Golfsquid Gets Ink

With robust software and a big-time spokesman, this Colorado startup has quickly become a major player in tournament planning.

Jon Rizzi

The company’s name is quirky, but its product isn’t the least bit silly. In fact Golfsquid.com could easily become as indispensable to tournament planners as Diet Coke is to John Daly.

Veteran golf tournament planner Gary Robinson launched the website earlier this year after a chance encounter with multitalented software entrepreneur Michael Kranitz.

“We were in a carwash and I overheard him talking on his phone about event-management software,” Robinson says, “I held up my business card. He looked at it and told the other person, ‘I gotta call you back.’”

Among the dozens of businesses in which he is involved, Kranitz developed flat-fee, cloud-based event-management software called eventsquid.com. “Within each category, the squid’s tentacles come out to help you manage the event,” Robinson explains. With the technical R & D already done, it took less than a month for him and Robinson to customize a version for golf tournaments.

Intuitive and easy to navigate (within a half-hour your site is registering players), Golfsquid automates every aspect of golf event registration, payment, marketing, management and reporting. It creates databases, spreadsheets and revenue reports. Its dashboard tracks everything from signups to signage, as well as minutiae that often get overlooked. Hole sponsors can use a course map to select the hole where their sign will appear. Golfsquid’s software interfaces seamlessly with tee-sheet software—BlueGolf or Viper—used at golf courses and will even print out check-in lists, cart pairings, badges, sponsor coupons and much more. Individual event sites can also accommodate advertising, further adding to the event’s bottom line. The entire cost: $2.99 per player.

At a meeting with Robinson, 13-time PGA Tour winner and Golf Channel analyst David Duval was so impressed with Golfsquid that he asked, “Do you mind if I show it to some people at Augusta next week?”

Soon the Golf Channel’s Rex Hoggard called to interview Robinson, and Duval became a partner and spokesperson. “I believe that Golfsquid will transform the golf tournament industry by facilitating more events and making existing events far easier to manage,” he said in a press release. “If you are planning an event, you need to get on the site and see what it does.”

Duval is not the only strategic alliance Robinson has brokered. At press time, Golfsquid was about to ink a deal with a national golf chain to become its official tournament retailer. He’s also in talks to bring customers deals on logoed merchandise, luxury automotive prizes and entertainment. Live scoring and player-prospecting apps are in the works.

With close to 100 events already booked and a national rollout imminent, Golfsquid intends to reach between 750 and 1000 by the end of the year. “We found the right brand, the right name, the right logo, the right spokesman. Our software and servers have the capacity to handle 45,000 tournaments, and the software is so easy. If you can handle ebay, you can handle this.” golfsquid.com