Everyone loves being rewarded for the minutiae of everyday life. Book a flight, stay in a hotel, fill up the gas tank, go to a supermarket—and get rewards points. Collect enough points and get free stuff, from more of what you bought in the first place to extravagant items you wouldn’t buy for yourself.
The founders of a new golf app think you should get rewarded for everything around our favorite sport.
GolfN, now in the Apple App Store and online, allows you to collect points for golf and social activities around golf.
“We think that it's a new way of operating in golf,” GolfN founder Jared Phillips says. “It’s Strava and it's like Pokémon Go all in an app for golfers where I can check in and here's my community and we can all earn together and it's free.”
The way Phillips sees it, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in golf apps in recent years. What he calls “table stakes” in golf apps now are features like scoring, stat tracking, GPS and course ratings that are a given, like paper scorecards and pencils to luddites.
What separates GolfN is a rewards program where points are accumulated by, for starters, just playing. Sign into the app and start a round, and you’ll get points. Connect with other members and points can multiply.
GolfN is still in its infancy but eventually points will be available for going to TopGolf, practice ranges, retail outlets and more. A social component is already functional, users posted photos from Oakmont during the U.S. Open and received points.
Points can be saved up to redeem for merch from balls to clubs and more in an online marketplace; GolfN has partnerships with Srixon, L.A.B. Golf, Bettinardi and Cobra Puma, with more on the way.
“Every time I play I’m getting rewarded,” Phillips says. “There’s a redemption marketplace just like Chase Sapphire [credit card] rewards or whatever.
“It’s getting back what you’re putting into the game. That’s the sell.”
Points can also be used on sweepstakes entries for trips (GolfN sent one member to Northern Ireland for a nine-day golf vacation) and items like a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon (IYKYK).
“A lot of what we want to do are focusing on experiences that you just quite frankly can't buy,” Phillips says. Like everyone wants a $4,000 bottle of Pappy Van Winkle but says ‘I'm not gonna buy it … but I would take it.’”
And like premium credit cards, GolfN has membership tiers that can be purchased with various other perks, most notably points multipliers that put players that much closer to rewards. Monthly memberships start at $16 and go up to $999 a month (all are cheaper if paid annually), and GolfN’s founders encourage users to explore the multipliers and “game” the system, similar to those who study frequent-flyer mileage programs and look for loopholes. For example, if you’re in the market to buy the L.A.B. putter that J.J. Spaun just won the U.S. Open with, maybe you figure out a way to do it via a GolfN membership, use points and collect other rewards along the way.
Phillips has put plenty of thought into all of this including when he’s on the course—where, ironically, he buries his phone in his bag. “I’m CEO and founder of a golf tech company and I hate using my phone,” he says, laughing.
That led to another feature on the app, a “breadcrumbs” GPS system where your steps are followed through the entire round. Instead of, say, tracking your fairways for an entire round by constantly pecking on your phone, you can see after the round that you were playing from the left rough on 10 holes and adjust your stats accordingly.
Alas, there are no sympathy points for bad golf on the GolfN app. Then many of us would be embarking on a heck of a shopping spree.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as With This New Golf App, You Get Rewarded to Play.
