The Vergecast - The putt-putt champions of the internet

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

Danny and Steven Sanicki are twins, competitive golfers, and suddenly the biggest names in online mini golf. They started making mini golf content on TikTok about a year ago, and it took off; since then they've been trying to ride the viral wave and also turn it into something that lasts. For this episode, the first in a miniseries we're calling How To Make It In The Future, we talk to the Sanickis about their journey to turn putt-putt into their life's work — without killing the fun in the process. Further reading: @dannysanicki on TikTok Twin Tour Golf on Instagram Twin Tour Golf on YouTube From Golf Digest: How college golf twins and some friends with time to kill accidentally created a viral mini-golf sensation Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of making this putt right now. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am playing mini golf. I am at the East Potomac mini golf course in, I don't know, it's like an island between Virginia and D.C. There's really fun golf course over there, but the real fun is this mini golf course. And the key is if you get out here early enough in the morning, A, nobody notices your missing work, and B, there's nobody else here. So I just get out, crush some 18, we're good to go. Anyway, the reason I'm doing this here and right now is because the episode we're about to do is actually all about mini golf. This is the first episode in a two-part mini series that we're doing that we've been calling how to make it in the future.

And basically the idea is we want to talk to people and tell stories about different ways people are trying to, well, make it. Different kinds of creators, different kinds of businesses, different kinds of strategies on how to be successful. in this world we live in. And for these two episodes, what we're going to talk about, especially, is content. People whose businesses make content and people for whom that content

becomes their business. And then how you figure out how to make all of that makes sense in a way that feels good and works well for you for a long time. Today's story, believe it or not, is about minigolf. So I figured this is work today.

Let's give it a whirl. All right, we got a lot to get to, but first, we're going to take a quick break. Then it's mini golf time. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Proms something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually.

builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back. I'm sorry to say I did not make the second put.

But alas, we carry on. Let's get into it. Our story today starts on September 4th of last year. Also at a mini golf course. Doing our first ever mini golf tournament. 18 holes in here. A one through three.

This is the beginning of a two-minute and 43-second TikTok video of three dudes playing minigolf. The three are Stephen and Danny Sennicki and their friend Matthew. Stephen and Danny are twins. They're competitive golfers, and at the time, they had just recently graduated

from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. They all step up to the first hole. It's a pretty simple one, one of those ones that's a little wavy, but if you just hit it down the middle, you'll be fine. It's like the perfect first mini-golf hole. just to get you warmed up.

Stephen steps up and goes first. Nearly with a hole and one on the first hole. Then it's Matthew's turn. Matthew's T-shot, off the wall, it's a good bounce, and not enough speed. And then it's Danny.

My pot to take the lead on a good line. Lips out. Brutle. At the top of the screen, the whole time they're playing, there's a neon, blue line of text that just says mini golf tournament. Underneath it

in like Microsoft paint level graphics, it says each of the guys' names and updates the score underneath it after every hole. It's so low budget it's kind of delightful, honestly. All the names are in different fonts and colors. They're not aligned

at all. Danny's score in the middle is smaller on the screen for some reason, but there's something about it that just kind of works, and it's kind of riveting. On the second hole, Danny's step up and calls his shot that he's going to get a hole in one. And then he doesn't. The first two holes are both pretty straightforward mini golf holes, but then the guys play a third hole at this course underneath a waterfall and with a few posts in the way. Like imagine playing mini golf

underneath a deck. That's kind of what this one looks like. And every time somebody hits their first shot, the camera, clearly a smartphone camera, just does that abrupt zoom to follow the ball. The camera is always behind the person in the T-box and then just sort of of zooms to follow the ball towards the hole. None of it is, you would say, well shot or beautifully produced. And as you can hear, Danny's commentary isn't exactly like high production value. Corner there. I have some work left there. Stephen or Matthew here. Off the wall. The shot rolls out.

But it works, right? It really works for me. I really enjoy this video. But more importantly, it worked. After the guys played the round, Danny added all those crude scores, overlaid the commentary in one take, basically just by watching the video and talking about it, and posted it the next day.

