Pod Insights The Vergecast The putt-putt champions of the internet About this episode 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
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 David Pierce? Bienvenidos al Vergecast, el podcast de flagship de hacer este putt ahora mismo. Soy tu amigo David Pierce y estoy jugando mini golf. Estoy en el mini golf de East Potomac en, no sé, es como una isla entre Virginia y DC. Hay un curso de golf realmente divertido allí, pero el divertido real es este mini golf. Y el key es que si salgas aquí temprano en la mañana, A, nadie se nota que estás perdiendo trabajo y B, no hay nadie más aquí. Así que solo salgo, tomo 18, estamos listos para ir. De todos modos, la razón por la que estoy haciendo esto aquí y ahora mismo es porque el episodio que estamos a punto de hacer es en realidad todo sobre mini golf. Este es el primer episodio en una mini serie de dos partes que estamos haciendo que hemos estado llamando "Cómo hacerlo en el futuro".
0:48 David Pierce? Y básicamente la idea es que queremos hablar con la gente y contar historias sobre diferentes formas en que la gente está tratando de, bueno, hacerlo, diferentes tipos de creadores, diferentes tipos de negocios, diferentes tipos de estrategias sobre cómo ser exitosos en este mundo en el que vivimos. Y para estos dos episodios, lo que vamos a hablar especialmente es contenido. Personas cuyos negocios hacen contenido y personas para las que ese contenido se convierte en su negocio. Y luego cómo descubrir cómo hacer que todo eso tenga sentido de una manera que te guste y funcione bien para ti durante mucho tiempo. La historia de hoy, crean o no, es sobre mini golf. Así que pensé, este es el trabajo de hoy, démoslo un vistazo.
1:30 David Pierce? Está bien, tenemos mucho que hacer, pero primero vamos a tomar una breve pausa, luego es el mini golf. Este es el Vergecast, volveremos enseguida.
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2:06 David Pierce? Welcome back. I'm sorry to say I did not make the second putt. 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.
2:19 Speaker 02 Doing our first ever mini golf tournament. 18 holes in here, holes one through three.
2:26 David Pierce? This is the beginning of a 2 minute and 43 second TikTok video of three dudes playing mini golf. The three are Steven and Danny Sinicky and their friend Matthew. Steven 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. Steven steps up and goes first.
2:58 Speaker 02 Dealing with a hole in one on the first hole.
3:00 David Pierce? Then it's Matthew's turn.
3:02 Speaker 02 Matthew's tee shot. Off the wall. It's a good bounce, but not enough speed.
3:10 David Pierce? And then it's Danny.
3:12 Speaker 02 High putt. To take the lead on a good line. Lips out. Brutal.
3:20 David Pierce? 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 steps 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.
4:02 David Pierce? 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 woof 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.
4:39 Speaker 02 Corner there. Have some work left there. Steven or Matthew here. Off the wall. Shot goes out.
4:51 David Pierce? 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.
5:08 Speaker 03 And we were kind of like, eh, that was kind of lame. Like, I don't know how that's gonna 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, alright, well, let's go film another one.
5:23 David Pierce? That's Steven, 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 alike. It's confusing, but we're gonna 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.
5:53 Speaker 02 Calling an early victory. Missed it. Like Scotty Scheffler at the Masters, we're gonna tap this in here to secure the victory. I shot 40, Matthew 42, Steven 48. Thanks for following along. Next tournament coming soon.
6:07 David Pierce? 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 scorecards are even and 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 Steven, 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, Steven said,
6:52 David Pierce? and they had been planning for a while to make some kind of career out of it.
6:56 Speaker 03 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.
7:11 David Pierce? 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 rail 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 snickies 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.
7:40 Speaker 03 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 Steven, I was like, look at this. And we were like, wow, like what, what can we do to expand? So we started off with doing our golf stuff.
7:57 David Pierce? 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, 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, did you have high ambitions when you posted that first video?
8:17 Speaker 03 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 gonna do well with it. But when I woke up the next morning and it had a bunch of views, I was like, wow, 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.
8:59 David Pierce? 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.
9:17 Speaker 04 Hey, guys, this is Bryson DeChambeau, and welcome back to my channel.
9:21 David Pierce? That right there is Bryson DeChambeau, 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, it's kind of a fun idea. But anyway, the point is, the 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 cynics.
10:02 David Pierce? 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.
10:45 David Pierce? 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 turn 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.
11:29 David Pierce? 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 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 trade offs on both sides of that. To be fair, the cynics 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.
12:12 David Pierce? So in that sense, it was actually a pretty easy transition.
12:15 Speaker 03 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.
