Competition Golf makes golf events more enjoyable for both players and organizers by collecting, storing and calculating player’s scores without the need for a traditional scorecard. These results are displayed in a mobile app, on big TV screens in the clubhouse, and on the leaderboard website.

Competition Golf is the latest venture from serial software founder Karl Gjertsen, who aims to build the company into a pillar of the golf community. As the founder of several successful SaaS companies, Karl shared that “great customer service is the cornerstone of all new ventures.” He explained that they use Raygun daily to ensure that their customers get the best user experience possible.

After a bug impacted one of our users, I contacted them to apologize for the issue and to explain why it happened and what we have done to fix it. Customers are not used to this, and they were delighted with our service.

Karl Gjertsen - CEO and Lead Developer

Modern development processes maintain a competitive edge

As an experienced startup founder, Karl knows that for Competition Golf to stay ahead, they must use the most up to date development techniques. This way, they can leverage technology to act faster and understand what’s happening in their application in real-time. If a customer experiences an error, the team knows immediately and can fix problems quickly without them lingering in their app.

“Thanks to our CI/CD Pipeline and Raygun, we can find a bug, fix it, and push it to production in a matter of hours or even minutes. We no longer have to wait for a bug to be reported and then begin the process of tracking it down.” Once the bug is fixed, Karl uses Raygun's Customers feature to reach out to the customer and apologize for any inconvenience.

Karl gets more insights into his app with powerful features

The three features Karl and his team use the most are custom tags, Customers, and Deployment Tracking. He explained that adding tags and custom data allows them to tag error types and add additional data to the error that can be used internally.

Raygun’s Customers surfaces data on his customers so his team can take a proactive approach when an error affects a customer without the need for error reports. Karl and his team also use Raygun's Deployment Tracking feature to keep an eye on whether a release made things better or worse, and to make sure bugs are fixed.

Being able to contact impacted customers directly is an enormous asset to customer service and can turn a user into a product champion.

Looking to the future

With Raygun, Karl is able to give a new company the best start possible and will continue to use both Crash Reporting and Real User Monitoring in his ongoing ventures. He explains, "In the next year, we are planning to launch several new products, apps, and websites. Knowing Raygun is watching them is peace of mind—I don't have to worry about them throwing errors or performance problems. If something goes wrong, I know about it straight away."

“I recommend Raygun to anyone who will listen.” He continued, “If you want to improve your software and provide your users with a great experience, you need Raygun.”