The $5,000 bet that changed everything
Shot Pattern started as a hobby. Eric Duffett had just stepped down from coaching basketball because his second child was on the way, and he sat still for about five seconds before opening his laptop. He wanted to see if he could build a simple golf tool — one that would draw two lines on a satellite map showing the width of his landing area. No golf course data, no hole layouts. Just lines on Apple Maps.
It was $20 a year. People would download it, open it at their house, and see it pointing at their backyard. “That’s surprising,” Eric says. But on the golf course, it worked — like a compass for shot strategy.
Within two months, something felt different. Downloads and trials were coming in without Eric understanding where they came from. The reason: serious golfers were already doing this exact thing manually on Google Maps, measuring fairway widths with the built-in ruler tool. Eric had automated a workflow that already existed in a community of strategy-obsessed players.
Then he hit a wall. To make the app actually useful — to give it awareness of golf courses, holes, and hazards — he needed to buy course data. The only option was a $5,000 upfront API purchase. He’d made about $1,000 in total sales. His wife asked the obvious question: “Is this a hobby or is this a business?”
He paid the $5,000. And buried in that API data, he found something he didn’t know he’d purchased: geo-point outlines of every fairway, bunker, water hazard, and green. That was the missing piece for running shot simulations — the “moneyball” feature that would define the app.
“This feature is highly illegal”
Eric built a half-finished prototype of the simulation feature, took a screenshot, and posted it on Twitter: “Hey, this feature is highly illegal if you were to use it during tournament play, but it’s coming soon to Shot Pattern.”
That single tweet was the first time anything he posted got real momentum with a cold audience. Phone calls started coming in from golf influencers and coaches. “Oh, now we’re off to the races,” he says. “Now we have something.”
Shortly after, he got a different kind of phone call. A respected golf company — people Eric admired, “man-crush in the golf world” level — said they’d used the app, loved it, and wanted to buy it. They’d been thinking of building something similar. “What’s your number?”
Eric asked for $250,000. He’d done $12,000 in total sales. They countered at $75,000 — with a non-compete clause thrown in at the very end. No more golf apps, ever.
He said no.
The dark winter
The high lasted about two weeks. Then Eric fell into what he describes as a “dark, dark hole.” He’d turned down real money — not life-changing, but a cushion for a family with a newborn — and the buyers had made their position clear: “We’re going to build what you’ve built. We have more distribution, more brand power. We have a full-time developer. You’re teaching and you have a newborn. It’s over for you.”
October hit. Golf season ended. Revenue dropped. Trials dropped. Subscriptions dropped. Everything went backwards. Eric did his taxes and calculated that at his current profit rate, it would take 75 years to catch up to the $75,000 he’d walked away from.
He tried to sell the app to someone else. Nobody responded. He emailed Curtis Herbert, who talked him off the ledge.
Spend a dollar, make 4
The next spring, Eric decided to try Meta ads. He’d learned from Sub Club and other podcasts that you need creative inventory and enough budget for the algorithm to learn. He paid some content creators, set a $300/day budget, and at the last second threw in a scrappy screen recording with his own voiceover — raw, unpolished, zero production cost.
That last-second addition outperformed everything else. Cost per install: $0.80. His 30-day LTV per download: over $4. “Spend a dollar, make four,” he says. He told his wife he was going to get a line of credit at the bank. She grabbed him by the collar.
The reason it worked wasn’t sophisticated targeting. The creative itself did the filtering. It showed the app doing the thing that strategy-obsessed golfers already cared about, in language they already used. People who weren’t in that niche scrolled past. People who were stopped in their tracks.
By the end of 2024 — his first full year — Eric had outrun the $75K offer. Not just in revenue, but in profit and what he paid himself. He still had the app. He still had the momentum.
$1M as a teacher with a side project
In early 2026, Shot Pattern crossed $1 million in total sales. Eric is still a full-time high school teacher. He teaches intro to business, personal finance, and next year, sports marketing. He recently showed his students a viral video he’d made for the app and explained his target customer profile: “They look like me, they dress like me, they probably think like me, they’re bald like me.”
A student raised his hand, patted his belly, and said he was working on looking more like Eric’s target customer. “He didn’t mean anything by it,” Eric says, “but it came off as quite the dis.”
The competition that threatened to crush him never built the feature. Eric hired his first contractor — not a developer, but a general business operator to handle email automation, paywalls, and experiments. He’s still the sole developer. He still loves that part.
“I still think it’s one of the coolest things,” he says. “To sit down and solve this puzzle with your mind and then show it to people and give them value in exchange for dollars and have it feel like a win for everybody.”
In the full episode, Eric also talks about his first failed meditation app for athletes, what he learned from working with UI/UX students, how he handles the emotional weight of seasonal revenue swings, and why he recommends the book The Only Way to Win by Dr. James Loehr to every high performer he meets.
Guest links:
•Shot Pattern on social media (all platforms)