An estimated 85% of golfers play for money, it's a natural motion that's always been embedded in the game where even Mary, Queen of Scot's played a money match before her wedding day! Recently we enjoyed a fascinating conversation with co-founder of LoopGolf, Thomas Reinholm. Loop is a peer-to-peer betting app built specifically for golf. Thomas and I spoke about Loop’s origins, where the game of golf is heading, the Loop brand, and what its future could look like.
origin story
TR: My co- founder Matt Rum and I met when we were working at CashApp where we became quick friends over our love to get out on the course, compete, and play for a little bit of money. One day, we had a ton of action in our money matches with a lot of presses, meaning you take an existing bet, and double it. While you're out on the course things can escalate, I’m usually the score keeper scribbling with a little pencil and hopefully enough room to keep track of everything and as you get to the final three holes people begin peppering you with questions; Where do things stand? How much am I up? How much am I down? What is this hole for? It’s tricky when you're trying to play and do all this math in your head hoping it's right. You're trying to finalize everything but sometimes there can be debates especially when you get to the final step of settling that money match.
At the time we were at a payments company and looking at the world through a payment’s lens, we were driving home and felt there has got to be a better way to do this! it would make so much sense for payments to be embedded within this experience. There should be a simple way to hit SETTLE and have everything taken care of. Then we searched to find a product that did three things: coordinate, score, and settle a real money match on the course. We couldn't find anything that solved each of those pain points and to take it a step further we didn't find anything that had payments embedded within the product. Which, for a community that has an extremely high level of transactions like golfers, we realized we found a gap. Thus, we set out to start designing LoopGolf.
The Market Opportunity
TR: There are over 40M individuals now in the United States who are golf participants. We break it down into two buckets: the on-course golfer and the off-course golfer. Off-course (simulator environments, TopGolf, etc.) is currently where we're seeing the largest growth, I think off-course participation exceeded on-course participation for the first-time last year. Which is great for the game because there's always been an approachability issue with golf. It's expensive to start making the upfront investment to go buy clubs, then even going to the driving range is a real consideration for folks, then there's several people who are getting into game and think, “I'm not good enough to go play eighteen holes”, etc. so they're stuck on the driving range. But now, these off-course experiences are allowing people to get involved with golf with a much lower barrier to entry which is great for all golf companies including Loop. For example, last year in the dead of winter we had a few people go play a money match on a simulator at the virtual “Pebble Beach” at the Five Iron Golf location in New York. In fact, we've spoken to a few different simulator operators about embedding our digital wallet into their environment, so players can still play for money in these off experiences.
coordinating, scoring, and ultimately settling an on-course, real money match.
Uniqueness?
TR: What was extremely important for us was to make the process of real money games as seamless as humanly possible because ultimately, we were trying to improve something that one could argue had been working okay for a long time. However, with cash becoming less prevalent, and coming from a payments company where we had a front row seat to a huge trend taking place around the digitization of real money. When we were building Loop in terms of the payments design, we really wanted to bring that seamlessness to fiat currency and the exchange of dollars from the start.
Sure, there are other real money wallets that handle P2P transactions well, but digitizing real money in a gaming sense was where the opportunity existed. With our product we actually built live match experiences for the top game types. For example, if you’re playing a nassau, which is a popular game type in golf, you choose the course you’re playing, invite your friends, decide on how much you’re playing for, we pull off your Loop Wallet balance or linked card, whichever is greater and you’re good to go. Each player has already staked the amount they’re playing for with real money. The game creator inputs scores during the round and hits settle at the end. This customer experience solves those initial pain points I mentioned of coordinating, scoring, and ultimately settling an on-course, real money match. We will continue to build on this core use case to handle more complex game types, groups greater than 4 players and a whole lot more, but we felt this initial experience was key to get right to ultimately scale from.
Your Brand’s Soul?
TR: We believe strongly that playing for something and putting something on the line builds camaraderie. Secondly, it's such a mental game and the challenge of teaching yourself how to execute under a little bit of pressure, it doesn't have to be crazy amounts, it could be a dollar, it could be five bucks but just having something on the line means something, having to execute in that moment translates to all different areas of life.
Values?
