By Andy Abrahams
To tap into the audiences of golf’s top content creators and influencers, the PGA Tour recently announced an initiative called the Creators Council. One of those creators is No Laying Up, a digital brand co-founded by Brooklyn-based Neil Schuster, 35, and his business partners. Launched as a website in 2014, NLU now has one of the top podcasts in the game and counts 170,000 subscribers to its YouTube channel. It also has bucket list golf travel planning videos, merchandise, fun tournament previews, and, for $90 a year, access to exclusive content on the Nest, NLU’s subscriber-only service. What NLU doesn’t ever want to be is dull. “Golf writing can be boring,” says Schuster, aka the “merch czar” who sports a 1.8 handicap. “Nobody talks about golf the way we’re talking about it as a group and making jokes and enjoying the game like we are.”
My older brother Todd, who goes by the name Tron Carter on NLU, went to college at Miami University in Ohio with cofounder Chris Solomon (Soly) and Phil Landes (Big Randy). They had a group text thread going, and then they started a Twitter handle that got a few hundred followers. I think Billy Horschel and Jason Dufner followed them. Then they said to me, “Hey, we want to start a blog.” I was working in tech in San Francisco, and my roommate helped me start a website. Then we said, “Well, what’s the first article going to be about?” I got a Google news alert that day about a guy who was wanted for murder that got spotted in a PGA Superstore hitting balls in a simulator. That was the first story we posted. Then we wrote these weekly tournament previews. We’d tweet them out, and then it started to build from there. Then, in early 2015, we all met up at the Heritage tournament after the Masters, and we recorded our first podcast. I quit my job at Google in January 2019 to work full-time at NLU. A lot of this was timing. I think golf tends to be four or five years behind other sports and how they promote it, market it, televise it, all of that. This also gave me a reason to keep in touch with my brother; I always had something to talk about with him when I was on the other side of the country.
I remember talking to my dad, and the question that really drove it home for me was, “Would I regret more staying at Google and NLU failing or leaving Google and NLU failing?” It was definitely the second one. I felt like, “If I leave and if it doesn’t work out, I’ll learn something.”
We sold shirts and towels for the first, I’d say, five years. That paid the bills, and it paid for us to go on a couple of golf trips as a team. Then the sponsorship stuff shot up. Now the business is about 65% partnership revenue, 25% merch, and 10% membership to the Nest. I look at this business as less of a media company or an entity like that and more like a band. I look at what we’re making as – it may sound a little snooty – but some of the video series we do, they almost feel like albums. The audience is almost a little bit like the way they would follow a band. We have a message board, and a lot of what I see in the feedback is more or less, “Play the hits,” like, “I wish they would go back and do this kind of content or that.”
Oh, I’m very much the kind that should lay up more and doesn’t. It’s cost me one or two strokes a round. I’m a very volatile golfer. I hit the ball really well, and I have a pretty good swing. But I have a tendency to blow up because I make bad decisions. It’s exciting! I started in 2024 at about a 4 handicap, and I was like, “Don’t get worse.” This is the lowest my handicap has ever been, which I think, honestly, it’s a credit to playing a lot more competitive golf. I played in five MGA events this year and then two or three other events that NLU puts on that I call low-stakes but meaningful competition. Because I’ve had those competitive events on the calendar, I don’t want to go and embarrass myself, so I’ll go to the simulator in the neighborhood, and I’ll do as much as I can to practice.
I was actually a very good tennis player, and my family belonged to Dunwoody Country Club. But my brother got into golf when our dad got a golf membership to the club, and I followed Tron out to the course. I played junior golf and then played on the high school team. I also played basketball and football, and when I went to Columbia University, I played free safety on the football team. We stunk. We had a lot of talent, but it’s just not a winning program. I led the team in tackles my senior year as a safety, which isn’t a sign of a good defense. But it was a great experience, and you learn a lot when you lose and stick with something.
I’ve got two or three buddies who are not very good, but they played a lot this summer. They were getting 6 a.m. tee times at Dyker Beach in Brooklyn, and they needed a fourth. They expected me to say no. My wife, Carson, and I have an 8-month-old son, Peter, so I said, “I’ll get up early.” I play Dyker and Marine Park, and I’m a massive fan of the Flushing Meadows Pitch & Putt, though I wish they could improve it a bit. I find Bethpage a little intimidating. It’s a better experience for me to go to Dyker or Marine Park.
The answer I usually give to that question, though it sounds a little facetious, is like, “Don’t screw it up.” We don’t have any investors. We control the business outright. We’re able to follow our curiosity and our passion. I think our biggest risk is burnout – making sure that we stay focused on what we want to cover.
It is. I love golf and the competition. A question that I don’t think enough people ask themselves is, “If you didn’t have to work, what would you do?” My answer – I remember writing it down once in a coffee shop – I think I said, “I would travel. I would play golf and other sports. I would also probably get a lot of foot massages.” Why wouldn’t I just schedule a weekly foot massage if I had all the money? That’s what I’m doing. But with our baby, I don’t get as many foot massages as I used to.