If you can drive a golf ball 10 miles by Canada Day, Foursum and Puma have a hat — and a mobile phone app — for you.
Foursum is a Moncton startup that has developed an app for golfers. On Tuesday, it launched its partnership with Puma, the German sports equipment maker whose Cobra Golf unit, based in Carlsbad, Calif., makes one of the world’s most popular drivers.
In celebration of the partnership, Foursum and Puma have announced their Go Looooong challenge, which is seeing how many golfers can drive the ball a total of 10 miles from the tee (and log the distances into their Foursum account) by the end of June. The first 150 entrants to do so will win a limited-edition Cobra golf hat.
“You’d have to average about eight rounds over six weeks, so it’s very doable,” Foursum CEO Matt Eldridge said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It wasn’t about making it a stretch to achieve. We just wanted to show the start of our partnership and some of the great ideas that we have.”
The Puma deal is the biggest announcement yet from Foursum. The company began two years ago when startup veterans Eldridge and Adam MacDonald and golf pro Louis Melanson teamed up to produce an app that can help golfers improve their score and enhance their enjoyment of the game. The app can be downloaded free from foursum.com.
Foursum has a databank of 26,000 golf courses, including maps, global positioning system locations and details of each hole. The app lets golfers input statistics from each hole, so they end up with personalized data and a graphic presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of their game.
The data — such as fairways hit and length of drive — can be instantly shared with an instructor to help golfers identify the parts of their game that need improvement. They can share the stats with friends over Foursum’s social network, even form league tables to compete with other golfers.
Eldridge said the deal with Puma is “all about customer acquisition” — that is, using the Puma name and network to drive customers to the Foursum site. The partners are now getting the news out to the golf media, and pro golfers sponsored by Puma will soon be tweeting promotions to their followers. The Puma team includes such players as Ian Poulter, Greg Norman and Rickie Fowler, identified by 70 per cent of junior golfers as their favourite player.
Eldridge said the company beta-tested the product with about 10,000 people, and this spring launched the app. It now has more than 15,000 customers, and the number is growing. So far, they are using the app for free. In the late summer, the company plans to introduce a revenue model that Eldridge describes as unique. He declined to reveal more about it.
Working with Puma, the Foursum team hopes to grow the product in Australia, New Zealand and Asia as the Southern Hemisphere enters summer.
“Opening up those other countries is big, and by the time we roll around to the spring of next year (in North America), we’ll be in a very healthy position,” Eldridge said.
“This, for us, is about helping to grow the game, which Puma wants to do as well. For us and for Puma, this is the start of something much bigger.”