Hyzerbase

A fantasy sports app for disc golf: draft players, score tournaments, compete with friends. The world’s first of its kind, bootstrapped with a close friend from zero to 1,500 users on no marketing budget.

My Role

Patrick built the entire technical stack (Android, iOS, backend) and owned most of the product surface. My lane was everything outside the code: community and growth on Reddit and Instagram, user communications, the social and visual design, and the launches.

We owned our lanes and talked whenever something mattered: what went behind the paywall, how we announced pricing changes, how we handled complaints. Neither of us was the boss. We agreed a clean 50/50 and made the calls that counted together.

What Worked

A pre-qualified audience. Every user came in through disc-golf-native channels: Reddit communities, Instagram followers of pro players, niche disc golf media. By the time someone opened the app they were already deep in the sport, so the funnel stayed high-intent. Almost no top-of-funnel from outside the disc golf world.

Real reasons to come back. Live fantasy scoring synced to tournaments (watch the broadcast, see your score move), interactive drafting that pulled people back before every match, and peer-to-peer player trading that kept the app alive between tournaments, the hardest retention window for anything sports-adjacent.

Taste over framework. We never sat down and designed a retention model. Patrick and I were disc golf fans building what we wanted to use, and the loop emerged from the inside. The 89% is real. The mechanism was product judgment in a niche we knew cold, not a flywheel diagram we executed against.

The Result

89% seven-day retention in a category where 7.3% is average. 1,500 users in six weeks with zero paid spend. We monetized with a deliberately cheap subscription (€10 a year, priced to cover hosting, not to be a business), and around 15% of users converted to paid, well above the usual consumer freemium benchmark. The telling part: they wanted to pay at a price we’d set low enough that they didn’t have to.

The app is still live, maintained by my co-founder. I stepped back around 2024 to focus on other work.