Matt Robinson had the job every engineer is supposed to want: senior software engineer at Meta, on the AI team, six years in and never touched by a layoff.
And every morning from 6am to 9am, before that job started, he built a golf app.
That app is Live Tourney. It now makes $30,000 a month from 150 golf courses, and this year it's pacing toward an $800K run rate.
So Matt sent Pat Walls from Starter Story a DM with one question: should I quit Meta?
I watched the whole video so you don't have to (you still should, it's great). Here's the story, the real numbers, and the parts worth stealing if you're building a SaaS with a full-time job.
The idea came from a complaint at his local course
Four years ago, Matt was playing tournaments at his local golf course. No live scoring. Paper scorecards, manual tallies, results hours later.
He knew a product existed for this: Golf Genius. So he asked the course pro why they weren't using it.
The answer: too complicated and too expensive.
That sentence is the whole business. An incumbent exists, it's winning the enterprise end of the market, and the small operators it ignores are telling anyone who asks exactly why they won't buy it.
Matt didn't run surveys or buy a niche report. He built a stripped-down version for one tournament at his own course. Nights and weekends. Then he kept going.
"I'd wake up and the first thing I'd want to do in the morning was go build," he told Pat. "It just became this obsession of how do I keep making this thing better every day."
Four years later: 150 courses.
What Live Tourney actually does (and the numbers)
The product is simple enough to explain in one hole of golf.
Players show up, get a scorecard with a QR code, scan it, and land on a live leaderboard. They tap in their scores hole by hole. Everyone in the tournament sees the standings update in real time.
That's it. That's the $30K/month product.
The numbers Matt shared on camera:
- → $30,000/month in revenue
- → About $350K ARR, pacing toward an $800,000 run rate this year
- → 150 golf courses as customers
- → Built solo, nights and weekends, over 4 years
- → Tech stack: Next.js frontend, Google Firebase backend
No venture capital. No growth team. A web app with a QR code, sold to an industry that was still passing paper cards around.
And the growth was unglamorous. Run it at your own course, get the pro to vouch for you, follow up with the next course until they say yes. Course by course, for four years. If following up is where your pipeline dies, steal a proper lead nurturing system instead of relying on memory. Matt's 150 customers are mostly the result of four years of not dropping threads.
The 6am to 9am rule
Everyone asks how you build a business without quitting your job. Matt's answer is boring, which is why it works.
"Time management is key. Set aside time in the day. For me, it was the morning, like 6am to 9am. Just wake up early and get it done."
Three hours, before Meta got his brain. Every day.
Notice what that structure does:
- → The business gets his best hours, not his leftovers
- → The day job stays safe (he performed well enough to survive six layoff rounds)
- → Progress compounds daily instead of in weekend binges
I see the opposite pattern constantly. Founders "working on the side project" at 10pm, fried, half-watching Netflix. Six months later there's no product and the idea is dead.
Matt's version cost him sleep, not his salary. Two young kids at home, a senior role at Meta, and still three protected hours a day. If he can carve that out, your calendar has room too.
If you're in that spot right now, job plus an itch to build, I wrote up a list of business ideas you can build without quitting your job. Start there. Keep the paycheck while you find the thing.
The golden handcuffs argument (it almost kept him)
Pat asked the question everyone was thinking. One of his friends worked on AI at Google and made "tens of millions" just by being on the right team at the right time. Matt is a senior engineer on Meta's AI team, in the middle of the biggest comp bubble in tech history.
Matt's answer was honest: "If it was purely financial, staying is probably the right call."
Sit with that. The business making $30K/month was still, on paper, the worse deal.
But here's what he said next: "I could lose my job at any point."
Six years at Meta. Six-plus rounds of layoffs. Lucky every time, and fully aware that lucky is not a plan. The "safe" option and the "risky" option were both risky. One of them just hid it better.
He also had the fear you'd expect. His words: "If something happens and I lose all my customers, then I have nothing."
Two kids. A wife. A mortgage-sized decision. This wasn't a 22-year-old with a backpack quitting to chase a dream.
He quit the week after layoffs hit
Three weeks after the golf course interview, Matt called Pat back with the answer.
He quit.
The detail that gets me: layoffs swept Meta the week before. Matt survived them, again. Getting cut would have made the decision easy. He had to make it the hard way, with the job still in his hands.
"I had a one-on-one with my boss yesterday and it kind of felt like a breakup," he said. His boss, a golfer, was pumped for him.
And it wasn't a solo call. "It definitely wasn't a decision I made individually. My wife pushed me on this as well."
His reasons for going all in:
- → The energy test: "When I think about what I want to spend my time on, it's Live Tourney"
- → His kids: "Being able to show my kids you can just do what you want to do. You don't have to let someone tell you what to do"
- → The business was ready: $30K/month meant he wasn't validating an idea, he was scaling one
Pat's take matched what I've seen: the hard part was already done. Matt proved he could build, get customers, and generate revenue with three hours a day. Now the business gets eight.
This path isn't the only one, by the way. I covered a founder who left a $350K Google job for a business making far less: Jim quit Google at $10K/month. Different math, same trade: buying your time back before the spreadsheet says it's optimal.
What to steal from Matt's playbook
Strip the golf out of this story and you get a repeatable pattern.
1. Fish where the incumbent won't. Golf Genius serves the big operations. Matt built for the courses that found it too complicated and too expensive. Every boring industry has this gap at the bottom of the market.
2. Build inside a niche you already live in. Matt played in these tournaments. He knew the pro. His advice on camera: "Find something you care about, figure out where you could make it better, and go." Pat put it even better: people build for dentists, know nothing about dentists, and quit three months in when it gets hard.
3. Give the business your first hours, not your last. 6am to 9am, daily, for four years. The consistency mattered more than the total hours.
4. Let revenue make the quit decision for you. Matt didn't quit to build. He built, hit $30K/month, watched it pace toward $800K, and then quit. The risk he took was real but priced.
5. Simple products win boring markets. A QR code and a live leaderboard. Firebase and Next.js. You don't need novel tech when the competition is a paper scorecard.
FAQ
What is Live Tourney and how much does it make?
Live Tourney is golf tournament scoring software built by Matt Robinson. Players scan a QR code on their scorecard and enter scores into a live leaderboard. It makes about $30,000/month (roughly $350K ARR) from 150 golf courses, and was pacing toward an $800K run rate when Matt appeared on Starter Story in 2026.
How long did it take to reach $30K/month?
About four years, working nights and weekends while Matt kept his full-time job as a senior software engineer at Meta. His core routine was building from 6am to 9am every morning before work.
Should you quit your job before or after your SaaS makes money?
After, if you can manage it. Matt waited until Live Tourney hit $30K/month with 150 paying customers before quitting. That meant he skipped the desperate validation phase most full-time founders go through and went straight to scaling something proven. The trade-off is years of brutal double duty.
What tech stack does Live Tourney use?
Next.js for the frontend and Google Firebase for the backend. A deliberately simple stack that one person could ship and maintain in three hours a day.
The part nobody puts in the video
Matt's first week as a full-time founder won't feel like freedom. It'll feel like silence: no standup, no boss, just him and a revenue number that has to grow.
That's the exact moment most founders realize nobody around them gets it.
It's why I interview people like Matt every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast: bootstrapped founders between $100K and $10M a year, sharing the numbers and decisions everyone else keeps private.
