Fairgame App Aims To Become Golf’s Digital Clubhouse

Credit silky swinging Australian Adam Scott, currently the 40 ranked golfer in the world, for reinvigorating his fellow Fairgame app co-founder Ben Clymer’s latent passion for golf. The watch collector and entrepreneur’s game had remained largely dormant since he dialed up bombs on his junior varsity golf squad and palling around with a Master’s champion brought back his love of the sport.

“It really got me excited. To see a guy like Adam strike a ball—it’s like he’s on a different planet—and when you see it up close, five feet away, it’s just remarkable. We’ve played many times since and he usually beats me by 20 strokes on average,” Clymer related.

There is probably an alternate timeline where Ben Clymer’s maternal grandfather gifts him an Andrew Dickson long-nosed putter instead of an Omega Speedmaster Mk40, flipping the man anointed as ‘the High Priest of Horology’s business building order. In that reality he still embarks on a career in wealth management at UBS, takes a severance package during the 2008 financial crisis and enrolls in a graduate J-school program at Columbia. But then he tees up a blog called golfový, as this alternate version of him remains smitten by the timbre of European languages.

Of course, Clymer founded Hodinkee (after the Czech and Slovak word for wristwatch), a content play geared towards luxury wristwatch enthusiasts. The site meshes editorial with a marketplace that deals in new and pre-owned timepieces—everything from Audemars Piguet to Zenith—and generates over $100 million in annual revenue.

“I found what really worked well for Hodinkee was taking a middle-class mindset, an everyman approach at what could be perceived as gate kept, pretentious or hard to break into and I approached that earnestly with an authenticity that really allowed us to play the liaison between a normal person and the high-end Swiss watch industry,” Clymer explains.

The success of that endeavor would eventually grant him a license to pursue a hibernating passion. Clymer hadn’t picked up a club in fifteen years and despite having the desire, the time and the money to re-immerse himself in golf, he found it challenging navigating his way back into the sport. He feels the accessibility and barriers to entry are on par with breaking into watch collecting during the early aughts.

“This is the same thing that watches went through but bigger with even more diametrically opposing user bases. You might have a guy that wears a $100,000 watch and a guy that wears a $100 watch and they’re still doing the same thing and can at least speak with each,” Clymer said.

“Whereas in golf, if you are a member of a private club or know people that play versus people that aren’t members of clubs or don’t know anybody else that plays—you are on different planets and playing different versions of the same game,” he added.

With Fairgame, Clymer, Scott, and third partner Eric Mayville, the co-founder of Wondersauce, are striving to create a unifying social golf app to democratize access and establish a digital home for the category.

“We think it’s a really neat mechanism to get people excited about golf and allows people to let their freak flag fly. When I think about watches fifteen years ago it was incredibly dorky. It was really, really isolating. You see these great fashion 2.0 brands in golf that are really pushing the idea of what golf can be forward but we, Adam Eric and myself, believe there is a gaping hole for a unifying digital brand,” Clymer said.

Clymer and his cofounders are clear-eyed that Instagram is the number one place to engage with and share posts about watches, golf or any enthusiast category. But they feel the broadness of Meta’s social media behemoth also creates opportunities for interest-specific affinity groups to find community elsewhere, in the same way Hodinkee with its streamlined horological focus engages an audience of three million viewers a month.

“You can post about your golf round or your putter on Instagram but realistically does your mom care about that? Does your girlfriend care about that? Does your best friend care about that? So, the idea of creating a real home for golf was part of the genesis here,” Clymer explained.

The app is designed to be approachable to people looking to find or expand their golf community with a key element that is essentially the clubhouse edition of Bumble Friends. Open Rounds is a feature within the app that helps players find people in their vicinity to play a round with.

When Clymer was playing golf as a single in the New York area, he found himself completing foursomes filled with bankers and lawyers whereas he was hoping to tee it up with likeminded artsy types, a cohort of players he knew existed.

“I thought ‘man where are the cool creative guys, where are the journalists, the art directors, the photographers,’” Clymer said. He noted that odds of randomly being paired with someone like that at your local golf track might be one in a million.

“You want to connect to people you enjoy being with because that’s ultimately the best thing about golf. You can go out meet new people, spend time outside, get to know people in a real earnest, organic way and if you like them, all of a sudden you have a friend for life,” Clymer explained.

There are dozens of golf apps that focus primarily on gameplay, stat tracking and self-improvement—Fairgame is unique as it dials headfirst into the social aspects and fun of the game. While the platform allows users to share photos, videos and and user feeds also feature curated news from outside sources, the primary focus is always fostering a sense of community around a shared passion for golf—a digital tool to promote real life interactions.

Additionally, you can peruse friends’ scorecards to see what holes they birdied and bogeyed. While the app doesn’t handle financial transactions, it can also keep tabs on the action in a large variety of betting games from best ball contests to games of wolf.

“There aren’t too many homes for golf where everything you do can be in that one place. Fairgame, where we are right now, is headed in that direction where you’ll be able to find people to play with, then play with them, chat and maintain a relationship longterm, all on one platform,” Clymer explained.

The app currently has 35,000 users and they project they’ll reach around 150,000 by year end 2024. It's in a pre-monetization phase, with a deliberate strategy to thoroughly test features and attain critical mass before introducing advertising, sponsorship, and other mechanisms that will eventually pay the bills of the predominantly self-funded venture.

“We want to keep the majority of functionalities free to the users for as long as possible. That’s not to say there won’t be power user features like the ability to keep every stat—you might have to pay for that—but the ambition is to build something that is user-first,” Clymer emphasized.