12:42 David Pierce? Were you like mini golfers anyway? Like, I feel like every golfer plays mini golf, right? It's like, I like mini golf. 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 of mini golf and see?
13:00 Speaker 03 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. And, um, but no, it was just more of a thing we'd maybe do once a year, twice a year.
13:22 David Pierce? It's like a vacation thing. I feel like you, you like go, you play mini golf when you're like on family vacations and that's kind of it.
13:28 Speaker 03 Exactly.
13:29 David Pierce? Okay.
13:30 Speaker 03 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 and anybody can win.
13:59 David Pierce? So, yeah, they pretty quickly decided to go hard on mini golf 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 round, 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 makes something work on the internet? And that is really, really hard to do. Like, if you were to try and explain why this video-
14:41 Speaker 03 I go crazy every time.
14:42 Speaker 05 Oh, you gotta give him that huck too and spit on that thing.
14:47 David Pierce? 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 is 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 Hocktua 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
15:31 David Pierce? 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 liked your videos is hard, even when it's just three guys playing mini golf. 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.
16:04 Speaker 03 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. Just, 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.
16:47 Speaker 03 And also, having every shot recorded clearly, you see every putt 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 gonna win was thrilling to viewers.
17:15 David Pierce? Steven also has a theory.
17:16 Speaker 03 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.
17:33 David Pierce? And Danny actually has another theory.
17:35 Speaker 03 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.
18:05 David Pierce? 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.
19:00 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Here's my theory about why mini golf works on social media. The voiceover is certainly part of it. The cool shots, sure. But I am also convinced, convinced, that mini golf 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 tee 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 mini golf course, in theory, has a chance of going in.
19:43 David Pierce? Mini golf 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 scrolling and three minutes at a time, I think you'd come up with something shockingly close to mini golf. Especially mini golf the way the Senekys play it at Big Putts, 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 bowling pin obstacles,
20:26 David Pierce? 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 mini golf. 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 Steven 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
21:10 David Pierce? me at all that mini golf 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 Sinikys 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 @DannySiniki account became synonymous with Twin Tour Golf and with this huge increase in views for mini golf.
21:53 David Pierce? Steven 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.
22:08 Speaker 03 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 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 on 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
22:53 Speaker 03 of seeing the numbers that Danny's TikTok was doing.
22:57 David Pierce? Now Steven 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.
23:26 Speaker 03 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 Steven's 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.
24:11 Speaker 03 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 we'll be at quite a bit this winter.
24:48 David Pierce? 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 cynics, that most important platform, at least when it comes to the mini golf, is TikTok.
25:25 Speaker 03 Really, everything just gets posted to TikTok first and then Steven will take it from TikTok, throw it on to 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 a video does well on TikTok, it most likely performs well on Instagram.
26:09 Speaker 03 And then YouTube is just pretty consistent. Just we're continuing to grow our YouTube page and we're starting to see more success with it as we go.
26:18 David Pierce? Okay. Have you, 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?
26:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, I would say so, although right now on Instagram, there's a match between Steven 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.
26:53 David Pierce? Carter is another new entrant to the Twin Tour universe. He won a tournament the guys threw for some fans who wanted to play with the Twin Tour guys. Like I said, people like talking trash to Steven and Danny and telling them that they're better. So they gave him 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, Steven 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
27:34 David Pierce? 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. Steven and Danny tried to do both. Pretty quickly, they decided to make their golf content their full-time jobs. And they started to structure their lives in a way that could make that work.
28:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, so typically Monday through Wednesday, we'll wanna 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
29:01 Speaker 03 and uploading all the content.
29:04 David Pierce? This all sounds like a lot of work to me. I tried a bunch of different times in our interview to get the Seneki 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.
29:25 Speaker 03 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 YouTube. 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.
30:03 David Pierce? That makes sense. Which is easier to shoot, mini golf or regular golf?
30:07 Speaker 03 Um.
30:09 Speaker 03 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, like, 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. We'll never film on a weekend when everyone's out there.
30:41 David Pierce? 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 Steven have been thinking a lot about how to improve the way they film the tournaments, too.
30:53 Speaker 03 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.
31:06 David Pierce? Is that why you're hardly ever playing at the same time?
31:08 Speaker 03 Yep.
31:08 David Pierce? I was wondering about this. Okay.
31:10 Speaker 03 And then people think Danny and I are the same person because you never see the other person behind.
31:16 David Pierce? Right.
31:17 Speaker 03 So, but no, we, 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.
31:32 David Pierce? How do you want it to just like, sort of describe as best you can what you want that to look like?
31:37 Speaker 03 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, we 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. So, and also just make sure the ball never goes out of frame.