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Meaning, be responsible for your physical and mental health through balance. We have an incredible marketing and community advisor that would always ask, how are you guys doing? how are you feeling? With start-up life, the highs are high, and the lows are very low and so she always wanted us to get outside, go play golf. There was this period last summer where we were so head down in everything that we were trying to get all the vendors together, get the development perfect, and we kind of lost ourselves and why we did this in the first place, which is our love to go play golf and to get outside and be in nature.tion text goes here
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It’s a mantra for our brand and that one is to build connections and camaraderie through competition.iption text goes here
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This is not always easy to maintain, as things can get heated and contentious in the midst of building and making difficult tradeoffs, there's a lot of great debate that takes place, but through it all, we want everyone to come together and be a connector not a divider.
Brand in One Word?
We've always done everything with a community mindset, and that's what always drew us to play for money… the camaraderie that would come through it.
The Innovator Inside
Fears
Running out of money. While my background is in finance, and I was at a public equity fund for the first four years of my career then in finance and strategy at Square. Digging into the numbers, understanding what drives them, where is burn? where is it going? what expenses are coming in? Keeping track of all of that even for being a small company is not that easy to do ironically.
frustrates
To be totally transparent, it’s the way most venture capitalists treat founders and entrepreneurs. That's been my biggest disappointment in this journey, in a lot of ways, there's quite a bit of disrespect to each other's time, a lack of preparedness, and a lack of follow up. Even answering “No” is just as much a part of the job as saying “Yes”.
Encourages
One of the things that keeps me going the most out of anything is the people that we both get to meet and interact with along the way, but especially the people on our team that have joined us in this journey. Early on whenever someone would say, I love what you guys are doing, I'd love to be an advisor and work with you and try and help you achieve your goals, and then slowly they’d start using the word “We” and as soon as we’d hear that, Matt and I would get really excited.
Brand Mentors
A big reason is because Apple is uncompromising in their design; they are playing an infinite game instead of a finite one that has allowed them to take their time but when they do something they do it amazingly well. You rarely see Apple be the first out, but when they do it, you're like wow! they absolutely knocked it out of the park.
The Delta rewards program. We look at the Delta rewards program as one of the best loyalty and rewards programs out there. As part of our broader roadmap we see a big opportunity to centralize loyalty & rewards for the golf community within our wallet given how fragmented loyalty and rewards are for this highly transactional community.
Another brand we see doing inspiring things is Gumtree Golf & Nature Club. We did a podcast recently with the founder who is an awesome human being and very creative person based out of New York. He has a mission to use all reusable materials within his clothing and accessories. He did headcovers that are incredibly cool, but then with each order he hands out little notebooks, which are meant to be something you can jot down notes and capture what you're seeing out in nature while you’re playing golf. He also takes it one step further, setting up a nonprofit entity to donate around 2% of each order to conservationist efforts. One thing that we always envisioned for Loop and had in our very first investor deck was the ability to donate to causes at the end of your round. To support and promote this natural sanctuary that we all love it is our responsibility to give back to nature. It’s not lost on us that there are aspects of building golf courses which are not great for the environment, but we hope that we can do a little something to help give back and promote conservationist tactics when redesigning or building new golf courses.
You’ve gotta’ be doing it for the right reasons…
Advice for other Start-ups?
TR: You’ve gotta’ be doing it for the right reasons because this is a marathon not even a 5K, a true marathon and there are periods where things are slow even if you're doing everything you should be. So having that perspective and passion around what you are building and the understanding that this is going to take time is crucial. I was reading an article about Roblox the other day and the time from when they launched their game that was entirely web based to when they launched iOS to Android was over a long several year arc. And they are a very well-funded company, so, when people are asking us when is this coming? When is that coming? You know, it's like, it'll come. We have a lot to prioritize, and we have to be super thoughtful in understanding the pace is a lot slower than what people want it to be. A final piece of advice is make sure you trust who you're partnering with, the human being they are, they’re value system is super important given you will spend more time with them than your family at certain points.
What’s Next?
TR: Where we ultimately want to take this thing is beyond real money gaming to bring more utility to the dollars that you have stored within your wallet, like being able to allow you to shop aka “commerce discovery”. We view this as a niche super app built specifically for golf with the wallet component at the center. There are so many transactions as a part of the Golfer's journey from buying your clubs, buying clothes, purchasing your greens fees, on course wages, a drink at the turn, lunch post round, the big week/end trip with your friends each year, etc. all of those are transactions that we can capture within the Loop wallet. And then eventually we see an opportunity to allow individuals to also bet on professional golf, all inside the LoopGolf app.
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