And we were kind of like, that was kind of lame. Like, I don't know how that's going to do, but I'll post it anyways. I posted it. The first tournament we posted, got 6.8 million views on TikTok, and we were like, all right, well, let's go film another one. That's Stephen, by the way. As we're talking, he's sitting at his computer right next to Danny,

and they both look and sound a lot of like, it's confusing, but we're going to get through it. They're twins. It's complicated. Oh, I should also mention, by the way, that 6.8 million number, he says, it's not just that one video that got 6.8 million views. Danny actually posted six videos from that round over the next two days. They showed the whole round three holes per video all in. a row. Ultimately, Danny won the round pretty handily. Calling an early victory. Missed it. Like Scotty Sheffler at the Masters, we're going to tap

this in here to secure the victory. I shot 40. Matthew 42, Stephen 48. Thanks for following along. Next tournament coming soon. It's really funny to watch those six videos in order now. Danny edited them all back to back, but you can literally see him getting better as he goes. By the sixth video, all the score cards are even in the same color, and Danny had stopped making scoring mistakes like he did that you just heard. There's still a lot of jump cutting and rack focusing, but that seems to be part of the look rather than kind of not knowing what you're doing. So, yeah, six videos, two days, 6.8 million views.

Danny and Stephen, I don't think, realized that this series was going to do numbers, but they did understand pretty quickly what most creators understand pretty quickly. You gotta just keep posting. They'd been making golf content together for a while, Stephen said, and they had been planning for a while to make some kind of career out of it. We started about three and a half years ago, actually about three years ago now, and we were doing golf simulator stuff at our school when we were in college. We were kind of getting interested in social media.

If you've ever seen a golf video on TikTok, you know roughly what those early videos look like. People hitting balls into a screen indoors, which simulates where they go on a real course. Or playing an actual round of golf with the shot tracer and all that good stuff. Golf content is huge all around the internet. And the sneakies are good golfers, but in like a relatable way. So it certainly seems plausible that they could have pulled it off. Danny even had one video of his regular golf game go slightly viral. I had posted one video of me golfing in high school that my high school golf coach took.

And it started getting a bunch of views overnight. And I showed Steve and I was like, look at this. And we were like, wow, like, what can we do to expand? So we started off with doing our golf stuff. Did you think on that first video like, oh, I'm going to post this and a lot of people are going to watch it because a lot of people like golf content? Like what I feel like that I would not personally have guessed that like I posted a random video from my high school golf career is like how you launch a social media universe.

But maybe I'm wrong. Like, did you have high ambitions when you post it? posted that first video? Well, I probably posted about 25 videos before and nothing did that well, so I didn't think anything different of this post, although it was a little bit cooler of a post. There were a lot of people in the background watching. I made a putt. So I didn't think anything was going to do well with it, but when I woke up the next morning and it had a bunch of views, I was like, well, maybe we found something, but we didn't have many more clips to post from high school because we're in college.

And so it kind of just took off from there and then we started doing our live streaming on TikTok. And we were kind of thinking, we enjoyed live streaming, but we wanted to find a way that we could just be content creators. Other than a couple of those little pops

and the sort of consistent live streaming stuff, the golf content wasn't exactly exploding for the guys. You won't know this if you don't care about golf, but there are a lot of golf creators out there. And increasingly, like, the pros are becoming creators themselves. Hey, guys, this is Bryson DeShambo, and welcome back to my channel. That right there is Bryson DeShambo, who is one of the best pros and most famous golfers on Earth right now. And he has used YouTube in part to totally rehab his image as a pro.

He's actually become hugely popular on YouTube and TikTok, playing golf with creators, with other pros, with Donald Trump. Honestly, we could do a whole episode about his arc as a creator, and maybe we should. That's kind of a fun idea. But anyway, the point is that golf space is extremely competitive and full, honestly. The mini golf space? Less so. So maybe it's not surprising that it was the mini golf videos that first popped for the Seneca's. But the thing is, after a few years of making videos, trying and trying to find the thing, having a big hit feels pretty great.

even when it's not the one you expected. That first hit also brings up one of the moments that a lot of creators go through, I think. You start out making the kinds of stuff you want to make, the things you've been planning and thinking about for forever, then something you make takes off. Sometimes it's exactly what you'd always wanted and planned and hoped for. Sometimes, frankly, I think more often it's like a weird throwaway joke or something you just made on a whim and didn't think about. You're always making content, you post something, it goes nuts. the internet and the algorithms are unpredictable that way. But then it happens, and now you're left with a question,

do you keep doing what you were doing, what you kind of came here to do, or do you go with what works? Do you double down? Do you triple down? And if you decide to do that, how do you take this thing that for some unknown, maybe unknowable reason, pleased the algorithm gods and turned that thing into your life? And is turning that thing into your life even what you want?

