Golfers can take their game – and trash talk – from the green to the keyboard with a new Web site started by three University seniors. The Web site, they say, allows golfers to pick on each other long after they leave the country club.
University students Scott Rasmussen, Jake Horton and John Robinson recently launched GolfingMyWay (www.golfingmyway.com) in hopes of improving the golfing experience. The Web site is a social networking site aimed to connect golfers.
The business – three years in the making – is one of the first to launch with the help of Dick Sloan, a Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship mentor hired last year to help undergraduate students with business plans.
GolfingMyWay allows users to create a profile and interact with each other, but it goes beyond traditional social networking sites. Users can upload game statistics to view trends.
The Web site is banking off of the communal feel of golf.
“Just being such a social sport, it’s easy for golf to fit into this realm of social networks,” Rasmussen said. “People give each other a lot of crap in this sport. That alone will draw traffic.”
Horton said users can even comment on their fellow golfer’s bags or clubs.
Robinson said he thought of the idea for the Web site as a University sophomore, and he approached two friends that he met in the residence halls with the idea.
“Immediately, Jake and I jumped on it being golfers and users of MySpace and Facebook,” Rasmussen said.
The group then turned to Sloan for guidance.
Sloan said he often gave the students feedback on business plans.
“They just kept coming back,” Sloan said. “They’re very tenacious – extremely. As true entrepreneurs, they never took no for an answer.”
The students revised their business plan, and they eventually presented their ideas to investors and competed in student business competitions.
“It went from stuff meshed out onto a napkin to a formal business plan and an investor push,” Robinson said.
At first, GolfingMyWay founders say some investors did not take them seriously because they were students.
“We got a lot of arguments saying that we couldn’t put 100 percent into this,” Rasmussen said.
The students, however, were able to prove all naysayers wrong by never quitting.
“If you approach someone once, and they shut you down, a lot of time they do that to see if you come back and fight,” Horton said. “That’s something we did a lot of the time. We just kept nagging, and they realized we took this thing seriously.”
The group hired Web site developers and programmers to create the Web site, and they hired a law firm to help them become incorporated.
“People take you a hell of a lot more serious when you’re a legal entity,” Robinson said. “As we look back, we should have become one a lot sooner. That is when people can shake your hand and take you seriously.”
The students say they learned from the failures of other social networks.
“The fact that this has taken a while has been frustrating, but it’s also a blessing because we’ve been able to learn a lot from Facebook and MySpace,” Horton said. “A lot of users on MySpace feel like it’s so cluttered.”
GolfingMyWay has a classic, clean, organized feel, Horton said. Users can also control who can see their profile.
Although a plethora of social networking sites exist on the Internet, the creators of GolfingMyWay say they are reaching out to a niche that has not been tapped yet.
“There’s nothing really like that out there for golfers,” Rasmussen said. “It’s something that can really help the game.”
Other companies have found success in targeting niche markets online.
Sloan pointed to Dodgeball.com, a social networking site for dodge ball players. In 2005, Google, Inc. acquired the Web site.
The students are attending the Seattle Golf Trade Show this weekend at Qwest Field Event Center to market their Web site. After the students graduate in June, they plan on moving to Seattle to take on the business full-time.
“If we have to get a part time job, we’ll do it, but we want to be devoted to GolfingMyWay,” Rasmussen said.
Sloan said he will miss the students.
“Even if this is not a resounding success,” he said, “they all are walking successes in and of themselves, and they will end up somewhere else – either with an existing company to improve or add value there, or they’ll be creating another start-up.”
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