SeedBlink Blog

Watch the entire interview with Tommaso Guerra here, or read the transcript below:

What’s the story behind Golee?

At Golee, we are a team passionate about sport and with a strong background in technology. We started a few years ago developing apps for athletes, our aim was to help sports talents get visibility. It was very difficult to introduce our product and our tests were not responding as we expected. Therefore, we decided to study the entire sport ecosystem and realized there was a huge digital gap in the sports environment. SportsTech products and services are expensive and difficult to use, they are designed for professional clubs, representing 5% of the entire market. Instead, the remaining 95% were still using paper and excel sheets for their daily operations, financial and sportive activities.

We decided to create a platform for them, a product that could professionalise and digitalise thousands of clubs. Right now, more than 2500 clubs are using us in Europe (mostly in Italy), and we noticed the same needs and problems all over the world.

What problem does Golee solve, and how does it relieve "pain" for your customers? Who is your app the most useful? Who are your customers?

95% of Sports Associations and Sports Federations are stuck in the 90s: they still manage daily tasks on sheets of paper (or at most on Excel), and manage sensitive data without being GDPR compliant.

Associations are not economically sustainable: they have scarce availability of tools to monetize their assets (structures, events, merchandise, talents) and to interact with their communities (athletes, parents, fans).

Lastly, COVID-19 has blocked the sports activities for over a year, causing thousands of sports clubs to close and endangering the whole industry.

Golee is a model created to digitize and solve these problems in a scalable and effective way. With this intent we created a digital platform with dedicated services to each user of the sport ecosystem: managers, secretaries, coaches, athletes, parents, federations. Our aim is to educate the industry to work with digital tools, making them more professional and setting an industry standard.

Thanks to Golee clubs and federations work more efficiently:

• wasting less time (documents, payments, communications)
• saving money and paper (82% less paper usage)
• interacting with the community (coaches, athletes, parents, fans)

What's going on in the industry you're actively supporting? What are the most important trends?

Digitization is the main trend in the sports world. This process started a few years ago and now, in the aftermath of the pandemic, the process accelerated exponentially.

Golee has entered the market at a crucial time, with the Covid-19 accelerating digitisation and sport clubs having to restructure on a digital backbone or face extinction. Golee is a well-structured, agile company with 20 dedicated employees offering a comprehensive platform where there are no established alternatives. The need for sports clubs is relatively new and promptness in responding is crucial thus, scale up can be accomplished quickly.

The foundations of the Golee platform have been laid: the first layer of technology that allows all users to work digitally has already been released and tested on the Italian market. This gives real opportunities to become a global leader (replicable model), as all sports associations/federations share the same needs and organizational structure. The market is still virgin and we are among the pioneers of the digital movement.

How has your previous experience influenced Golee's growth?

(Felice) I was working in an international company designing innovative and disruptive solutions for big brands and financial institutions in different countries. This helped me to understand how to apply digital processes to unserved markets.

(Tommaso) I was a football player all my life, playing between the US, Italy and Spain. This helped me to understand the real needs on the market on my skin and bring my passion in this company. Moreover, I have experience in business development especially in international expansion.

Where do you see Golee and your company in the next 3-5 years? Do you have any ideas for a possible exit strategy?

We want to be the European market leader in the next 3 years and create the biggest existing sports database. We already had contact with international companies (sportswear, software systems, insurance companies) interested in a long term relationship and growing through acquisitions. We know that niche SaaS companies are one of the most interesting ones for them.

What makes Golee so special? Why should investors choose you?

I think the perception clubs have about us is different. Our target is made by sports enthusiasts, driven by passion. We always approach them as a Partner and never as a service provider. Our Customer Service builds relationships with clients, every time you have the same guy answering inquiries and always remember who is talking with. Clubs participate in the development of our software testing the product and giving us feedback continuously. They feel we are helping them and they want to help.

I think investors should choose us because we have a product designed to disrupt the entire industry from the ground and for the unique Team we built: young people passionate for sport with tech capabilities. Our resilience and energy made us become the Italian market leader in a few months and involved in our project federations, strategic investors and sport experts such as Clarence Seedorf (one of the greatest football legends) and Leonardo Limatola (ex-CFO AC Fiorentina).

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Golee is launching a crowdinvesting campaign on SeedBlink on Thursday, January 27.

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