Normal Sport stands as a business.
So without further a do …
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,025 of them) and includes numbers on where our business is at, why our book has made $0 and a few thoughts I have about the future.
By becoming a member, you will receive the following …
• Access to 100 percent of our content this week.
• An invite to our Slack channel where we watch and talk golf together.
• A free digital copy of our Rory book.
• 15% off to our pro shop.
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