Special Edition | January 13, 2025

Let’s get right to the good stuff!

January Giveaway

This month’s giveaway is a monster.

We are partnering with new sponsor, Seed Golf as well as Experience Ireland Golf and Travel to give away a trip for two to play a three day golf event in Ireland at Carne and Enniscrone from August 20-22.

All golf, accommodations and airfare will be covered by Seed and Experience Ireland Golf and Travel. You can read more about the courses you’ll be playing and the details of the trip right here.

We will be giving this trip away to one Normal Sport member, who can then invite another friend and/or family member to go with them (for free). We are also planning on sending someone from Normal Sport over to meet and greet you with some NS swag and goodies.

This will be our big giveaway for January and February this year, and we will draw the winner on March 1. It’s the trip of a lifetime, and we’re thrilled to have businesses partner with us to give something like this away.

The giveaway will be for Normal Sport’s paid members only. If you become a paid member by March 1, you’re eligible. We’ll draw from that pool.

If you have not become a Normal Sport member (or were on the fence about doing so), this is a good time to jump in. It helps support our business and gives you access to things like … golf trips to Ireland (among many other giveaways we’ll be doing this year).

You can become a member right here.

And for those of you who signed up for the newsletter specifically because of this giveaway, you don’t actually have to become a member to win something. We do not want you to feel like you were tricked into subscribing like DJ may or may not have been tricked into going to LIV! (although I definitely could have worded this tweet better!)

We’re still doing a few giveaways around this trip for our overall subscriber base (both paid and non-paid). If you are simply subscribed to this newsletter, you are eligible for one of the following giveaways that we will also draw for on March 1.

• One (1) box of Normal Sport merch, including a couple of hats, leather journal and a few other goodies.

• One (1) free annual membership.

• One (1) Normal Sport headcover from Seamus (see below). Sneak preview of our next merch drop by the way.

Media Appearances

December was quiet. We didn’t do many pods or publish anything really outside of a handful of newsletters. As I’ve stated, that was purposeful. We wanted to relax and recharge ahead of 2025. I suspect this will increase significantly in January of this year.

Here is the only pod we went on.

• Kyle on The Fried Egg talking Spieth.

Last Month’s Winner

Last month, we gave away a Meridian putter, and member Charlie C. was the winner. We asked him about his Normal Sport experience, and his answer kind of blew us away.

We might need to look into hiring Charlie for a future marketing position.

If you are reading this, that means you are a Normal Sport member. I write a bit more in depth from here on out about our business because I view you as someone who is …

1. Helping us build that business and …
2. Probably interested in business.

Three Takeaways

Here are three things I’ve been considering as it relates to our business.

1. We have stalled in ad sales. We recently decided that every newsletter we send out in 2025 will have exactly one ad. Even our Thursday newsletter and our major championship newsletters — in which 70 percent of the newsletter will be for paid subscribers only — will have one ad. This is a good rhythm for us, and we’re so close to filling up our entire inventory of ~160 newsletters. But the last month has been full of about seven companies on the 3-yard-line with nobody willing to go full Derrick Henry.

I suspect we will eventually get there, and I don’t really lose sleep over it, but it’s a good reminder to me that nothing is done until it’s done. Once we’re closer to max capacity, I’ll write a little more about each sponsor we have on board for 2025. If you’re interested, though, you can see the full list right here.

2. Producing 3x/week is hard. Last week was our first full week of the year, and we banged out three newsletters, including a Q&A with Sean Martin. It was a total blast but coming off of a fall in which I was more focused on the business side and less on the content, there was certainly an “oh, we’re doing this … 160 times this year, huh” moment.

3. Other dreams. I have stated from Day 1 of doing this full time that my focus in the short term is specifically on nailing the newsletter rhythm and process. We are moving toward that. Not quite there, but getting there.

Along the way, though, I’ve caught glimpses of what we could perhaps create in other spaces (specifically podcasting and YouTube).

Doing either of those well is difficult and requires probably more time than I have to give to them (at least right now), but I think the following would do really well in the golf space.

• Acquired but for golf: This happens ad hoc with NLU deep dives or SGS spotlights, but I think an entire podcast dedicated to going super deep on stuff like “how did the Ryder Cup get formed” or “the full story of Tom Watson and his career” would absolutely crush. The downside is you could only publish once a month at most, but the upside is that brands would love to sponsor something like that.

• Colin and Samir but for golf. Getting 10 -20 minutes with a player or person in golf is fine, but I think there’s a space for something like Justin Rose telling the full story of his career over 90 minutes or Butch Harmon talking through the different stages of his life for 2 hours. Shoutout to Iona for venturing into this a bit.

Both of these ideas produce extremely evergreen content, which is appealing to somebody like me who is basically on the daily golf beat. I love the daily stuff and wouldn’t ever want to get too far way from it, but those are the types of leaps I’m constantly considering. Especially after what SMartin said in our Q&A last week.

Business Traj

Here is our lifetime subscriber graph.

Total subscribers and total members are currently going in opposite directions, although if they were going to go in opposite directions, this is the combination I would choose (subscribers decreasing, members increasing).

Like I said last time, total subscribers is not a metric I worry all that much about — especially in November, December and January — but I am curious to test out some different strategies this year to hopefully try and increase that overall number. The goal we set for 2025 is 25,000, which would be a 165 percent increase.

Difficult but definitely doable.

Purse Size

One thing I care a lot about as it relates to the health of our business is how much runway we have. Here’s an estimate of what that looks like. Runway for our business in total months is the y-axis on the left side. If we stopped making any revenue tomorrow, that’s how many months we could stay in business.

There are two ways to increase these columns.

1. Make more money every month.
2. Spend less money every month.

Expenses are difficult to evaluate in this first year. We’re just now starting to get real numbers so my early formula was just based on projections. But thus far, actuals have been close to what I budgeted, which is great.

OK, that’s it for this month.

If you have any business-related questions, I would be happy to answer them in a future version of this newsletter. Just email me back by responding to this email.

Thank you for being a Normal Sport member. I’m grateful for it.

Kyle Porter
Founder | Normal Sport