I'm making this sound kind of existential because I think it is. And I think very few creators see this moment coming, but it always seems to come. My favorite example of this is all the people who were like video game streamers on YouTube. But then during the Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial in 2022, started putting up daily recaps of the trial. They didn't do this because they had deep passion for Johnny Depp Amber Heard trial coverage. They did it because it worked. You see other people getting views with trial. trial takes. You do a trial take. Some subscribers might think it's weird to see it on your channel,

but it gets views, and so you keep going. And at some point, you have to look at yourself and say, okay, am I a video game streamer or am I a much more successful court reporter? It's a tough question to answer because there are big costs and big tradeoffs on both sides of that. To be fair, the syndicies didn't have to make quite that intense a decision. They went from regular golf to mini golf. You know, it's like a much straighter line. And they could keep making regular golf content on their channels, and it would still make sense in context. So in that sense, it was actually a pretty easy transition. Right after that first tournament, we both looked at each other and were like, this is it,

like, let's do it. And it's fun because it is a form of golf and it's intense and it's all of our videos kind of revolve around a competition or a challenge. So we knew right there that, hey, we're going to enjoy mini golf and let's do it. So were you like minigolfers anyway? Like, I feel like every golfer plays minigolf, right? It's like, I like minigolf. I just played the Tiger Woods mini golf thing for the first time.

That was bananas. But, like, is this like a thing you guys would normally do? Or do you, like, wake up one day and you're like, let's go make a video at minigolf and see? Yeah, I would say we weren't too into mini golf prior to. starting to film. And then we started to figure out all the courses in the area, all the good courses around the country. But no, it was just more of a thing we'd maybe do once a year, twice a year. It's like a vacation thing. I feel like you play mini golf when you're like on family vacations and that's kind of it. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So yeah, no, it wasn't what we thought, but we wanted to

try something new because it's always nice to give your viewers something fresh or something new. So we tried it and it turned out to be our niche. And it's also more competitive than golf, I would say some of the people that we play mini golf with don't really have a chance against us in golf. But in mini golf, it's a lot more competitive than anybody can win. So yeah, they pretty quickly decided to go hard on minigolf content. They did and do still make a lot of regular golf content too, but they knew immediately that people loved watching mini golf. So they filmed another, posted it, got views, filmed another, posted it, got views, theory proven, kind of.

But then, this is another moment you get to as a creator, where you have to figure out not just whether to keep doing the thing that got views, but why it got views in the first place. That requires understanding at a deep and specific level and a replicable level, for that matter, what, make something work on the internet. And that is really, really hard to do. Like, if you were to try and explain why this video, I go crazy every time, that you do. Became the hottest thing on the internet in many years and tried to back that into a formula that you could repeat again, I bet you couldn't do it. I really do. I don't think you could do it. I mean, the video's funny, but there are a lot of funny things out there. And would you have guessed, frankly,

the first time that you saw this video that Haley Welch, the Hoctua girl herself, would now have a giant hit podcast and still be famous all these months later, if you would have, call me, I have lots of questions for you. The difference between getting it right and getting it wrong in those moments

when you're taking off is the difference between being a meme forever and being a celebrity forever. People will either know you as the name of your meme like you're the scumbag Steve guy or the kombucha girl, or the meme just becomes part of the story of how you became like Lil Nas X. It can go one way or the other,

and there's not that much wiggle room between. But figuring out why people like to your videos is hard, even when it's just three guys playing minigolf. It can be tempting in a lot of ways to not think about it and just kind of keep doing what you're doing and trust that it'll keep working. But eventually you do have to try and sit down and figure out what are we doing that works?

I asked the guys about this, and Danny said he has a theory. I think that just like how the video was produced, it could have just been a video of us mini-golfing with no voiceover, anything on top of it, just us hitting a ball. But I think what added to it was the voiceovers kind of making you feel like you're there,

like something's on the line. This is super intense. It really adds a lot. to the videos. So I don't know 100% what it was. I mean, it wasn't anything crazy. It wasn't a special tournament. Nothing insane happened. But I think just the voiceover kind of brings people in and really makes them understand what's kind of going on in the videos. And also having every shot recorded clearly, you see every pot where it ends up. So it's not like, oh, he's maybe cheating or this isn't legit. So I think just the way that it was produced and kind of edited with

clear scores on top and to see where everybody stands and who's going to win was thrilling to viewers. Stephen also has a theory. Right now, I would say our bracket-style tournaments are sort of our best performing. I think head-to-head matches are something that a lot of viewers like. So we try to post those at the start of a month in hopes that they perform the best. And Danny actually has another theory. If someone makes a hole in one at the start of a video and someone else's ball isn't on the screen, I'll try to put that first. Maybe I like to think that a hole in one sometimes brings the viewers in a little bit more

and might help the algorithm. So just kind of experimenting with different clips. And sometimes people get mad like he wasn't supposed to go first there, but I mix the clips up when we're playing. It's all right. But sometimes when I edit it, things get a little mixed around. Whatever it was in that video,

whether it was the way it was produced or the way the tournament was put together or the way the scoreboard looked, it worked. So the guys kept doing it more and more and more of it all the time. And it kept working. We'll talk about what that looks like. And I also have a theory on why it all worked as well as it did.

