Meet the founders of Foreteam

Introduce yourself in a sentence. Who are you, and what do you do at Foreteam?

Pawel: Engineer by day, golfer by weekend. At Foreteam I build the app: the matching, the backend, the mobile app, the servers, and the part where it all breaks at 2 a.m.

Valeria: I'm a product designer with over seven years of experience, and I'm responsible for every part of the design at Foreteam.

How would you describe Foreteam to someone who's never picked up a club?

Valeria: Pawel will probably call it "Tinder for golfers", so let me add the important difference: here, the more matches you get, the better. More matches means more rounds and more people to play with. Which is pretty much the opposite of how dating apps are supposed to work 😅

Pawel: Guilty. The version without the dating app: you tell it where you play, how well and when. It hands you people who fit. You write one message and you have a round. No swiping, no feed, no likes.

How much golf do you actually play?

Pawel: Less than I'd like, more than my wife would like. Weekends, mostly. On the range I flush it, on the course the same clubs have other plans. So I'm building this for people like me, not for scratch golfers.

Valeria: I don't play regularly yet, but I'm learning. I want to understand the game well enough to design the best possible experience for our users.

Where did the idea actually begin? A specific round, or a specific frustration?

Pawel: It started with Nick, my father-in-law. He loves the game more than anyone I know and put a club in my hands at Andrews Air Force Base. Back in Warsaw the game was still there, the people weren't. So I did the engineer thing: wrote a small tool that found golfers at my course, at my level, free when I was. That tool grew up into Foreteam.

Valeria: Not on a golf course, I'll be honest. I've held a club exactly twice, both times with Pawel. My way in was the opposite of his. I don't play golf, but I live the active-lifestyle version of the same problem: I do a lot of sports, and the ones that need other people are always the hardest to keep going. Kitesurfing is a lot more fun when you've at least got someone to travel with.

When did it go from "someone should fix this" to "we're building it"?

Pawel: There was no lightning. It ran as a Telegram bot for a while, a few friends, one course, and I kept postponing the real thing. This summer we said it out loud: either we build it properly or we stop pretending. Then the name landed and I couldn't stop.

How did the two of you end up building this together?

Pawel: Valeria is my wife's best friend, so my co-founder was in the family before the company was. For years we'd talked about building something together and never had the time, me with my studies, her with her own things. Then Foreteam came along when we both finally did. I asked, she liked the idea and the look of golf, and we started.

Valeria: Pawel brought me the idea at the start of 2026. What sold me was watching Barcelona, where I live: friends kept moving their tennis and volleyball groups off WhatsApp and onto dedicated apps, one after another. So I did the research, and golf was wide open, nobody had cracked it the way those other sports had. That's when joining Pawel stopped being a maybe.

You call this a people problem, not a golf problem. What's actually broken about how golfers find someone to play with today?

Pawel: Golf is a game you play with people. Alone, it's four hours of walking with a scorecard. The people you'd enjoy it with are already at your course, on the same days, at your level. You just never meet them. That's the whole gap, and our guide on how to find golf partners shows how people try to close it today.

Valeria: Golf has been getting more popular, like a lot of sports. But if your family or friends don't play, it's genuinely hard to step into what used to be quite an exclusive world. That wall is exactly what we want to remove.

What kind of golfer is Foreteam really for?

Pawel: Me, two years ago. Back in Poland, loved the game, knew nobody who played. Also the person with the same three partners who'd like a fourth. And the traveller with clubs in the boot and a free afternoon in a city they don't know.

Valeria: Anyone who wants to play more but doesn't have the people for it. The complete beginner who feels intimidated walking onto a course alone. The newcomer in a city who left their golf friends behind. The regular who just wants a good fourball more often. A golf buddy app for anyone missing the buddies.

Most apps are built to keep you scrolling an endless feed. You went the other way. Why?

Pawel: Two reasons. A feed mostly ends with nothing, and it isn't fun. So we made matching a small daily game: you get dealt a few cards, you don't know who's in the deck, and each one is someone at your course who fits. Five minutes, one message, a round. That's the loop we wanted, not the scroll.

Valeria: The point of Foreteam is to get you off your phone and onto the course. An endless feed is built to hold your attention; we'd rather earn your trust, help you find your people, and let you close the app and go play. If you're barely using it because you're too busy golfing, we've done our job 😄

You rate each other after a round, so reputations are real. Why does trust matter so much in golf specifically?

Pawel: Golf is four hours with someone. That's longer than most first dates. You want to know the person shows up on time and keeps pace. So after a round you rate your partner, and the reputation only shows once a few people agree. It's not a leaderboard, it's a reference.

Valeria: Call us European, but this is simply how it should be in a digital product. Real people, real reputations, no noise.

What did you deliberately decide not to build?

