I never set out to build software. I'm a marketer by trade, and like most people who end up running a company, I built PlayThru because I needed it to exist and nobody else had built anything I liked.
The first reason was personal, and embarrassing. Every summer my family hosts the Atwood Open, the most prestigious golf championship in all the land. Maybe you've heard of it. It's a very big deal to win as it comes with bragging rights and a trophy. And, in year 4, I was right in the thick of it. At the turn, we added our scores up and reshuffled the groups to put the top scorers in the last group. I ended up losing to my brother by 1 stroke ... devastating.
Turns out I didn't lose. I just added my own score wrong. We should have tied. Devastating is an understatement. I vowed then and there that we would never manually add scorecards again.
The second reason was more meaningful. Around the same time, we were planning a memorial outing for my uncle. If you've ever helped organize one of these events, you know the end-of-round scoring chaos: paper scorecards stacked on a clubhouse table, three volunteers with calculators, golfers waiting around for results they won't trust anyway. It felt like exactly the kind of problem worth solving, especially for an outing that was supposed to honor someone we'd lost.
So, in 2015, I built the first version of what would become PlayThru — a mobile scorecard that golfers could use from any browser without downloading anything, with a live leaderboard the organizer could put on a TV in the clubhouse. The response from that first outing was the kind of feedback that doesn't let you stop. Organizers asked if they could use it for their event. Then their friends' events. Then strangers.
Since then, PlayThru has run scoring for thousands of charity outings, corporate events, memorial tournaments, school fundraisers, and family championships (including, I should note, several I've now won).
The product has changed a lot, almost entirely because of the people who use it. I've had hundreds of conversations with tournament organizers, sat through dozens of outings as a participant and as an observer, and learned that running a successful golf event is mostly about removing friction from the things people don't realize are friction. Why should a golfer need to download an app to score one round of golf? Why should a sponsor's logo only appear on a banner nobody looks at, instead of on every leaderboard refresh on every phone on the course? Why should an organizer have to manually calculate skins?
PlayThru is, in a real sense, the product those conversations built. My job at this point is mostly to listen to the next round of feedback and figure out what to remove or add next.
If you're organizing an event — charity, corporate, memorial, school, or otherwise — and you have a question about how to run it well, I'm genuinely happy to talk. Most of what I know about golf event operations came from people who were kind enough to share what worked and what didn't with me, and I try to return the favor.