32:13 David Pierce? Yeah, what, do you ever like sneakily retake a shot? If you're like, oh, I missed it. I didn't move the camera fast enough, like hit that one again?
32:20 Speaker 03 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. Mm hmm.
32:43 David Pierce? Would you ever like, is there a next level up? Like, you could, you know, go out, go out and get a person with like a fancy camera and a Steadicam 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?
32:58 Speaker 03 I think for YouTube content, possibly, for filming horizontally. Um, 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.
33:25 David Pierce? 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, and it feels weird when you see something that is like clearly professionally shot on TikTok. You're like, why is this, why'd you try so hard? Like, just, just shoot it on your phone. It'll be fine.
33:44 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah, so we, we did use a 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.
34:15 David Pierce? 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.
34:28 Speaker 03 Every voiceover is really, at this point, I try to do them in one take. Just kind of what's, kind of keep it natural. What's, what I'm thinking, what I'm seeing and not trying to make it perfect. Uh, 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 will, 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 commenting or
35:04 David Pierce? Mm-hmm.
35:04 Speaker 03 Stuff like that to implement in his voiceover.
35:07 David Pierce? What's one you've added? Do you have like a new catchphrase you're workshopping right now?
35:11 Speaker 03 Uh, I honestly, it's not, there's nothing really stirring right now.
35:16 David Pierce? No.
35:16 Speaker 03 But before, what was popular and still is, is Bella's Pumped Up. I, I don't know how I thought about that, but she's really, she doesn't look pumped up, but she is pumped up.
35:27 David Pierce? Bella, by the way, is Steven's fiance 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 Snickies 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.
36:12 David Pierce? 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 Tour 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. We'll be right back.
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37:13 David Pierce? All right, we're back. So you can pretty easily imagine how a bunch of mini golf 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 Sinicky, the Twin Torque 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.
37:56 David Pierce? And in the hopes, frankly, that it becomes a total never-ending content machine.
38:01 Speaker 03 Steven and I, we pretty much play in almost every tournament, but really who's ever available when we're looking to film will film with.
38:12 Speaker 03 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.
38:56 Speaker 03 To September now. So we're through one year. Danny was Player of the Year in year one. He had the most points and then-
39:03 David Pierce? Feels like cheating. Give yourself Player of the Year. I don't know.
39:06 Speaker 03 But now it all reset and we just are in our first season of the new year.
39:12 David Pierce? 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.
39:57 David Pierce? That means ad 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 Twin Tour 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.
40:28 Speaker 03 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 helped 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
41:08 Speaker 03 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-
41:25 Speaker 03 This and if I play well, it's mine or if I don't play well, it's kind of gonna hurt.
41:32 David Pierce? Yeah, it's kind of a lot of money for a round of mini golf in, in some of these.
41:35 Speaker 03 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.
41:50 David Pierce? It's a good way to get the players paid and since Danny and Steven 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 bucks, which is not pro athlete money, but to be fair, is kind of a lot to win for a round of mini golf. 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 mini golf.
42:32 David Pierce? 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, the Twin Tour mini golf putter?
43:02 Speaker 03 That would be pretty cool. I, 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.
43:16 David Pierce? Would you ever, would you want to design a course?
43:19 Speaker 03 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 holes. 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.
43:59 David Pierce? What it, 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?
44:08 Speaker 03 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 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 and courses that have a little quicker greens, I feel tend to perform well.
44:50 David Pierce? 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 of times where it has like the three tiered green. I feel like that's like exactly what you're talking about. Like it takes forever to figure out if they hit a good shot or not in a way that is actually pretty compelling.
45:10 Speaker 03 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 hole 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.
45:44 David Pierce? I've been watching the Twin Tour mini golf stuff for almost as long as the Cinekees have been making it. And I really do love watching strangers play mini golf, 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 Cinekees 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
46:27 David Pierce? 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.
46:42 Speaker 02 High shot to tie Steven on one, rolled it in. Matthew, there's still some work left. Got it, all tied through one.
46:52 David Pierce? 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.
46:59 Speaker 02 Eddie, number one spot in the Player of the Year standings. Trying to keep it that way, gonna tap it in for his two. Steven in for two, Matthew. Thank you to everyone that's contributed to this major's purse. Means 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.
47:26 David Pierce? 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 Twin Tour 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,
48:09 David Pierce? 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 mini golf. 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 answers to those questions and neither do the cynics, 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.
48:51 David Pierce? 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.
49:25 Speaker 03 The other day, we went out and golfed and played really 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.
49:37 David Pierce? But then he thought about it and he said he figured it's probably okay. Mystic 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 [email protected] or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. We love hearing from you. Send us all your thoughts and questions. This show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, 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.
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