But first we have to take a break. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work?

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It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. that's Shopify.com slash Vergecast. All right, we're back. Here's my theory about why MiniGolf works on social media. The voiceover is certainly part of it. The cool shots, sure.

But I am also convinced, convinced that Minigolf is like the perfect spectator sport for the social media world. It's a game most people have played, and it's not super difficult, so you're immediately watching someone else do something that you can kind of do too, which makes it more relatable. It's also really easy to capture in a compelling way, which I think is really important.

You just stand behind the T-box, and you can almost always see the hole. The twists and turns and walls and everything, it's all right there in frame. Every shot is dramatic because every shot on a minigolf course, in theory, has a chance of going in. Minigolf is both endlessly repeatable and never exactly the same way twice. I honestly think if you were going to create a sport in a lab that is perfect for TikTok and vertical phone screens and quick-scroup. rolling and three minutes at a time, I think you'd come up with something shockingly close to minigolf. Especially minigolf the way the Seneca's play it at Big Puts, which is their local course

in Greenfield, Wisconsin. Every hole there seems to be visual in an unusual way. On one, you have to hit the ball through a half pipe with skateboards in the middle as obstacles. There's another one where there's a loop that you have to smash the ball through and that loop is made out of a huge truck tire, which is really cool. One hole makes you hit the ball through two different sets of. of bowling pin obstacles and the hole is in the middle of all the bowling pins. I've never played

a course like that, or that course, for that matter, but it's really fun to watch this course, and I find myself sitting there thinking about where I would hit the ball to try and get the angle just right. It's not like the NBA or the NFL, you know, where you're essentially watching another species play the game. I can play minigolf. I can totally get a hole in one. I could beat those guys. That last part, by the way, I think matters a lot. Both Danny and Steve, even told me that they get a lot of comments from people basically trash talking about how they could beat them on a course, which is part of what keeps it fun and exciting. People being too good at things might be bad content. The more I think about it and the more I watch, the more it actually

doesn't surprise me at all that minigolf would work on social. It is fundamentally a vertical screen game. Anyway, that's all really easy for me to say in retrospect, having watched a year of this content now, right? When the syndicies first posted their mini golf tournament to TikTok, they definitely didn't think it was going to be huge. The best evidence I have for that, by the way, is that they posted it on Danny's personal channel, not their more official twin tour golf channel, but also maybe because they assumed it wasn't going to do well

and they didn't want to cause any problems for the main channel. Uploading videos that don't work is death. But it did do well. And suddenly, the at Danny Senniki account became synonymous with twin tour golf and with this huge increase in views for minigolf. Stephen swears he's not jealous that it's Danny's name on the channel, but I don't think I believe him. Anyway, at first it was just Danny's TikTok doing all these mini golf numbers, but the guys took this

whole thing cross platform pretty fast. So when we saw Danny's account kind of taking off, we were like, wow, and then we weren't posting that on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. We weren't posting it right away. And I'd say it was about, about three weeks after that first tournament, when we were like, we got to start putting this on all the other platforms to help those grow as well. So then we started putting it onto Instagram,

doing long-form videos on YouTube, and then we started to get monetized on YouTube, and it really started to pick up. So just pushing our content onto all platforms was our next step after about three, weeks have seen the numbers that Danny's TikTok was doing. Now Stephen says the goal is to post roughly 20 videos a day across all platforms. They aim for three TikToks a day, lots of posts on Instagram, Facebook, and the rest,

and 28 long-form YouTube videos a month. 28. And in putting out all of this stuff, they've sort of by accident built a whole system for trying new things, seeing what works, testing algorithms, and relentlessly optimizing their whole content operation all the time. What's so fun about our YouTube page is people watch whatever content we put on there. So just kind of experimenting with some new challenges, some new style of videos. But continuing the mini golf seasons and everything on TikTok short form content and just being able to experiment with new ideas. And we also have Stevens page for if we want to

implement new challenges, mini golf challenges. We can post them on his account without getting in the way of all the mini golf tournaments. We've just seen too much success with it to change it up. So it's nice to have multiple accounts. My account just continuing to be the tournaments and then experimenting on other platforms. And then also this winter, unfortunately in Wisconsin, it gets cold and courses close. So we'll travel. It's like what we did last year.

We found spots where we could go mini-golf. So we'll definitely be doing some travel. We have some courses that we want to hit in like Myrtle Beach is like the mini-golf capital. So just traveling around and continuing to get our content over the winter. And then we always have the indoor course by us as a backup and a course that I'm sure will be at quite a bit this winter. That's such an interesting description of the whole social media world, isn't it? YouTube is the place where people are able to most closely connect with the channels they like. So if you're a creator, you have fans, and they'll see and watch the things that you publish.

