Join the Normal Club

We wanted to take the top off the defense and allow those of you who are (in some cases, literally, in others, figuratively) making FedEx Cup money to help build this place as we start to get off the ground.

That’s why we have a minimum membership price but no set number on what you want your membership to cost. The benefits are no different, though we may sneak in a few surprises for you if you exceed that $82 minimum.

$82/year is the minimum necessary to join the Normal Club.

This means ...

• For one Bryson contract you could be a member for 2 million years (or 3/4 of Bryson’s lifespan).

• Officer Gillis could have spent his $82 on a Normal Sport membership instead of on a pair of pants that got ruined anyway.

Why $82? To honor Tiger’s incredible run of 82 PGA Tour victories? Of course not. 

No, it’s out of respect for Sam Snead’s co-record of 82 PGA Tour victories, which includes wins at the prestigious Anthracite Open, the Miami Biltmore International Four-Ball and the Palm Beach Round Robin which featured a total of 15 golfers who played 126 holes of match play in various groups of three to determine a winner. 

Normal stuff.

But we digress!

1. The satisfaction of helping Normal Sport thrive as a business.
2. Daily updates during major championship weeks
3. Free entry into our major championship contests.
4. First look at new merchandise.
5. Kyle’s monthly thoughts on entrepreneurship and the direction of Normal Sport.
6. A digital version of all our Normal Sport books (and any others that we may write).

As No. 6 states, you will immediately receive all of our annual Normal Sport books, which means the first $82 comes close to paying for itself as soon as you spend it.

Like my wife tells me when she goes to Hobby Lobby, “All of it was on sale, they basically paid us.” Same concept, just with jokes about Scandinavian golfers and not discounted lamps and fabric supplies.

This is a good question.

As we thought through potential business models with our team, we considered every possibility. We could ...

• Slather the newsletter in ads for products we don’t like.
• Put the entire newsletter behind a paywall.
• Ask Yasir Al-Rumayyan for money.

None of those options seemed palatable, and the more I studied other newsletter models, the more the one we landed on made the most sense.

This doesn’t mean NS is ad-free

We believe the advertising experience doesn’t have to be terrible, but we also believe that it always will be terrible if ads are your only source of revenue.

We have already partnered with some high-quality brands [LINK] and have integrated their products into our content. We believe this is something that can be done tastefully and can be additive to the reader.

However, I have noticed a trend highlighted by this screenshot I took the other day.

That's an article. Or so I'm told.

So much of the internet is borderline unusable to the point that I’m not sure whether the purpose of the ads is to subsidize the content or whether it’s the other way around.

I am convinced of two things, though.

• There is a better way.
• There are enough of you who care enough about keeping high quality writing and illustration clean from over-advertising that all of this can work.

There is a clear race to the bottom on the internet as businesses try and squeeze every last nickel from every last consumer.

It’s not one we will be participating in, though, and I’m hopeful this model will facilitate that aspiration.

The other day, I was sitting at the table with my dad (age: 69), and he said, “So ... how does all of this work?”

Translation: “How on earth are you going to support a family of six on a mostly free newsletter?!” I can tell it’s a question others have wanted to ask but haven’t known how to phrase.

If I’m honest about all of this, here’s the dream: 10,000 people become members (Normal Sporters), and I just write my face off for them and maybe we have 2-3 partnerships with awesome brands, that’s our entire business.

This does happen. It has happened. 

So is it technically possible for a niche golf newsletter? Sure!

But is it plausible? Absolutely not!

So while I would love a model that is almost exclusively readers paying us for our work, I think the following five-pronged model is going to work well for us in the future in terms of revenue.

• Partners – Creative newsletter partnerships with companies like Holderness and Bourne, Meridian Putters and Garmin.
• People – Reader membership (become a Normal Club member here).
• Packages – Merchandise sales.
• Products – Our books, things of that nature.
• Places – Events (stay tuned).

Will all of that somehow meld together to create a business that survives? Who knows! But it’s our very best effort at a company, and we’re going to try and keep extending our runway from 4 months (where it started) to 8 and then from 8 months to a couple of years and then from a couple of years to the time when Sammy Spieth is winning all the Masters his father did not.