Building trust in your product—our platform in this case—is absolutely critical to driving mainstream adoption.
The end of 2023 and 2024 has been an eventful year for SWEE. AI is the hottest theme across industries, and golf is no different. However, innovation can be disruptive and often scares people, especially stakeholders in the industry being disrupted.
When we first embarked on building our AI golf platform, the internal and external pitch was typical: AI can democratize golf, making high-quality golf instruction more affordable for the masses. It's cheaper than a lesson with your local pro and gets to know you better because you can use it regularly—unlike the golf pro you might see 1-2 times a year. We were excited about how AI could revolutionize golf instruction.
But this initial pitch didn’t resonate as we expected. Why not? The answer was obvious: It inadvertently minimized the industry’s key opinion leaders—the coaches. Our intent has never been to replace coaches with AI but rather to use AI at scale to make coaches better and, in turn, make their students better golfers. It’s a win-win. But we weren’t leading with this pitch. This was a big mistake.
This refinement of our messaging is starting to pay dividends. We've recently partnered with yet another highly respected PGA teaching professional (announcement coming soon). Coaches are beginning to see us as allies, not enemies, helping them enhance their teaching, not threatening their livelihoods or passion for coaching. By focusing on collaboration rather than disruption, we’re carving a path forward.
This shift has also had a positive effect on building trust with golfers. Consumers often look to figures of authority when making decisions. An AI company offering to teach you golf feels very different from an AI platform that empowers trusted golf professionals to teach you more effectively—on-demand and at a lower cost. This creates a service consumers trust far more than just a machine.
What inspired me to write this article is the noticeable change in the tone of our conversations during 2024. In the first half of the year, golfers—both open-minded and skeptical—expressed doubts about the product, even when presented with clear evidence of areas where their swings could improve. Teaching professionals joked that it would put them out of a job (those jokes were probably legitimate concerns). At first, this was both confusing and frustrating for us. But that is the beautiful thing about business, you are forced to quickly move on from your own negative, unproductive emotional reactions. Frustration is a signal to stop brooding and find a solution. We realized we needed to build trust in our product. Golfers might not trust AI alone, but will they trust an army of PGA professionals endorsing and using our platform? We think so and so our focus has been onboarding teaching professionals, and the message is resonating.
You can have the most sophisticated platform on the market, but if you don’t build trust, you won’t get far. Partnering with our friends in the teaching community has reinvigorated us at SWEE. We’re excited about the paradigm shift that’s not only happening in golf instruction but in all sports. We’re grateful to be a part of this movement, and like the best golfers in the world, we’ll keep putting in the reps to emerge as champions in this space.