Everything else, everywhere else, is mostly just about playing the games of the algorithm. But if you play the games and lose them on your main channel, you could end up in real trouble. So you have to build a whole pipeline that eventually lands the best stuff and only the best stuff, on your most important platform. And for the Seneca's, that most important platform, at least when it comes to the mini-golf, is TikTok.

Really, everything just gets posted to TikTok first, and then Stephen will take it from TikTok, throw it onto Instagram, and then when we do post it on YouTube, it's a fresh voiceover, it's a new voiceover. So it's pretty similar, but maybe a few different talking points

for our YouTube viewers. But really, it just kind of gets posted all the same to all different platforms. And it's interesting to see how each one grows. Sometimes a video on Instagram will go viral, but it won't go viral on TikTok. But sometimes usually we see the same thing. If the video does well on TikTok, it most likely performs well on Instagram. And then YouTube is just pretty consistent. We're continuing to grow our YouTube page and we're starting to see more success with it.

as we go. Okay. Have you developed a pretty good theory of what's going to work and what doesn't? Like when you post something, can you usually predict whether it's going to hit big or not? Yeah, I would say so. Although right now on Instagram, there's a match between Stephen and Carter that there's two videos with a bunch of views, like 800,000 and 300,000 and on TikTok, it didn't perform as well as that. So it's all kind of a gamble, and I sometimes I like to think I know, but then I'm like, wait, maybe I don't know. Carter is another new entrant to the Twin Tour universe. He won a tournament the guys through for some fans who wanted to play with the Twin Tour guys. Like I said, people like talking trash to Stephen and Danny and telling them that they're better.

So they gave them a chance to be better. The tournament went great, and they want to do more of them, both as a way to make money and as a way to generate even more content to put on their channels. because, as I said, the only thing that is always true about every content platform is that there is no such thing as too much content. Over the course of the last year, Stephen and Danny have really started to think more strategically about what they're doing, not just making mini golf content and putting it out, not even just making lots of mini golf content and putting it out, but really trying to set this thing up

to succeed in a much bigger way for a much longer time. Because really, in any moment when you as a creator are having that first viral hit moment, you can kind of pick two things. You can either do one or the other. You can keep the thing going as long as possible, knowing that nothing on the internet lasts forever. Or you can try and leverage that moment of virality to build something more sustainable. Stephen and Danny tried to do both. Pretty quickly, they decided to make their golf content, their full-time jobs. And they started to make their full-time jobs. And they started to structure their lives in a way that could make that work. Yeah, so typically Monday through Wednesday will want to film at least a YouTube video. And we shoot for a few regular season tournaments early in the weeks. And then kind of the schedule of everyone that plays with us, they have jobs, they have other things going on. So we typically try to film after work or on a weekend if it's a big major or a bracket-style tournament where we have eight players in the field. We'll try to do those on the weekend.

But other than that, so we try to find times that work for everyone. And then when we're not filming, we're always editing or doing voiceovers and uploading all the content. This all sounds like a lot of work to me. I tried a bunch of different times in our interview to get the Seneca twins to tell me how grueling and terrible this job is, but they just wouldn't do it. I genuinely think they're having a good time. But they did acknowledge how helpful it is to have each other and that they found a pretty good two-man balance to get all of this done. So we figured out day to day. So Danny only edits the mini-golf tournaments and posts them on his page, and then he'll do all the long-form mini-golf voiceovers for you to.

and then I'll take everything and put them on to Instagram, YouTube shorts, and then I'll do my golf content and I'll record and edit all of that. So we found timing what takes Danny the same time that it takes me to do my work. So we split it pretty much what we think 50-50 to continue to upload content. That makes sense. Which is easier to shoot minigolf or regular golf? Probably mini golf because it's so quick or a lot quicker than golf content. And then golf when we're recording, if we're waiting on a group in front of us or the course is super busy and we're kind of like, oh, let's go.

It somewhat gets stressful. But that's why we always find times when it's not going to be busy. So we always film during the week when we can, especially golf content, will, never film on a weekend when everyone's out there. Danny is really the one in charge of the mini-golf TikToks, which are currently the centerpiece of the whole operation. And over the last year, he and Stephen have been thinking a lot about how to improve the way they film the tournaments, too.

So every clip we've filmed since September 4th of last year has been done by either Danny or I. We film all the mini golf tournaments, passing the phone back and forth to record. Is that why your heart? ever playing at the same time. Yep. I was wondering about this.

