Score Beo is a big winner with GAA supporters
Fergus Grimes of Score Beo, the GAA scores and news app which is enjoying soaring popularity among GAA fans. Picture: Barry Cronin
Supporters are starting to use Score Beo instead of Twitter to find the GAA Live Scores and Lineups. Fergus Grimes is the man who created it.
The 24-year-old Meath native is the creator of Score Beo — the GAA live scores app that has 105,000 downloads. Score Beo provides live scores, line-ups and a news hub for GAA fans, as the app continues to increase its user base with every passing week.
“It is all growing organically, Score Beo continues to get 2,000 new downloads each weekend,” Fergus explains.
Having spent €7,000 on media advertising, he backs this up by having an events team who travel to Croke Park for the big games, mixing with fans and generally having the craic: “The events team have the craic with supporters walking to matches and supporters get a chance to enter competitions to win tickets for the next game.
“Maintaining a direct interaction with supporters going to games is very important for us. I have always had the figure of over 100,000 users in my head from day one, now that we have passed it I’d be very confident we will surpass 200,000 users before the end of next year.”
The entrepreneurial spirit is clearly well established within the Grimes family gene pool, given that both Fergus’s grandfather and father were also self-made businessmen.
“I’m very proud to be the third generation of the Grimes family in business, and have had great support from my family in helping Score Beo to become a reality.”
Fergus is keen to interest Local Enterprise Boards in the platform, given the spectacular success to date. Score Beo started small — initially focused on providing live scores for inter-county championship games, but has since expanded to include scores for All Senior Club Championship matches.
“As a GAA player and supporter myself, I could clearly see the gap in the market — GAA supporters were crying out for it.”
Fergus adds that the original idea came to him during his time on a student J1 visa to Canada, where he found it difficult to get quick and easy access to the sporting scores back home.
“It was there and then I decided to build an app that would be a one-stop shop for GAA supporters. Score Beo gives one-click access to all GAA scores.“
Already receiving rapturous applause from influencers across Twitter and other social media sources. Bernard Brogan who is a seven-time All-Ireland winner with Dublin said: “It's a great service for the GAA Community.”
Score Beo has further underlined its growing success with GAA sponsors from major players such as Allianz, Eirgrid, PWC and Appliances Delivered.
“It has been very gratifying to get the support of official GAA sponsors like Electric Ireland for the College Championships as well as Allianz for the Senior All Ireland series — they saw the value in Score Beo and backed it. We also have a Cork sponsor — O’Mahonys — who provide alarms and security in Cork. We are currently working with O'Mahony and driving traffic to their website.”
Having been named in the ‘Connected 30 under 30’ earlier this year, Fergus says that the winning formula which has won the hearts and minds of GAA fans may yet extend itself into other sporting codes such as soccer and rugby.
“We’ll see what happens in that sphere down the road. For now, Score Beo has expanded from a side gig to a full-on business for me and I want to ensure our Gaelic games score coverage is fully comprehensive before extending into other sports. We’re growing organically, and the plan is to continue our GAA coverage before moving on to other things.”
As a graduate of Bachelor of Business with Entrepreneurship from Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Fergus found his true calling as a sports app entrepreneur after many rejections for jobs he had applied for.
“I tried for 32 jobs, without success in any of them. Sports Beo was the result of spotting a gap in the market for GAA Live Scores — and also turned out to be a way of creating a job for myself. To other grads and young people out there, I would say ‘keep your eyes open’ — there are opportunities where you can end up being your own boss. I’m a huge GAA and football fan myself, and running Score Beo has been a brilliant start to my career so far.”
