$36K/year micro-saas app | Starter Story

"Run golf tournaments with live scoring." That's the pitch for Live Tourney, a micro-SaaS that pulls in $36,000 a year from roughly 10 to 15 golf courses around the world. The pricing model is straightforward: $2,700 per year per course, plus an additional per-event fee. It's a side project, not a rocket ship, but it's profitable and it works. The episode unpacks how the founder built it, why it works, and what the psychology of a successful micro-SaaS looks like—without the hype.

The Core Mechanism: Solving a Painful Manual Process

The fundamental insight behind Live Tourney is that golf courses run tournaments constantly, and they manage them with spreadsheets. That's a slow, error-prone, and labor-intensive process. The software automates live scoring, which saves the course money on manual labor and helps them drive more revenue by making tournaments more attractive to players. The key is that the problem is painful enough that a course will pay $2,700 a year to solve it, but not so complex that it requires a massive engineering effort to build. The founder didn't try to build a full golf course management suite; he focused on one specific, high-friction task.

The Psychology of Pricing and Customer Acquisition