Founder story
A picker, a garage sim, and a coach that remembers
I did not build Fore-ward Thinking because I love software. I built it because I had eighteen months of launch monitor data and could not tell you one thing it had taught me.
I am a picker. I do not take a divot, I sweep it, and for most of my golfing life that meant thin ones, the occasional fat one, and a driver that leaked right hard enough that I benched it. My driver swing is around 108 miles an hour, which is plenty of speed, and that was exactly the problem. Speed sends a slice further into the trees. So I gamed a Callaway mini driver off every tee and told myself it was course management.
I am also an engineer. I run process engineering at a manufacturing plant in Indiana, and I fix processes for a living by measuring them. So when I got into golf I did the obvious thing and bought a launch monitor, a Uneekor Eye Mini Lite feeding GSPro in the garage. It measured everything. Ball speed, launch, spin, club path, carry, dispersion, all of it, every session, exported to a folder.
Eighteen months later that folder had hundreds of files in it, and I could not tell you one thing they had taught me.
Here is what actually happened in those eighteen months. I would take a lesson and lose it in two weeks. I would watch three swing videos on a Tuesday night and take four thoughts to the sim on Wednesday. I would find something that worked, play well for a round, and then forget what it was by the time the miss came back. The numbers were all there. Nobody was reading them, and nothing remembered what I had tried.
The fork was to hire a coach I would see twice a month, or build one I could talk to after every session. I built one. The one property it had to have was the one a human coach has and no chat app did: it remembers. Every session, every drill, every number, and what I was working on last time.
The first thing it caught
My wedges. I had built a yardage card off my own exports and I trusted it. Working low point drills with the coach and feeding it the session files afterwards, it flagged how much I was delofting at impact. My 54 was being delivered like a 50, with a strike I could not repeat. We fixed the strike, ten balls at a time, one thought at a time. The carries came in about seven yards shorter than the card.
That sounded like a loss until I watched the dispersion tighten. Inside 120 yards the job is proximity, not carry. A number I hit every time beats seven yards I only got with the bad strike. New card in the bag.
Ten balls at a time
That is the rule now. One mechanical fix, hit ten, report back, and the coach tells you whether the number moved or whether you just felt like it did. If it did not move, you get the next drill, not a fourth swing thought. It is boring. It is also the first practice I have ever done that I could measure.
Over that year and a half my index came down from about a 15 to about a 12.6. I want to be honest about that number. It is casual golf, with gimmes and the occasional breakfast ball, and I use Arccos, so some shots get missed. I am not claiming a tournament index and I am not claiming the app did it alone. I am claiming the thing that changed was that I stopped guessing. I knew what the miss was, I knew the one thing I was allowed to work on, and next session I knew whether it held.
The driver is coming along the same way. The mini driver is still the gamer off most tees, and the big stick comes out when the numbers say the face has earned it, not when I feel brave.
The coach is called Chip, the app is Fore-ward Thinking, and I use it every session. The sample read on the home page is my own file. You can start free with your own export and three messages, no card. Run your file through it and tell me what you think of the read.
More about the app, what it deliberately does not do, and how it is run: About Fore-ward Thinking. Last updated: September 12, 2026.