The company has grown to 23 employees without outside investment. Now its leadership is thinking about what it will take to bring millions more people into the sport.
By Chris Philbrook | November 2026
Josh Lichti helped build one of the world’s most popular disc golf apps. These days, when he heads out to play, he often turns off the scoring feature.
He still records the round. That part is important. But after more than a decade building UDisc, Lichti has found that keeping score can sometimes get in the way of enjoying the game.
There’s another problem. He can’t stop thinking about the app.
On a recent outing in Blue Hill, Maine, Lichti found himself considering how the software could work better. A feature could be easier to use. Something else could be improved. He sees these things everywhere.
“For most people, disc golf is a way to get away,” Lichti said. “But I think for me and Monica, disc golf is our job.”
Monica Thomas is UDisc’s chief operating officer and Lichti’s longtime life partner. The two met while working as consultants at Accenture in New York City. Today, they live in Maine and help run a company with 23 employees across roughly 16 states.
Last year, players recorded 21 million rounds of disc golf on UDisc. The app helps people find courses in more than 100 countries, and its data has become a resource for communities deciding where to build new ones.
Lichti and his college friend Matt Krueger, who originally created UDisc, have financed the company entirely through its own revenue. They have never raised outside investment.
For years, they wondered whether the business would grow enough to support even a handful of employees.
Lichti now believes UDisc could someday employ hundreds.
A Locked Gate in Minneapolis
Krueger and Lichti met at Iowa State University, where Lichti studied computer engineering. They lived across the street from a disc golf course and played several times a week after class.
After college, Krueger returned to Minneapolis, where he wanted to try a different course every weekend.
On one trip, he printed directions from the internet and drove to a course, only to discover that the entrance gate was locked.
This was during the early years of the iPhone. Krueger figured there should be a way to combine maps with information about disc golf courses, including where they were located and whether people could play them.
He started building an app in his spare time.
Meanwhile, Lichti had moved to New York City, where he was working for Accenture. He was doing well enough to be offered a promotion, but he turned it down to spend five weeks hiking in New Zealand.
Somewhere along the trail, after weeks of walking through rain and mud, Lichti began reconsidering his career.
“I realized that I just didn’t care about what I was doing for work,” he recalled. “I wanted to build something that I cared about, wanted to build something connected with nature.”
He returned to New York, quit his job and contacted Krueger.
Lichti offered to volunteer on UDisc. He wanted to learn and work on something he enjoyed.
“I think there’s zero percent chance that I thought 12 years later I would still be working on it,” he said.
For several years, the two developed UDisc themselves. Lichti handled the iPhone version while Krueger built the Android app. Both were engineers, which meant they could make almost everything they needed.
Their expenses were extraordinarily low.
Lichti estimates they spent about $10,000 annually during UDisc’s first five years. They took advantage of free software, startup credits and whatever infrastructure they could access without paying.
They also accumulated technical debt that the company is still addressing today.
UDisc eventually introduced a subscription model, giving the founders a source of recurring revenue. By around 2017, both had committed to working on the business full time.
They earned enough to support themselves and reinvest in the product.
Hiring employees would have to wait.
The First Employee Arrived Just Before COVID
In January 2020, UDisc hired its first employee, a developer named Luke.
Lichti remembers the timing vividly.
Within weeks, the pandemic arrived, and early public health guidance discouraged people from playing disc golf.
Suddenly, the company had its first payroll obligation and an uncertain future.
Then the guidance changed, and people began looking for ways to spend time outdoors.
Disc golf was well suited to the moment. Players could walk through wooded courses, get exercise and maintain distance from others. People who had played ultimate Frisbee and other team sports began trying it.
UDisc’s growth accelerated.
By the end of 2020, the company had seven employees. By the end of 2023, it had more than 20.
Thomas, who had joined to help Lichti and Krueger manage the business, found herself helping build the systems needed to support a growing workforce.
Her background included working at Accenture and spending time at a small unmanned aerial vehicle company founded by one of the people behind iRobot.
The UAV company operated out of a former video rental store. Employees worked at picnic tables and tested aircraft inside the building.
Thomas had considered returning to graduate school for mechanical engineering. Instead, the experience left her curious about how businesses worked.
“I had so many questions about how you build and grow a business,” she said. “I wanted to figure out how people make decisions.”
Consulting gave her opportunities to observe executives making those decisions. She didn’t fully appreciate the value of those early experiences until years later.