Okay. And then people think Danny and I are the same person because you never see the other person behind. Right. So, but no, we know how we want the camera to look, the angles, and we always have to leave some room at the top for the scoreboard. So just making sure everything is recorded how we want it. How do you want it?

Just like sort of describe as best you can what you want that to look. like. Yeah, so you always, we want the ball in the middle of the screen when it's rolling and never too far down so the scoreboard covers the hole and you can't see a shot or something. So, and always, yeah, just have our angles and we know from playing courses what angle to start the hole on if you're behind the hole, behind the player at the halfway point of the hole, just so we don't miss anything at all. And also just make sure the ball never goes out of frame. Yeah, do you ever like sneakily re-take a shot if you're like,

oh, I missed it, I didn't move the camera fast enough, like hit that one again? Like there's been a time where you think it might be recording, someone hits a shot, and then you realize it's not recording, and we'll go grab the ball. So it's like, hey, it would have ended up here. It's like, no, we don't know where it would. have stopped. But we hardly, now that we've been doing it for over a year, run into many issues. Would you ever, like, is there a next level up? Like, you could, you know, go out and get a person

with, like, a fancy camera and a steady cam to be, like, running after you as you go down the course. Like, is that, would that help? Is that even a thing you would want to do? I think for our YouTube content, possibly, for filming horizontally, I think maybe someday we'll upgrade to a camera, but with how much content we're pumping out, the phone and just being able to edit on my phone, export it from my phone up to YouTube, TikTok, whatever. It's just everything's so quick, it saves time.

So right now, and I think the iPhone camera is unbeatable. I actually, I've also, I've started to believe that, especially on social, like Instagram and TikTok, that actually there is such a thing as like it can look too good, and it feels weird when you see something that is clearly professionally shot on TikTok

you're like, why is this, why did you try so hard? Like just shooting on your phone, it'll be fine. Yeah. Yeah, so we did use the camera a little bit before we started mini golf for our long form YouTube videos,

but now just Danny believes in the iPhone and he's got me to believe that it's our best option, especially for the short form content, like you said, with just having a normal phone video for a TikTok rather than a very high quality, something that looks out of place on the short form apps. Danny really does do the whole thing on his phone. All the editing, the voiceover, the scoreboards, it all just happens in the Capcut app.

And Danny has developed a very specific way of doing everything, especially his commentary. Every voiceover is really, at this point, I try to do them in one take, just kind of kind of keep it natural, what's what I'm thinking, what I'm seeing, and not trying to make it perfect. It could be there for hours and hours with how much content we post. It's just really, I try to do it in one take. I'll probably mess up one every three, but then I'll just go back, undo something, and start from there.

So it's fun trying to do them in one take. And I know that Danny does read a lot of the comments, so he'll get ideas from what people are common. or stuff like that to implement in his voiceover. What's one you've added? Do you have like a new catchphrase you're workshopping right now? Honestly, there's nothing really stirring right now,

but before what was popular and still is, is Bella's pumped up. I don't know how I thought about that, but she's really, she doesn't look pumped up, but she is pumped up. Bella, by the way, is Stephen's fiancé and is one of the main recurring characters in these tournaments. She often shows up in scrubs, and she seems somewhere between kind of disinterested and entirely

annoyed about being there, and then frequently just dominates everybody. If you believe the comments and the Twin Tours merch sales of the Bella's pumped-up t-shirts, she is everybody's favorite player to root for. She's definitely my favorite player to root for. There are a few other folks who pop up in these videos a lot. There's Eddie and Wolf and Matthew, who was the one in that very first video, and now also helps the sneakies with some of the behind-the-scenes process. And if you watch long enough, you can actually see in the comments people picking their favorites and each player actually developing their own character in the series.

Like Eddie, I love Eddie. Eddie always starts great and always just collapses at the end. Wolf is super up and down. Bella is just a quiet killer in the best way. These people are now part of the Twin Tore Golf universe in a way that is, I think, increasingly strategic. And it is designed to make sure that this thing can last. Making that thing last, by the way, is the whole game now. More on that coming right after this break.

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So you can pretty easily imagine how a bunch of minigolf videos would get boring over time, right? Same guys, same course, over and over, it eventually just gets old and repetitive. There's a reason you see creators of almost any kind start to do wild challenges or bring on celebrity guests or just pivot completely.

