Not Everything Has to Be a Unicorn

Billy Annesley didn’t grow up dreaming of being a founder. He grew up playing sports and making a few extra bucks on the side.

He was the kind of kid who went from one sport season to the next without a break—football, lacrosse, golf, basketball, repeat. But between all the practices and tournaments, one thing stuck with him more than he realized at the time: he loved having control over his time.

When he figured out how to string lacrosse heads better than anyone else on his team, it quietly became a business. “People would pay me 10 or 20 bucks,” he says. “I didn’t have a real business plan, but I liked that I could take on as many people as I wanted and deliver on my own schedule. I had control.”

That same feeling came rushing back years later—only this time, it wasn’t stringing sticks. It was building Bantee, a social golf app that blends Strava and Instagram to bring golfers together on and off the course.

You track rounds. Share scorecards. Join communities. Post photos from your game. Everything about the experience is built around one belief: golf is more than a score. It’s a story.

The idea hit Billy on a golf trip to Pinehurst with his college roommates.

“My dad kept texting me, asking how I was playing, I thought—he should just be able to follow along. Like if I were running a marathon and he could see my pace on Strava.”

There wasn’t anything like that in golf. So Billy got to work.

He was still working full-time, had no technical background, and didn’t know how to code. But he wasn’t interested in waiting for perfect conditions. He just wanted to move.

“I started wireframing with pencil and paper,” he says. “Eventually I found this tool called Proto.io. It wasn’t fancy, but I learned how to prototype. I figured out how everything would flow—even if it wasn’t pretty.”

Next came the question of how to actually build it.

He didn’t have the time or skills to code it himself. So he found a development agency in Australia that offered a low-rate founder plan—about $2K a month. “That was perfect for me,” he says. “I could still work my 9–5 and get this thing moving.”

But the agency setup wasn’t built for speed. The dev team was in India, the PMs were in Australia, and Billy was in the U.S. “There was no quick feedback loop,” he says. “I’d send a request Monday and maybe get a reply Wednesday. Everything took forever.”

So he changed the play.

He brought on an in-house engineer. He found a co-founder—Andrew Winter—through the YC founder matching platform. Andrew had been building something called Birdie Book, a physical golf diary that mirrored Bantee’s digital vision. “We joke that he was building the analog version of Bantee,” Billy says. “It was such a natural fit.”

Together, they brought on a UI designer, cleaned up the front end, and pushed the product forward. Bantee officially launched on the App Store in January 2023—more than a year after Billy first started sketching wireframes.

It hasn’t been perfect. And Billy doesn’t pretend it has.

He’s bootstrapped since day one, with a little help from friends and family at the very beginning. The team is still lean. Marketing is scrappy. But the product is live, growing, and gaining momentum.

“This is our third real golf season, we’re bullish that we’ll double or triple our user base by the end of it.”

They’re doing it without blowing the product up with features. “We’re not trying to be an everything app,” he says. “We just want to be the best at what we do—digital scorecards, community, and storytelling.”

It’s working. But not because Billy is sleeping under his desk or skipping weddings. He’s not playing the martyr-founder role. In fact, he thinks that whole mindset is a little much.

“I’ve seen posts where founders brag about skipping their best friend’s wedding,I’m like… come on. Would your company really be in a different place today if you had gone? Probably not. And you’d be a lot happier.”

He’s serious about building Bantee—but not dramatic. And that balance is something he’s grown into.

“In the beginning, I was obsessed with everything being perfect,” he says. “I’d overthink Instagram posts, worry about every little thing. Now I realize—people see something for two seconds and move on. You can’t operate like the world is watching every move.”

His goal now? Build the company the way he wants. Be proud of the work. Keep learning.

“I taught myself design. Taught myself how to code—at least enough to work with AI tools now,” he says. “If I ever needed to get a job again, I feel like I’ve leveled up in so many ways. But I’m not doing this just for the resumé boost. I want to prove to myself I can build something real.”

He’s not chasing unicorn status. Not trying to disrupt an industry overnight. He’s building a product he loves for a sport he grew up on—with people he likes working with.

And that, in a world of founder noise, feels like a pretty good swing thought.

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