At UDisc, those lessons became increasingly useful.
Lichti and Krueger had spent years making nearly every decision themselves. As the company grew, that approach became harder to sustain.
Lichti eventually had 10 direct reports.
“If you interviewed me a year ago, before we reorganized, when I still had 10 direct reports and hadn’t figured out how to share the stress with some of our other senior leaders, I wasn’t having much fun,” he said.
UDisc reorganized its teams to give employees more support and clearer opportunities to develop professionally. The changes involved no layoffs.
Thomas said the company is also learning to accept that some employees may miss the earlier days when five or six people could make decisions together and move quickly.
“Right now, at 23, it feels a lot different,” she said. “And it’s not even that many more people, but it’s enough that the feeling just has to change as you evolve as a company.”
Some employees may eventually decide they prefer working at a smaller startup. Thomas understands that.
For now, UDisc has an unusual employment record. Lichti said the company has never conducted layoffs and has never had an employee voluntarily resign.
Hiring People Who Would Take a Pay Cut
UDisc’s decision to remain bootstrapped influenced how it recruited employees.
The founders couldn’t afford the salaries offered by larger technology companies. They found people who already loved disc golf and wanted to spend their careers working on it.
Some accepted pay cuts of $100,000 to join.
UDisc advertised openings on Reddit and through its own app. The in-app recruiting messages proved particularly effective.
“We had more success hiring from our app than we did any job site,” Thomas said.
The approach helped create a workforce deeply invested in the sport. It also led to an unexpected challenge.
Nearly everyone at UDisc was an experienced disc golfer. They understood the rules, the courses and the habits of regular players. They naturally wanted to build features for people like themselves.
Lichti eventually realized the company’s growth depended on reaching people who had never picked up a disc.
Last year, he delivered a message to the team.
“We’re not building for ourselves anymore. We’re building for new players.”
He said watching someone use UDisc for the first time can be painful. The experience reveals assumptions that experienced players and software developers make without realizing it.
A feature that seems obvious to someone who has played for 20 years may confuse a beginner.
The company now spends considerable time studying those first experiences.
Lichti believes getting more people to try disc golf will ultimately do more for UDisc than adding another sophisticated feature for its most dedicated users.
A $5 Subscription That Stayed $5 for Years
UDisc offers a free version that lets players discover approximately 17,000 courses worldwide, navigate courses and keep score. Players can view their four most recent rounds.
The paid version, UDisc Pro, costs $30 annually. Subscribers receive their complete playing history, statistics, course traffic information and UDisc Round Ratings, which allow players to compare their performance across courses.
The rating system was developed using millions of recorded rounds. UDisc employs three data scientists, including one with a doctorate in mathematics, who helped create the mathematical model behind it.
The company also supports more than 100,000 competitions, from local weekly leagues to larger events.
For years, however, the founders were reluctant to charge much for the software.
UDisc Pro cost just $5 annually until 2021.
Lichti remembers other entrepreneurs urging him to increase the price. He resisted, concerned about what existing customers would think.
He eventually listened.
The additional revenue helped UDisc hire more employees and expand its work.
“If I could give one piece of advice to myself seven years ago, charge way more money,” he said.
He remembers being surprised by how little resistance followed the increases.
The experience changed his thinking about the value of his own time, too.
Early on, Lichti and Krueger spent hours finding ways to avoid software expenses. They negotiated with vendors and used every startup discount they could find.
Thomas recalls telling vendors that an additional $5,000 software charge meant $5,000 they couldn’t spend putting discs into children’s hands.
Many vendors helped.
Today, Lichti is more willing to spend money to save time. He has become particularly conscious of opportunity costs, especially when deciding how much effort to devote to the software and how much to spend helping the sport grow.
When a City Nearly Lost Its Only Course
One of Lichti’s favorite examples of UDisc’s work comes from Calgary, Alberta.
A local disc golfer contacted the company after learning that city officials planned to remove the community’s only course.
He asked whether UDisc could help make the case for keeping it.
The company assembled a report showing how many people played the course, where they traveled from and how much time they spent playing. UDisc also calculated the steps players took during their rounds.
The golfer presented the information to the city council.
The course stayed open.
Calgary subsequently built four additional courses.
“They just realized, like, we had no idea how popular disc golf was,” Lichti said.
UDisc now provides similar information to parks departments, municipalities and course designers around the world. Lichti said more than half of the disc golf courses being built use the company’s data or resources.