There are usually only so many ways to do a thing until you need a new thing to do. Danny and Steven Sineki, the Twin Tore Golf Guys, are only a year into making mini-golf content, so maybe they'll eventually have to resort to gimmicks and celebrity guests over time. But for now, their plan is to add a lot of structure to their mini-golf world,

in the hopes of turning it into something, that you watch and follow much more like a sport and in the hopes, frankly, that it becomes a total never-ending content machine. Stephen and I, we pretty much play in almost every tournament, but really who's ever available when we're looking to film. We'll film with seven, about six to eight regular season tournaments. And if you get a win, you get your invite to the major. We'll have a bracket-style tournament,

which is now called the playoffs before the big major. So how many people win is how many people are going to be in the major? And then we also added player of the year points. So you'll get two player of the year points if you win a bracket-style tournament

in the playoffs. You'll get three if you win the major, two for second, one for third. And then we pile up all the player of the year points for the whole year, which runs from September to September now. So we're through one year. Danny was Player of the Year in Year 1. He had the most points.

It feels like cheating. Give yourself player of the year. I don't know. But now it all reset, and we just are in our first season of the new year. There's a really delicate content balance in there. They're trying to both keep viewers hooked and make them want to watch the next one. but also to get new viewers interested. On TikTok in particular, you're not going to land on the first one of these.

You're just going to find a random three holes of a random tournament, and that has to be captivating, too. So for the Twin Tour guys, the whole system resets every month, and they're always looking to add new players to freshen things up. But there is still that big annual payoff, which genuinely does feel like a real capstone if you've been watching all their videos all year. The guys didn't want to tell me exactly how much money they're making

from all the stuff they're posting now, except to say that it is working as their full-time job. Most of the money that they're making comes from monetizing directly on the platforms. That means ads splits on YouTube, creator funds on TikTok, that sort of thing. That works to a point. But as you get bigger, and I think especially as you realize how finicky those platforms can be and how dangerous it can be to depend on them for your entire livelihood, everybody ends up wanting to diversify. So far, one of the coolest things that I've seen from the Twins or Golf guys, is that they've found one very clever way to bring some new money in. They started asking

people to Venmo them money to contribute to a prize for each tournament winner. It kind of, it happened last winter. We were traveling a lot, and it was getting expensive, and it was kind of a thought that came by. If we do a full season, we're putting in hard work, and if you win and if you're a viewer and you enjoy the content maybe you've watched the entire season so far

you're like wow thanks for the entertainment I appreciate you guys you guys help me on my lunch break you guys get me through my day whatever it is they send some money in and it kind of gives us

something to play for but also rewards those that play well and helps cover costs of travel for these people that come with us and whatnot so it's really kind of just a tip, like a thank you for the entertainment, and then it also helps.

And it does. It puts a lot of pressure on it knowing, hey, I'm playing for this. And if I play well, it's mine, or if I don't play well, it's kind of going to hurt. Yeah, it's kind of a lot of money for a round of minigolf in some of these. Oh, it's pretty cool. And kind of wanted it to make it feel like a true tour, like the PGA tour, they have all the money for the players. So kind of just making it a tour feel and competitive and something's on the line. It's a good way to get the players paid. And since Danny and Stephen win a lot, it gets them paid too. But it also feels different than them just being like, pay $5 a month to access all of our content. It makes fans feel involved like they're sponsors

of the event. And it makes them feel like they're directly contributing to the game itself and not just to some business entity somewhere. So far, it's not a lot of money. I've seen the purse so far as high as like $1,700, which is not pro-athlete money, but to be fair, is kind of a lot to win for a round of minigolf. The fan tournaments and the Venmos will help, but ultimately the Twin Tour guys do want to do the typical brand deals. But those are easier to do in regular golf than in minigolf. Like every golf creator eventually gets sponsored by a big golf brand. There's a whole path there. but I'm not sure who the big name in mini golf is, you know? Plus, at some point, every sufficiently big creator becomes a product person.

You put your name on a makeup line or an energy drink or a weird lunchable competitor or gadget accessories or your own golf bag. I'm not sure what that thing is here, but I do have some ideas. Is the next step like the twin tour mini golf putter? That would be pretty cool. I feel like a lot of people, if you go mini golfing, you're just using the putters there.

So maybe a custom putter for people, but we haven't really thought much about it yet. Would you ever, would you want to design a course? We have talked about that. And big putts, the course that we play, has talked about opening up another location.

So potentially partnering with them and they've given us freedom to design holes and from all the courses we've played, figure out what we like, what hold we would want to see there. But it would be a fun thing to set up our own mini golf course someday and have it somewhere we can film content whenever and not just filming content, but promoting our own business, our own course. So it's definitely something we've been thinking about and maybe someday we will do. What is the like ideal hole for great content mini golf as far as you guys are concerned. Like what does it need? What has to happen?

