Ten Years of Fried Egg Golf

Today marks 10 years since the start of Fried Egg Golf. I can’t express how gratifying a journey it has been to build the talented team we have today and deliver the quality of content that was a pipe dream 10 years ago.

When I think back to the start of the business and the twists and turns through the years, I marvel at how naive I was. At 29, working in the Chicago tech startup scene, I was in the perfect situation to take a chance in my career. I was not married, had no children, and was full of entrepreneurial spirit. Those qualities –mixed with a good work ethic and a lot of luck – allowed me to overcome a number of key deficiencies, primarily a loose grasp of grammar and unpolished speaking skills. With that naivety, I never thought about a world where the idea of a golf media business wouldn’t work out. Writing this, 10 years from the day I wrote my first newsletter, I can’t help but find myself reminiscing about my 29-year-old self and thinking of how easy I thought this all would be. It hasn’t been, but the “work” is a dream, and in 10 years, I’ve never felt the Sunday scaries like in previous employment. A wise man once told me, “Do something you love and you will never work a day in your life.” I have found that, and it wouldn’t have happened without all of the support from readers like you.

I, of course, would not be able to do any of this without our talented and growing team. I’ll never forget hiring Garrett Morrison, our first staff member. At the time, I wasn’t sure exactly what his role would be – or if our financial model was strong enough to pay him for the first year – but I knew the Fried Egg wouldn’t get to where we wanted to go with my minimal editorial talents.

Then there was Will Knights, who badgered me into meeting him at a Chicago coffee shop in the spring of 2017 and began writing for us for free. Much like with Garrett, bringing him on full-time was a pure leap of faith, and his start date happened to fall on the day that COVID hit America. That left both of us wondering if and when anyone would play golf again, and how long he’d have a job. Thankfully, golf boomed and Will never missed a paycheck. Now, for a few humorous and heartfelt stories from the early days.

Day 0. I spent all day at my job writing a golf newsletter and thought it was great. My wife, back then my girlfriend, offered to edit it. I proudly handed over my work, and two hours later, the edit ended with Kaley in tears because of “how bad” the writing was. She continued to reluctantly edit the newsletter and website posts for the next couple of years.

Launching a podcast. I have been a big podcast listener since the nascent days of Bill Simmons. That being said, I had no clue what went into creating a podcast. At the time, our website host offered the ability to publish a podcast, so that’s how we published the Fried Egg Golf podcast for close to two years. It was easy to use, but one of the drawbacks was it offered zero analytics. For nearly two years, I published podcasts with no clue how many people listened to them. Thankfully, when we switched to a service that measured listenership, the number was way more than I expected!

My first recording with Bill Coore. It was a huge get to have Bill on the podcast, and I met him at Sand Valley on a winter day when the resort was closed. We went for a walk around the Sandbox, which was under construction on a day when the high temperature was in the negatives. For the occasion, we decided to invest in professional sound equipment. It was a big outlay and I was very uncomfortable with dialing in the settings for the first recording. It was TERRIBLE. It was the worst sound quality we have ever produced and it was with the most expensive outlay in company history.

Blog Cabin. In the period of 2016-COVID, Twitter was the community mechanism for golf. In 2017, the PGA Tour invited a group of us “bloggers” down to the Players to experience the event and stay at a house together. It was an amazing group that included Chris Solomon and Todd Schuster of No Laying Up, Kyle Porter now of Normal Sport fame, Adam Sarson, Ryan Ballengee, and most importantly, Brendan Porath. At this house on the grounds of TPC Sawgrass, the Tour delivered pallets of Michelob Ultra and cases of William Hill, and the group spent the week watching golf and hanging out until the wee hours of the morning. There, Brendan and I hatched the concepts for the Shotgun Start, which eventually launched about 15 months later.

Steam Shovel. In 2019, we thought it would be a fun idea to get a big group of golfers together at a course we loved. The venue was Lawsonia, and we rented the Links Course out for the entire day for 36 holes of golf. I didn’t know if anyone would sign up, but to my shock, the event sold out in 24 hours and was a harbinger of things to come. It was evident that we had a great group of readers and listeners from the first event. A lightbulb went off at lunch as I saw a group of strangers interacting like old college friends and trading golf tales. There I knew that getting like-minded people together would be a staple of our company moving forward, despite a brief forced delay from the pandemic. As we continue to expand our event offerings, one thing that sticks with me is how people from that first Steam Shovel event are still friends today. One of my friends who came met a group of guys from Minneapolis, and when he qualified for the 2024 U.S. Amateur at Hazeltine five years later, a guy he met at the Steam Shovel was on his bag for the tournament. The events and venues that we can secure all come down to the great people who come out to the events.

Ten years in, I am most excited about our next ten years as we strive to deliver high-quality golf content while building a community of golf tragics. Hopefully we can deliver some new surprises, bells, and whistles. At the very least, we will continue to uphold our promise to the reader not to pull any punches or find ourselves in conflicts that prevent us from giving you our full opinions and deepening your affinity for golf.

To the next 10 years,
Andy