🚀 Big Update: tekbud.com, New Voting Portal & RISE Launch

Hey everyone —

A lot has happened in a short amount of time and I wanted to bring you all up to speed. Buckle up.

tekbud.com is live

I've been building out tekbud.com as the new home base for everything Tekbud and Tekbud Designs. Course library, getting started guides, and now — the thing I'm most excited about — a brand new community voting portal.

The Voting Portal

For years, the "system" for course nominations and voting has been... let's call it chaos. I'd get texts. Emails. Random comments buried in old threads. I tried Patreon's built-in chat — that was awful. I looked at third-party voting platforms. Nothing worked the way I needed it to.

This has been a long time coming.

tekbud.com/vote is purpose-built for us. Here's how it works:

• Nominate any real-world course you want to see built

• Allocate points to the courses you care about most (Members get 3 points, Pro gets 10 — stack them all on one course if you want)

• Comment on nominations — share why a course matters, post reference material, talk strategy

• LiDAR Scouts — this is new and I need your help (more on that below)

Everything's in one place. No more hunting through threads. No more "didn't I already nominate that?" Sign in with your Patreon account and you're good to go.

Round 25 Winner: Black Sheep Golf Club 🏆

Black Sheep took it over The Virtues in a 2-1 vote and is officially next on the build list. If you're not familiar — it's a men's-only inland links course outside Chicago designed by David Esler. 27 holes across 285 acres of Illinois prairie. No trees. No nonsense. Just pure golf. I can't wait to get into this one. I've been told that holes 1-18 are the must build.

LiDAR Scouts — I Need Your Help

Here's something that can genuinely speed up the build process: LiDAR data. It's what makes a course build accurate — real elevation data instead of me eyeballing Google Earth.

The new voting portal has a LiDAR Scouts section where you can submit LiDAR source links for any nominated course. There's a tutorial video linked right on the page showing you how to find it. Common sources include USGS 3DEP, OpenTopography, and state/county GIS portals. You'd be surprised how much of this data is freely available — someone just has to go look.

If you find LiDAR for a course, you're directly moving it up the priority list. Courses with confirmed LiDAR data get built faster. Period. I am also open to purchasing lidar for a course assuming we have permission. If you have any questions just let me know.

RISE — What a Start

For those who haven't jumped in yet — RISE is the career progression mode I've been dreaming about building for years. It launched just two days ago and the numbers speak for themselves:

• 250 players signed up

• Nearly 175 rounds played

• ScottW became our first Season 1 champion — and he did it fast. That is a LOT of golf in a very short time. Respect. 🏅

If you haven't tried it yet: rise.tekbud.com

This community is the reason I get to do what I do. Every course I build, every tool I create, every system I improve — it's because you all show up. The voting portal is my way of making sure your voice actually gets heard in a way that isn't a nightmare for either of us.

Go check it out. Nominate something. Drop some points. Find some LiDAR. Let's build something great. As always, if you have any questions or issues comment below.

— Brent