It started with one tournament
Pinli wasn't designed in the abstract. It was built one year at a time, for a single memorial golf tournament, by the person watching what kept going wrong.
Years ago, Nathan built a website for the Dennis Hutcherson Memorial Tournament. A simple template — a few pages, an entry form, nothing too crazy.
Then he watched the tournament actually run.
Volunteers crossing the course in every direction. Players trying to find their teammates. A check-in table where the only real record of who had shown up and who had paid lived in four people's heads at once:
“Did you see Jeff?”
“Yeah, him and George. Didn't see Greg.”
“George paid. Greg hasn't. Can't remember about Jeff.”
Thirty-six teams of that.
The end of the day was worse. Collect every scorecard by hand. Tally them. Build one long list, sort it, rank it, and work out where the flight cutoffs land — while a room full of players stands around waiting to hear who won.
So the next year, he started building.
How it grew
One tournament at a time
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Year two
The first dashboard
Not a product — a hand-coded admin page. A form that took teams in, records for who had paid and who had checked in, sponsor intake from the very first version, and one screen where a volunteer could check in an entire foursome and collect from all four at once. Check-in stopped being a bottleneck that year.
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A year or two later
Live scorecards
Scores went in as they happened instead of being tallied once everyone was off the course. The end of the day stopped being an ordeal and started being a leaderboard that was already finished.
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Every season after
Whatever the organizers asked for
Poker games. More sponsor tooling. Whatever the committee needed that year. Nathan treated the organizers like product managers with a roadmap, and shipped against it between tournaments.
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The turn
Other organizers started asking
Word travelled. People running their own tournaments wanted to use the thing they'd seen. It was still, technically, software built for exactly one event.
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Early 2026
Pinli
Rebuilt from the ground up as a real platform — many tournaments, many organizers, embeddable registration, a website builder, sponsor packages, and payments that go straight to the organizer.
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Today
Still shipping
New features land constantly, and the tournament that started the whole thing still runs on Pinli every year.
Every feature here came from a real tournament day
Check-in, live scoring, sponsor intake, the exports at the end of the day — all of it exists because someone needed it at 7am on a Saturday.