Bevan Kidd Golf · App concept
What the app looks like from the customer's side — the person booking a lesson at Jacks Point, and the person in Auckland who'll never meet you.
The app has to serve both without confusing either. One is local, wants a lesson, and is choosing between you and another coach. The other found you online, is nowhere near Southland, and is deciding whether to trust a stranger with their swing.
They want different things and they arrive in different states of mind. But they come in the same front door, and they end up in the same place.
Path one
Your existing base, plus anyone who hears about you.
A mate mentions you, or they see an Instagram post. They tap a link and the app opens straight in their browser. No App Store, no download, no create an account to continue.
That last part matters more than it sounds. Every signup wall between a warm lead and a booking loses a chunk of them.
They land on your face and your intro video. Who you are, how you coach, what you believe about the swing. This is the part you asked for — something that better represents you and your swing philosophy. It's the whole reason not to just use a generic booking page.
Lesson types laid out with prices, durations, and who each one suits. Locations with photos — the indoor Trackman bay at Prime Golf sells itself to someone who's been rained off twice this month.
Pick a lesson, pick a location, see real available slots, pick a time. Name, email, phone, card. Paid in New Zealand dollars, charged there and then — so you stop chasing money, and a no-show costs them rather than you.
No account needed. They're booking a golf lesson, not joining a platform.
An email lands straight away with an add-to-calendar link, the address, where to park, where to meet you and what to bring. A reminder goes out the day before.
Your part. The app stays out of the way.
End of the lesson, you pull up a QR code. They scan it and the app goes onto their home screen — no App Store, no download, no waiting. This is the growth loop exactly as you described it: every lesson you teach leaves an app behind on someone's phone. (More on how that works, and why it isn't an App Store app, further down.)
Why it stays there
Most apps a student installs at a golf lesson get deleted within a week. This one doesn't, because when they open it they find their lesson history, the drills you gave them — and the glossary. You spent an hour saying ground force and shallowing while they nodded along without quite following. Now they can tap the term and get you explaining it in sixty seconds.
That's the feature worth defending hardest. It's the difference between an app and a booking form.
Path two
The growth engine. Anyone in New Zealand, or well beyond it.
A reel, a referral, or a Google search at nine o'clock at night after a bad round.
Intro video, philosophy, what makes you different from every other coach they could send their swing to. Then the offer: Online swing analysis — back within 48 hours.
Here they do need an account, because you're sending something back to them. They type their email, tap a link, and they're in. No password to invent or forget.
Card, same as buying anything else online.
Step by step: stand the phone here, this far back, this height, film down-the-line, now film face-on. Diagrams rather than paragraphs.
Where this lives or dies
Get this screen right and you receive footage you can actually work with. Get it lazy and you spend your evenings squinting at a swing shot from behind a golf bag at knee height — and refunding people. It's the highest-risk screen in the whole app, and the instructions have to come from you.
Two angles, filmed there and then or pulled from the camera roll. A progress bar that survives them locking their phone and patchy rural coverage — this is Southland, not a fibre café.
In their own words. “I'm slicing everything with driver and I don't know why.”
They see a specific promise: Bevan will have this back to you by Thursday, 2pm. Not “soon”. That's why the turnaround time needs to be one you can genuinely hit on a busy week.
A notification. They open the app and there's a video of their own swing with your lines drawn over it and your voice explaining cause and effect — not you're slicing, but why. Underneath it, two or three drill videos of you demonstrating the fix.
They can reply with a follow-up question. The drills save to My Drills, so they're on the range on Saturday with the video in their pocket.
A few weeks later: send another swing and see what's changed. Or — and this is the commercially interesting bit — Bevan's in Invercargill on Tuesdays, want to book in person?
Online analysis feeds in-person lessons, and in-person lessons feed online analysis.
Whichever way they came in, they end up with your app on their home screen and a reason to open it. Upcoming lesson at the top, then their drills, their past analyses, and the glossary.
Rebooking takes three taps, because by then you already know them.
The obvious question
No — and that's a deliberate choice, not a shortcut.
Your student scans the QR code, taps Add to Home Screen, and there's an icon on their phone. Tapping it opens the app full screen, no browser bar, no address bar. As far as they're concerned it's an app like any other. The only difference is that it didn't come from the App Store, and they never had to wait for a download.
Three reasons that's the right call for you, heaviest first.
Between 15% and 30% of anything digital sold inside an App Store app. In-person lessons are exempt — that's a real-world service. But an online swing analysis is delivered inside the app, which is exactly what the commission is aimed at. On a solo coach's margins that's a lot of money to hand over, permanently, for nothing in return.
Right now it's scan, tap, done — while they're still standing there with their clubs. Through the App Store it becomes scan, go to store, download, wait, open, create an account. You'd lose a good number of people at the exact moment they're keenest.
They turn down apps that are essentially a website with a booking form, which is precisely what your first version is. You'd end up building the analysis features to satisfy a reviewer rather than because you were ready to.
On top of that it's about $250 a year in developer fees, and every small fix waits days for Apple's approval instead of going live the same afternoon.
One thing this needs from you
On an Android phone the browser offers to install the app by itself. On an iPhone it doesn't — the student has to tap the share button and then find Add to Home Screen, which people don't discover on their own. So the page behind your QR code will walk them through it, and it's worth getting into the habit of saying the words out loud while they've got their phone in their hand.
And it isn't a one-way door. If the online side takes off, this can be turned into a proper App Store app later without starting again. By then you'd have enough going on to get past review, and enough revenue coming in to stomach Apple's cut. Doing it now would mean paying both costs to solve a problem you don't have yet.
The scheduling is handled by an existing booking engine rather than built from scratch, which saves weeks and avoids a whole category of double-booking bugs. The trade is that those particular screens sit slightly apart from the rest of the design. In practice I doubt customers consciously notice, since everything around them is ours — but it's a real seam, and we've built it so it can be replaced later without touching the booking engine underneath.
You'll draw and record your voiceover in V1 or Hudl, export the video, and upload it against the student's submission. The customer can't tell — they just see a polished video with lines and commentary. The only person who knows is you.
That trade is what keeps this a few weeks of work instead of a few months. Building a drawing-and-voiceover tool from scratch is most of the engineering in an app like Skillest. If the export-and-upload step turns out to genuinely annoy you once you're using it week to week, we build it properly then — with a month of real use telling us exactly what it needs to do.