The company also publishes an annual Disc Golf Growth Report, which tracks participation and course development.
Lichti said three new disc golf courses are being built around the world each day. In the United States, he said, the number of new disc golf courses being built relative to traditional golf courses is 97 to one.
UDisc has begun sending employees to recreation and parks conferences to speak directly with the people who decide how public spaces are used.
The company recently attended a national conference in Philadelphia, where parks professionals were discussing how to use cell phone data to estimate participation in outdoor activities.
UDisc can provide information based on rounds that players actually record.
For a company that began as a way to find somewhere to play, the work has become an increasingly important part of its business.
Choosing Maine
Before settling in Maine, Lichti and Thomas had lived together in New York City, London and Berlin. Thomas, who was born in Finland, and Lichti also spent time living in Europe during UDisc’s early years.
Eventually, the business reached a point where they needed to return to the United States to manage employees and work in the same time zones.
They considered where they wanted to live.
Maine appealed to them because of its access to the outdoors and its people. Its proximity to Europe was useful for a company with a growing international presence.
Lichti also liked Maine’s disc golf scene.
According to UDisc’s rankings, Maine has seven courses among the top 100 in the United States. Three are in the Lewiston-Auburn area.
Yet Lichti sees room for the sport to grow here.
He estimates only about one-third of Maine’s courses are free to play. In Iowa, where he grew up, nearly every course is publicly accessible without a fee.
That difference has become a focus of UDisc’s work in Maine.
Lichti wants more communities to have courses where someone can try disc golf without first committing to paying for a round.
Maine Outdoor Brands has helped the company connect with state recreation and tourism officials. Lichti first met one of the organization’s leaders through a Startup Maine event.
Those introductions have helped UDisc find people working on public access and outdoor recreation across the state.
Lichti said the accessibility of Maine’s business community continues to surprise him.
“You might not always get the answer you want, but you most likely can get to the person that will know the answer or that can help you move something forward,” he said.
UDisc has also become involved with Startup Maine, where Lichti and Thomas have met founders facing many of the same questions they have encountered over the years.
Their company is unusual within that community. After approximately 14 years of development, UDisc has never raised venture capital.
Lichti said the company can now contribute its own experience to conversations with younger startups while continuing to learn from other founders.
He has also found that Maine offers something he appreciates after years in much larger cities.
“I don’t think we ever really thought we would be in a state that has fewer people than a lot of the cities we’ve lived in,” he said. “But I just absolutely love it.”
What Comes After 21 Million Rounds?
Lichti remembers thinking UDisc might someday employ five or 10 people.
The company has 23 now, with employees working remotely across the country. Its annual gatherings have taken the team to Iceland, and Sweden is planned for next year.
UDisc operates in more than 100 countries. The founders believe there is considerable room for international growth, particularly as more communities develop courses and introduce people to the sport.
Lichti has also set an ambitious goal for the company’s usage: one billion recorded rounds.
Reaching that figure would require participation to grow dramatically beyond last year’s 21 million.
The challenge for UDisc is deciding how much of its resources to spend improving the app for current customers and how much to invest in projects that could bring entirely new players into the sport.
Thomas said the company is constantly weighing those decisions.
Some investments improve the app immediately. Others involve working with governments, supporting course development or introducing disc golf to people who may be years away from becoming paying subscribers.
UDisc has increasingly devoted resources to the longer-term work.
Lichti believes the company’s ownership structure gives it the freedom to make those investments.
Had UDisc raised venture capital, he suspects the company would have hired faster and expanded more aggressively during its early years. Investors might also have expected a financial return within a shorter period.
Instead, the founders have been able to decide how quickly to grow and where to spend their money.
Thomas said that freedom comes with a responsibility to the people who now depend on UDisc, including its employees and the broader disc golf community.
The company has reached a size where its decisions affect far more people than the two college friends who originally built the app.
Lichti still thinks about what he would tell his younger self, particularly when it comes to pricing and the hours he spent saving relatively small amounts of money.
He also remembers why he joined Krueger in the first place.
He had left a successful consulting career because he wanted to work on something he cared about. More than a decade later, he spends his days thinking about how to get more people outdoors.
And when he needs a break from all of it, he and Thomas go hiking.
At least there, he can stop thinking about the app.
Josh Lichti and Monica Thomas can be reached at josh@udisc.com and monica@udisc.com
