Tony Covey MGS

Hopefully you've seen our blog posts announcing our donation program and club recycling program. Let me start by saying a very sincere thank you to those of you who have already donated. GolfSpy X is busy adding forum badges for those of you who's names and email addresses we recognized. If you have already donated, and don't have a badge, send me a PM and let me know the email address you used to donate, and we'll get you squared away as quickly as we can. The decision to ask for donations was far from an easy one. It would have been simple enough to say that everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn't we, but as you know, we pride ourselves on doing things differently. Quite frankly, GolfSpy X and I were uncomfortable, and remain so, about asking for your money. Ultimately we came to the realization that the commitments we've made to you, refusing big OEM advertising dollars in order to remain completely above the influence, completely independent, and unthethered from the marketing machines that drive the golf equipment industry, will fail without your financial support. This isn't a doom and gloom post designed to scare you into opening up your wallets, but we do think it's important for everyone to understand where MyGolfSpy is as a business. We have a vision for what we can become, but we won't succeed without funding (and the time that funding will allow us to spend on growing the site). The ideas we'd like to implement are many of the same you've suggested to us. They include things like: Testing heads with the same shafts Blind testing (masking the true identity of the clubs being tested) Comparing custom fit equipment Gather more and even better data (Trackman) Purchase our test equipment at retail and eliminate the OEMs from the process completely We'd love to do some of this, all of this, and even more. Our ultimate goal is to become globally recognizable as The Consumer Reports of Golf. That's not some catching marketing pitch, it's what we think a golf site 100% dedicated to the consumer should be. It's what we want to be. The reality is that we can't do any of it without the support of our readers. Yeah, we could probably shut our mouths, behave ourselves, and play by the industry rules. If we did that it's reasonable to assume within 6 months the big guys would be calling us with six figure advertising opportunities. Of course then where would we be? We'd have more money, but we wouldn't be able to use it for any of the things we want to do; the things you've asked us to do. We'd simply become the latest in a long line of mini-golf digests; existing for little more than to keep sponsors happy and cash flowing. That's not what we want, and we hope that's not what you want. We've made the decision to go all in and push forward our way and not look back. Whether or not we succeed is largely up to you, and everyone else who visits MyGolfSpy. If every person who visited our site in a single month donated just $1 we'd be well on our way. Of course, that's not a realistic expectation. All we can ask is for you to consider what MyGolfSpy offers you. If what we do has value to you, and if you believe in our vision for what a consumer driven golf site should look like, then please consider donating what you can to help us grow and become the golf site that many in the golf equipment industry want never to exist at all. Details on how to donate can be found in this post. Also check out the details of our new Recycling Program. Thanks, T