1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Alcide Deschenses: I started ONE Club Trainer because of my brother Jimmy. He had multiple sclerosis and still wanted to play golf, and I wanted to build something that could help him train without making the process complicated or physically overwhelming. That was back in 2007. What began as a personal engineering project between two brothers turned into nearly two decades of development, a patent and a training tool now trusted by PGA coaches and golfers across multiple countries.

The thing that makes it genuinely different is the engineering behind it. Most swing trainers on the market are built around a concept or a feeling. The ONE Club is built around mechanics. I applied the same biomechanical principles I use as a professional engineer to the way the human body generates and transfers force through a golf swing. The result is a tool that automates proper swing path, timing and release without any complicated setup or instruction. You just pick it up and train.

And honestly, the zero-setup part is what I hear about the most. Golfers don’t want to read a manual before they can take a rep. They want to get better on their schedule, indoors or outdoors, without figuring out where to attach something or how to calibrate it. That’s what we built, and I think that’s what keeps coaches recommending it to their students year after year.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Alcide Deschenses: The first real turning point was deciding to go directly to PGA coaches and instructors instead of trying to sell to everyday golfers first. Early on I was putting energy into reaching recreational players and the traction was slow. I wasn’t getting the kind of trust or volume that made the effort feel worth it. So I shifted focus and started getting the tool into the hands of coaches, the people who train golfers every week and recommend products by name. That changed everything. When a PGA instructor tells a student to use something, that student buys it without much hesitation. I didn’t need a massive advertising budget. I needed the right people using it and talking about it, and that referral loop became the foundation of how we grow.

The second turning point was committing to the international market earlier than felt comfortable. I think most founders in a niche product space assume their home market needs to be fully saturated before they expand. I didn’t wait for that. We started getting interest from golfers in Australia, Japan and Sweden and instead of treating those as one-off orders I built systems around fulfilling them consistently. That decision opened up revenue streams I wasn’t counting on and it also pushed me to tighten up the product packaging, the shipping process and the customer communication on a level that actually improved the domestic experience too.

The honest lesson from both of those is that the right audience and the right geography matter more than the size of your marketing spend. I learned to follow where genuine interest already existed instead of trying to manufacture it somewhere it didn’t.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Alcide Deschenses: The channels that drive most of our revenue right now are coach referrals, email and organic search, and each one works differently but they all feed into each other in a way that took me a while to fully appreciate.

Coach referrals are still the strongest. When a PGA instructor recommends the ONE Club to a student, that student arrives already sold. There’s no objection to handle and no price sensitivity to manage because the trust transfer happened before we ever made contact. What I learned is that you don’t maintain that channel through advertising, you maintain it through relationships. I stay in regular contact with the coaches in our network, I make sure their experience with the product and with us as a company stays consistently good and I treat them like partners rather than a sales channel.

Email is where we do the most direct revenue work. The list we’ve built is made up of people who already bought or who came close to buying, and those are the easiest people to sell to again. I learned early that email in this category can’t read like a newsletter. It has to feel like it’s coming from someone who actually knows your game. When we write like that, the open rates and the conversion numbers reflect it.

Organic search took the longest to build but it compounds in a way that paid traffic never does. We put real effort into content that answers the actual questions golfers are typing in, things around swing speed, release mechanics and tempo training. That content brings in buyers who are already educated and already looking for a solution, and I believe that’s the highest quality traffic you can get in any niche.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Alcide Deschenses: Search in 2026 feels genuinely different from even two years ago and I think the brands that are slow to recognize that are going to feel it in their traffic numbers before they understand why.

The biggest shift I’ve noticed is that AI assistants are starting to replace the first two or three clicks of a search journey. Someone used to type “best golf swing trainer” into Google, scan a few results and land on a site. Now a growing number of those same people are asking ChatGPT or a similar tool and getting a synthesized answer that may or may not include your brand. If your content isn’t written in a way that those models can pull from confidently, you’re invisible in that layer of discovery and you probably don’t even know it.

What we changed practically is the way we write about the product and the problem it solves. I moved away from keyword-stuffed copy and toward content that actually explains the mechanism behind the training. Why does dynamic inertia improve swing sequencing? How does resistance at the right point in the swing path change muscle memory over time? That kind of specific, well-reasoned content is what AI models cite and summarize because it gives them something substantive to work with.

For me, I also think about brand mentions across the web differently now. It’s not just about backlinks anymore. It’s about whether your brand name shows up in conversations, reviews, forum threads and coach recommendations in a way that feels organic and credible. I believe that’s what builds authority in an AI-driven search environment, and that’s where I’m putting real attention right now.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Alcide Deschenses: The honest answer is that repeat buyers and advocates don’t come from a loyalty program or a discount code. They come from the experience feeling better than they expected at every stage after the purchase.

The first thing I focus on is what happens in the 48 hours after someone buys. That window is where most brands go quiet and it’s actually the highest-anxiety moment for a new customer. They just spent money on something and they want reassurance that they made the right call. We send a personal-feeling onboarding sequence that walks them through exactly how to get started, not a generic confirmation email but actual guidance tied to what the product does and why it works. That alone reduces buyer’s remorse and it sets the tone for the whole relationship.

After that, the content we put in front of them matters more than most founders realize. I believe the golfer who understands why the training works is the one who sticks with it long enough to see results, and the one who sees results is the one who tells other golfers about it. So we put real effort into education, videos, training protocols and written breakdowns that help them get more out of every session. That’s not marketing at that point, it’s just serving the customer well.

The advocacy piece happens naturally when the results are real. I think the brands that have to engineer word of mouth usually have a product problem underneath the marketing problem. For us, when a golfer picks up more swing speed or finally gets the timing right, they bring it up at their club without us asking them to. That’s the kind of referral that no ad budget can buy and I’d rather invest in making sure the product delivers than in any formal ambassador program.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Alcide Deschenses: The things I’d double down on are pretty clear to me at this point because they’re the ones that kept producing even when everything else felt uncertain.

First, I’d go all in on a referral network of trusted voices in your niche before I spent another dollar on paid ads. For us that meant PGA coaches. For someone else it might mean dietitians, personal trainers or interior designers. The specific title doesn’t matter as much as the trust that title carries with your buyer. Build those relationships personally, keep them warm and make it easy for those people to recommend you. That channel has a compounding effect that paid traffic will never replicate.

Second, I’d treat the email list like the most valuable asset in the business because it is. Not the social following, not the ad account, the list. I’d write to it consistently, I’d write to it like a human being and I’d stop outsourcing the voice to someone who doesn’t understand the customer. In a niche product category the founder’s voice is the brand and buyers can tell when it’s gone.

Third, I’d invest in content that explains the problem your product solves at a level deeper than your competitors are willing to go. Not blog posts for the sake of SEO, actual substance that educates the buyer and builds the kind of authority that AI search tools draw from now.

What I’d stop doing entirely is chasing every new platform. I’ve seen founders burn months of energy trying to crack TikTok or spinning up a podcast or testing Pinterest ads because someone in a Facebook group said it worked for them. You know what actually works? Doing fewer things with real commitment. Pick the two or three channels that fit your category and your buyer and go deep on those. Everything else is distraction dressed up as opportunity.