GroupLooper’s BHAG
Do you know what a BHAG is?
… it’s a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
Our GroupLooper team has a BHAG… to enable any golfer to book a tee time at any golf course on the planet in 15 seconds or less.
Why would we care?
Why should you care?
Because as golf industry operators, we have a shared interest in helping people play more golf.
There are 3 primary ways to get people to play more golf…
Make it more FUN
Make it more CONVENIENT
Make it more AFFORDABLE
We’ll be sharing some thoughts in future posts on how to make golf more fun.
There are gobs of people who are offering “deals” to make golf more affordable… Golf18, GolfNow, iDeal Genie, KQRS Golf Card, Minnesota Golf Card, Minnesota PGA Golf Card, and I could go on for awhile. We’re swimming in a sea of discount programs.
But the #1 reason that people say they don’t play more golf… as confirmed in survey after survey… is that they don’t have enough TIME. In other words, golf is inconvenient.
How many services do you know of that have made it their primary mission to solve the #1 problem in golf by making it more convenient?
We know of two:
- GroupLooper
- Quick.golf (a GroupLooper affiliate)
We hope to have some competition soon; in the meantime, we’re trying to put more daylight between our solutions and the inevitable copycats.
One way of making golf more convenient is to make it easier to schedule a tee time. Golfers booking in high season often need to check several courses before finding one that has a tee time to their liking. We know from personal experience that it’s easy to give up on this process if it requires too much effort and the result is the dreaded “shoulda/coulda/woulda” played golf day. Yes, there are sites like GolfNow that allow golfers to check for tee times at many courses, but these sites typically limit users to the courses where they want them to book based on the deals that they have in place and there is often no rhyme or reason to the overwhelming number of tee times that are shoved in front of users of these sites.
GroupLooper takes a different attitude… we want to help each golfer play where they want to play.
We team with major local golf brands to enable golfers to easily link to the GroupLooper Booking tool… maybe from a link in their latest email from Tee Times Magazine or TwinCitiesGolf or maybe even from the Away Game button on their home course website or perhaps from the bookmarked link on their smartphone home screen. There are no apps to download or update… users are always working with the latest version of GroupLooper Booking.
On GroupLooper Booking, golfers can access information about every one of the ~36,000 golf courses on planet Earth. We allow golfers to book directly through GroupLooper OR if we don’t have a direct booking connection to the course where you want to play we’ll make it easy for them to link to the golf course’s website or to do things the old fashioned way by calling the course.
Switching from one course to another can be done in seconds. Each golfer can keep their own list of favorites and quickly scan and select from that list. They can quickly search for courses nearest to any search location they want to explore. Or, they can review the list of courses recommended by whatever site initiated their GroupLooper Booking session.
The process is so much faster and easier than Googling and searching for each golf course one by one… and as the number of courses that are directly connected grows the booking process will just get faster and faster and faster.
During the past few weeks, we have been testing GroupLooper Booking with a limited group of early adopters. We’ve gotten great feedback and will be doing a little fine tuning. General release will happen sometime in the next few weeks.
We’ll most likely start in June with about 10 Twin Cities courses connected for direct bookings, and there is a list of almost 30 other courses that are likely to join as a 2nd wave later in the season… many of these are just waiting for their tee sheet software suppliers to provide GroupLooper with the access required to do direct bookings. We don’t intend to slow down until we have at least 100 Twin Cities operators on the GroupLooper Booking platform and we’ve already begun to get commitments from courses in other Metro areas.
Our initial marketing partners Tee Times Magazine, TwinCitiesGolf and the PGA Minnesota Section will make over 150,000 golfers in the region aware that GroupLooper Booking is the best way to search for and book tee times at Minnesota courses. We’re in active discussions with other organizations that have the ability to market directly to large groups of area golfers.
We’ll be broadening the testing team during the week of May 29 and you may be offered an opportunity to get a sneak peek at GroupLooper Booking capability. If you do, help us out with some feedback.
Stay tuned as this story develops… whether you’re one of the early pioneers or a course that is going to watch and wait before jumping into this game this is going to be a very interesting long and winding road.
Very Interested