From Buffalo's startup scene to a fairway (or bunker) near you
Brandon Fischer has always been a collector.
Rocks, coins and sports cards with his dad as a young kid. Pokémon cards in elementary school. Supreme hoodies and more than 50 pairs of Jordan sneakers in middle school.
As he entered college at the University at Buffalo, he noticed a new obsession sweeping his friend group. They were spending as much time as they could on the golf course.
So he had an idea. What if he could apply the scarcity and hype economy he had lived in his entire life to the game he and his friends couldn't get enough of now?
That idea became Rareshot, a tour-quality golf ball company that wraps the entire ball in flashy designs, some more rare than others. The rarest design has a quantity of only one.
The company will officially launch its product this January.
Getting to this point was no gimme, though. Fischer collected his way there, picking up mentors, grants and manufacturing partners across Buffalo’s early stage startup ecosystem.
“I know this will work,” he remembers thinking. “I just need to get everything lined up in the correct way to make it work.”
First, he built a relationship with Launch NY. Fischer met weekly with an Entrepreneur-in-Residence for seven months while his friends took salaried jobs and he worked part-time in recruiting.
“It was really hard to keep giving that energy to Rareshot,” he said. “But I saw the bigger picture. The feeling of regret I would feel in the future if I didn’t keep pursuing it.”
He kept sending LinkedIn messages. Eventually, he got a response from Hadar Borden at University at Buffalo. Though his WiFi connection continually dropped throughout that first call, he did enough to secure a follow-up email. Borden sent over a list of potential grants that Rareshot should consider.
On the list was the Good Neighbor Fund. They cut him a $1,000 check, enough to get his first sample golf balls in hand.
For this first time, he had boxes and golf balls on his desk, and a sliver of hope that this thing might just work.
Beyond the cash, though, the Good Neighbor Fund provided time. Both Fund co-founders Jason Bartz and Danielle Blount met with Fischer for over 45 minutes each. They both separately advised him to consider the UB Cultivator, and made intros to Lauren Washington, UB’s senior associate director of startup ventures.
Rareshot pitched the UB Cultivator team on March 13, a Friday, which Fischer took as a bad omen. However, a few days later he got the yes. More than a year and a half of unpaid work on a product that existed only as a deck and a few flawed samples, and finally he had momentum.
"No matter what, whether we don't raise another dollar or we raise another $300,000, we can make this happen at some sort of scale," he said.
Now, Rareshot is ready to tee it up. They’ve lined up a partnership with trick-shot content creator Tania Tare to help content strategy. And the team is headed to the PGA Show in Orlando where 50,000+ buyers will be in attendance, deciding what to fill their pro shops with.
In January, the product will be available for purchase. Of the 120,000 balls in that first shipment, someone is getting a one-of-one design, the rarest offering.
“Adults are still into these products,” Fischer said. “When a new product comes out tailored to them, they’re willing to buy it.”
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