Valeria: Community groups, for now. Golf can already feel cliquey and exclusive, and we don't want to recreate that. We're also holding back on advanced features until we have real user feedback, so we can prioritise what people genuinely need instead of guessing.

Pawel: Payments and tee-time booking. Every club has its own system and its own opinions, and we'd have spent a year on integrations before anyone played a round. We match people; the club books the round, the way it always has. Also no swing analysis, no stories, no filters. There are great apps for that. Ours is for the part before the round: who.

Pawel, you play a lot. What did that teach you that ended up shaping the product?

Pawel: I play badly and often, which is more useful than playing well. A scratch golfer designs for scratch golfers. I design for the person who hesitates before pressing "join" because they think they're not good enough yet. So the app never asks for a certificate, never ranks anyone, and "beginner" is the first option on the list, not the last.

What's been the hardest thing to get right technically?

Pawel: Matching with few people. Any algorithm looks clever with a million users. With fifty at one course it has to be honest: sometimes there is nobody today, and the app should say so instead of faking it. Reacting within a minute when someone changes their availability, never proposing someone you've already matched with, and running all of it on one small server two people can operate. Boring problems, solved boringly. That's the goal. How it works, in four steps, is on the front page.

Valeria, how did you land on the look and feel: calm, warm, a little bit vintage?

Valeria: The logo followed the golf theme almost on its own. The dot became the ball, and the "r" works as a little flag with barely any modification. The current visuals came partly out of necessity: we didn't have real photos yet. These playful vintage images are easy to generate with AI tools, and I love the contrast between them and our modern, sharp typography. For social media we prefer real content, so we'll be creating more of that.

You came to golf as a total beginner. How does that shape the way you design the app?

Valeria: I don't see it as a disadvantage at all. I can put myself in a beginner's shoes and stay away from the "I already know how this should work" trap. It's also a genuinely fun product for me: day to day I build more complex dashboards, not mobile apps, so I get to learn current mobile trends and best practices along the way.

How do you split the work, and where do you overlap?

Pawel: She owns how it looks and feels, I own why it works. The border moves a lot: she has shipped code, I have answered Instagram comments, and nobody planned either.

Valeria: So far, everyone does everything, literally. Sometimes I'm the one coding (endlessly grateful for AI here), and sometimes Pawel is the one replying to Instagram comments 😄

What do you disagree about most?

Valeria: Surprisingly, no big disagreements so far. We have enough respect and trust in each other's working style and expertise. And when we need a third opinion, we have our rational supermind: Hanna, Pawel's wife and my best friend.

Pawel: Dogs versus cats. It's in the intro, it's not getting resolved, and it's the only argument we've had so far. Everything else took one conversation.

What does the other person do better than you?

Pawel: Taste. I can build anything, she knows which anything. And she asks the question I skip: what does the person feel when they see this.

Valeria: The technical side of the product, obviously. And, of course, playing golf 😅

What does a good round with the right people actually feel like?

Pawel: Four hours pass like one. You forget the score, remember the jokes, and the first thing anyone says in the car park is "same time next week?". That's the whole product. We're just the introduction.

Why Europe?

Valeria: It's where we are, and it's a fast-growing market. But we'd happily make the app available worldwide. One of the use cases we're building for is travelling golfers 😉

Pawel: Because I live here and nobody has taken it seriously. The US has a golf app for every occasion. In Europe you still find your fourball through a WhatsApp group from 2019 and a guy called Marek. We know the courses, the languages, and the season, which ends in October, painfully.

You're launching country by country, with every course in a country live from day one. Why that approach?

Pawel: A course with one user is useless, and a country with every course but no golfers is also useless. So we open a whole country at once, every course from day one, and then go and get golfers where they already are, one club at a time. Nobody waits for their course to be "unlocked". The rest is legwork. Mine, in a car.

A year from now, what does success look like, beyond the numbers?

Pawel: A message in our inbox that says "we played together for the first time in April and now we play every week". That, a few hundred times. And my own Saturday morning solved by the app instead of by texting five people who all say maybe.

Valeria: For me? Finding a golf buddy here in Barcelona through our own app.

What do you want a golfer to feel the first time they get a match?

Pawel: Relief. Like when someone at a party says "oh, you play too?". Then slightly nervous, because now it's real and you have to actually show up. Good nervous.

Valeria: That little spark of "oh, this is actually happening". The feeling when a plan you were slightly nervous about suddenly clicks: someone said yes, the round is real, and you can't wait to get out there.

If someone's reading this and thinking about signing up, what would you say to them?

Pawel: Bring your clubs, your honest level and one free morning. We'll bring the person who has the same three. The app is free. The excuse is gone.

Valeria: If you've been meaning to play more and just don't have the people for it, this is for you. You don't need to be good, you don't need a group, you just need to start. Come find your fourball 😊