The most significant development in Good Good Golf’s financial history began mostly by accident.
The journey from YouTube channel to a $45 million fundraising round from a fascinating group of Wall Street bigwigs began long before Thursday afternoon; before the company set its sights on honest-to-goodness world dominance; or before its CEO even knew they were raising money.
“It started with a meeting with Ben Grubbs at Creator Sports,” Matt Kendrick, Good Good’s CEO, told GOLF.com. “I wasn’t pitching him on funding — the meeting actually wasn’t to talk about funding at all. And then he came back to me a couple weeks after that and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got this partner of mine. We’re looking to raise a fund.'”
Grubbs was a perfect fit. He’d spent five years as a partnerships exec at YouTube before co-founding an investment and advisory firm to help sports startups in the so-called “creator economy” — a booming industry surrounding the creation and monetization of internet content. Now, with his business partner Brian Kabot, Grubbs was looking to invest. He made Kendrick an offer.
As it happened, Kendrick was in a position to listen. Good Good — the YouTube golf content-and-commerce behemoth he’d founded almost five years earlier — was spectacularly successful, but the business was nearing the ceiling of what it could achieve without additional outside investment.
“We’re in the product space, and that’s cash-intensive,” Kendrick said. “We limit ourselves on some of our growth initiatives because of cash management.”
Grubbs knew the true strength of Good Good: The business wasn’t a “bunch of YouTubers selling polos,” as Kendrick says with a chuckle, but rather a legitimate (and growing) golf brand using YouTube to create, market and sell premium golf products. In many ways, YouTube, where the brand is most popular, is only a vehicle for the brand’s larger ambitions in merchandise and equipment.
It is striking to hear Kendrick talk about his business in this way: at once built upon internet golf videos and aiming to exist almost entirely independently of them. In a media moment defined by YouTube, Good Good’s business reflects the platform’s widest ambitions.
“This was a piece of it that we discussed heavily: Let’s go build something that lasts forever,” Kendrick said. “I’m sitting here watching basketball. You know, these guys can’t play basketball for the rest of their life, right? It’s the same thing with creators. There’s a lot of pressure and burnout. So let’s build something so that you don’t have to make a video for the rest of your life.”
Ironically, the best method to reach a lifetime without videos turned out to be … a lot of videos. A new, algorithm-tuned delivery arrives on the Good Good YouTube channel each week, depicting everything from exotic golf trips and celebrity matches to self-examining dispatches from creators moving on to greener pastures. In less than five years, the channel has grown to more than 1.75 million YouTube subscribers, built out a robust merchandise and golf equipment business, and bulged from a handful of creators to a team of 25 on-camera personalities, editors and shooters.
Now the company is readying for its boldest jump: from YouTube’s (comparatively) friendly pond into the shark pit of major golf brands. Kendrick’s long-stated moonshot goal — to build one of the five biggest golf companies in the world — suddenly isn’t a moonshot.
“We knew there was an inflection point of, ‘there’s all these ideas that we have written down, there’s all these goals that we’re ready to go get, and we’re a highly profitable business,'” Kendrick said. “It gets to a point to where, if you’re going to scale it and you’re going to grow it and take on some initiatives that you want, you’re going to need more capital for projects, but you’re also going to need some strategic partners as well.”
Within weeks of the offer, Grubbs had attracted more than 50 major institutional and sports investors into the fold, including a boutique sports and entertainment fund at Manhattan West and Peyton and Eli Manning’s Omaha Productions. The investors raised $45 million for Good Good, with Grubb’s Creator Sports leading the fundraising round, and while Kendrick was reticent to reveal the company’s valuation, he has big plans for the capital’s deployment. According to Kendrick, three areas will dominate Good Good’s plans with the $45 million: global expansion, sales, and content creation.
On global expansion, Kendrick says Good Good’s goal is to build its content and merchandising efforts into international markets like Asia and Australia (already home to five of the channel’s top 10 viewing cities). In Asia, Good Good will pursue “dubbing and subbing” its english-language content — entertainment parlance for subtitling and translating audio — and could also look to hire local creators in markets like Korea and Japan. Meanwhile, in Australia, the company will launch merchandising efforts in full force (and expects to find a hungry market). On sales, Kendrick says Good Good will hire a sales team for the first time in its existence, which will target bringing the company’s merchandising efforts into some of the 20,000 pro shops around the United States. And the third prong of his plan — content — Kendrick says the company will invest deeper into its own YouTube channel, dive into an existing partnership to create scripted and unscripted content with NBC Sports, and explore potential overlaps within the Omaha Productions portfolio.
“I hope that our fans see we’re putting out more high-quality content,” Kendrick said. “I hope our fans see that we keep pushing the envelope on content ideas, because we feel like we’ve been the ones leading the charge on new and different ideas. People follow what we do — including the PGA Tour with this whole Creator Classic thing. We understand what it’s like to lead from the front, and in order to do that, we’ve got to keep innovating.”
Capturing even one of these pillars would count as a Herculean accomplishment — to say nothing of all three — but Good Good is used to life as a longshot. It was only five years ago that Kendrick approached the group for the first time, including lead voice Garrett Clark, with the hopes of coalescing golf’s YouTube stars in one place. Three weeks ago, that same group met to sign the paperwork on a $45 million fundraising round.
“These guys are so young,” Kendrick said. “To show them that when you set out with a goal, put the right things in place, and do the right things, you’re gonna succeed. I think that’s a big piece, and I think it’s very validating for them, too.”
Clark, 24, has been a golf YouTube star since he was a teenager. He dropped out of college to pursue making videos full-time, then got scooped up by Kendrick as he looked to replicate the success of a fishing channel called the Googan Squad.
“The moment that we signed the box, which was a couple weeks ago, Garrett and I had a long conversation,” Kendrick says. “He just said, ‘Dude, I just never thought we’d actually do it.'”
YouTube golf is an unlikely dream. And as it turns out, it’s an even stranger reality.
