Where do I stand?

Paul Matthew Lopez knows exactly where his feet go 30 feet above a circus ring. He trained the seven-person pyramid with the Fabulous Wallendas and spent a decade closing the show at Absinthe in Las Vegas, comedy and high wire in the same act.

On flat grass, nobody could tell him where to stand.

That question is how Advanced Golf Address started.

Laps and laps

From the ground, the wire looks death-defying. What you actually practice is almost ridiculously basic.

Take a step. Then take another one. Put your foot where it belongs. Put your weight where it belongs. Then do it again. And again.

Nobody on a wire says "I'll just feel it when I get up there." You prepare. You know where your body belongs. Then you trust what you trained.

Then golf

Paul picked up golf after a hard year. At first it was somewhere to put his attention. Then it turned into a passion.

It did not come easy. One of his first rounds was at an expensive course with grass so nice he was scared to take a divot. Then he took a lot of them, and wondered if somebody was going to send him a bill for the grass. Whiffs. Fat shots. A few that never left the ground. His buddies laughed, and one of them kept giving him a hard time for not knowing where to stand.

So Paul asked how to fix it. The answer was always some version of "you just have to feel it."

If you play, you have heard it too. From a buddy, from a video, maybe from a lesson you paid for. It is not wrong, exactly. It is just not an answer.

That answer drove Paul crazy. "Balance can absolutely be something you feel. But you do not arrive at that feeling by refusing to prepare."

So he did not call a golf pro. He called the kid from across the street.

Two kids from Wayside Drive

We grew up across the street from each other on Wayside Dr. in San Antonio. We met when we were 2 or 3. Then life sent us in completely different directions: Alex into business, Paul into clown school and the circus. We can go a year without talking, pick up the phone, and it is like nothing changed.

Alex had been building small apps for problems in his own life. When Paul called to vent about golf and his buddies, Alex asked him to walk through the whole thing while he recorded it. Somewhere in that call it clicked for both of us.

The plan was not to disrupt the golf technology industry. It was to build something so Paul could beat those guys.

The mat went in his pocket

Paul's first idea was a mat with marks on it. That fell apart fast. Fourteen clubs, all different lengths, and nobody is carrying a mat to the 14th tee. So the mat went in his pocket instead.

Your setup comes down to things you can measure: your height, your wrist to the floor, and the club in your hands. With the same 7-iron, someone 5'8" stands about 28 inches from the ball. Someone 6'2", about 30. Two tape measures and a few minutes gets you the numbers, and the app works out your setup for every club in the bag. We call it the Two Tape Method.

Then it turned into what we did as kids on Wayside: find something hard and stay up too late figuring it out. Paul would call from the course with a problem, and a few days later there would be a fix in the app. A gapping chart from his real carries. An aim check. A practice log. A scorecard.

"You're a wizard, Harry," Paul would say.

"I've never read or seen a single Harry Potter," Alex would remind him.

Failing in the right direction

As Paul put it, "I didn't suddenly become Tiger Woods because Alex wrote some code."

He still had to swing the club, and golf still humbled him. He played the buddies from that expensive course again. He still lost.

But his bad rounds started becoming better than what had once been his good rounds. Then he broke 90: an 85 at Olmos Basin, with his dad riding in the cart.

"That one meant something beyond the number," Paul said.

Then he took his brother Aaron and their friend Stephen out to San Pedro. Paul shot a 34, his best there. Aaron, first time on the course and using the app, shot a 40, which took Paul about ten rounds to get near. He has opinions about that. Stephen had never finished a round with a real score. That day he played every shot and walked off with an actual number.

Paul's verdict: "With Advanced Golf Address, I am failing in the right direction."

Still preparing

Paul is a high wire walker with a golf game in the 90s, working toward the 80s. He still wants his rematch with those buddies. This time he will know where to stand.

Alex solves problems a different way. He has spent his career finding the few numbers that matter inside something messy and building the tool that makes them simple, and he still stays up too late doing it, same as on Wayside.

Advanced Golf Address is what you get when those two ways meet. Paul brought a lifetime of knowing exactly where his feet go, and a golf question nobody would answer. Alex brought the numbers and the code. Two kids from Wayside Drive who never stopped figuring things out together. It is why we named the company Wayside Foundry, after the street where we grew up.

Take a step. Then take another one.

Advanced Golf Address is on Google Play with a 7-day free trial. iPhone is coming next.

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