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

College football is back, and Hilton has launched a "superstition concierge" to make fan rituals a reality — a room matching your lucky number, a guarantee your lucky jersey won't get washed, even a marching band wake-up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. But this episode of Starter Story isn't about hotels or football. It's about a far less glamorous, far more instructive story: a micro-SaaS that makes $36,000 a year by helping golf courses run tournaments with live scoring.

The product is called Live Touring. It's a software platform that golf courses use to manage tournaments — handling registration, scoring, leaderboards, and payment processing. The pricing is $2,700 per year per course, plus a per-event fee. At the time of the interview, which was just over a year ago, the founder had about 10 to 15 customers around the world. The business is small, but it's profitable and growing. The key insight is that this is not a glamorous or high-growth startup. It's a side project that generates real income by solving a specific, painful problem for a niche market.