I think for performance on social media, I think something that kind of takes some time to get down to the hole while also having a smooth green. So something that kind of takes maybe about eight seconds to see whether or not it's going to be online if it has a chance to go in for a hole in one. So a little longer hole with the suspense, you have five to eight seconds of long. like, oh, this could go in, this might not go in, you still don't know, and then you see it miss or go in the hole. So I just like the holes that are typically a little bit longer in courses that have a little quicker greens, I feel tend to perform well. That's interesting. I thought you were going to say, like, cool looking obstacles and weird stuff that's hard

for people to figure out. But the time actually makes sense. And there's the, I forget where it was, but there's the one course you guys have played a bunch times where it has like the three-tiered green. I feel like that's exactly what you're talking about. Like it takes forever to figure out if they had a good shot or not in a way that is actually pretty compelling. Yes, and we've noticed with like obstacles, if there's a windmill in the middle of the hole, it's just kind of hard to record because it goes through,

it disappears for a little bit, and then comes back out. So kind of when they have those interesting designs on a whole where it's just like a straight hole with an obstacle in the middle. They just don't tend to perform as well as a clear hole with some slope on it and the ball heading towards the hole. I've been watching the Twin Tour mini golf stuff for almost as long as the Seneca's have been making it.

And I really do love watching strangers play minigoff, way more than I expected. And frankly, I'm psyched to know I'm not the only one. But I've also really enjoyed over the course of the last year seeing the twin tour golf guys go through kind of the whole creator journey, one video and three holes at a time. The videos get a little more polished, though never too polished. There are more hashtags over time, the graphics get better, promotional merch starts to appear. They're now tagging the courses in the description, and actually both Seneca say that they're starting to drive new people

to courses all over the place. There are new players that show up, and then those players get their own TikToks and their own branches of the story. They're starting to push people to YouTube, because I think YouTube is just the most stable of these platforms for a lot of reasons. But one thing I really like is that the videos, the videos are still pretty much the same. Here's what it sounded like a year ago. My shot to tie Stephen on one, rolled it in. Matthew, there's still some work left. Got it all tied through one.

And here's what it sounds like now. At the most recent tournament, the same first hole almost exactly a year after that first video. Any number one spot in the player of the year standing? Trying to keep it that way. Going to tap it in for his two. Stephen in for two, Matthew. Thank you to everyone that's contributed to this major's purse.

It needs a lot to us a lot on the line. My pod got it for my two and Bella. For all twos on the first hole, rolls it in. All tied through one on the hole. You know what I love about that? If anything, it sounds worse. But in general, for all of the changes that they're making around these videos, the point is they're not messing with what made this video work the first time. Even down to things as simple as the music, you may have noticed it's the same song.

It is the same song just about every time. It's literally a track called Epic Music, which is hilarious. It's been used 158,000 times on TikTok, and a lot of them are golf clips. I'm pretty sure you can blame the Twinsor guys for that. At some point, though, I do wonder how. long this one thing can keep going. There's not a ton of other mini golf content out there right now. Both Danny and Stephen actually said they're surprised they don't have more competition, especially given how much golf content there is on the internet. But there will be competitors

eventually, especially if I'm right that it is like the perfect internet spectator sport. And maybe TikTok's algorithm will like those better. Maybe TikTok's algorithm won't always like minigolf. Will TikTok even be around long enough for us to find out? This is what I mean. This stuff is fragile. I don't know the answer. to those questions, and neither to the cynickeys, which is the thing that struck me the most, actually, about what they're doing. They don't really seem to be super tied to the idea that they are like mini golf content guys. They're really invested in doing this as long as it works, but I got the sense over and over that this is all just an excuse to play golf with their

friends. And honestly, I kind of love that. We talk a lot on this show and everywhere about the biggest creators on the internet, the ones starting giant production companies and hiring tons of people and making millions of dollars and becoming A-list celebrities. But the twin tour guys seem to be happy just being a small business, like a lifestyle business instead of a unicorn startup. They're playing a sport they like, they're hanging with their friends, and they're paying the bills in the process. They have some plans to grow and expand and do more stuff, but maybe that's enough. The one thing I do wonder is if turning golf into content is making them worse golfers. And it turns out Stephen wonders about that too. The other day we went out and golfed and played real.

well and then yesterday we went and played and recorded and we didn't do too well compared to the time when we weren't recording. But then he thought about it and he said he figured it's probably okay. Missing stupid putts is pretty good content. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to Stephen and Danny for being on the show. And thank you as always for listening. As always, if you've thoughts, feelings, questions, or sick mini golf courses that we should go

to for official Vergecast business, you can always email us at Vergecast.com or call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. Send us all your thoughts and questions. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Por, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

We'll be back with our regularly scheduled Vergecast on Tuesday and Friday. We have a really fun show coming up on Tuesday and oh, so much news to get to on Friday. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.