In our business environment, I don’t want our financial partner to fall behind. It has to keep our pace — and Vivid does.
— Tim Zimmermann, Co-Founder, Lazy Golf
Tim Zimmermann and Louis Wulff met on a staircase. Louis was at home; Tim was visiting the building wearing a golf cap. Louis had just started playing. A range session followed, then a longer conversation, then a question: why was every golf simulator in Hamburg either tucked inside an exclusive club or wrapped in the upsell logic of a corporate entertainment venue? Three years later, the answer is Lazy Golf — a single ground-floor unit in Hamburg that was once a nail salon, and is now an indoor golf simulator with no front desk and no staff. Membership exists, but it is not in the traditional German sense: members get 50 percent off every booking, and no one needs one to play. Customers book online, receive two codes (one for the door, one for the system), walk in, and play.
A Business Model Built on Subtraction
Lazy Golf is, in Tim Zimmermann’s phrasing, a self-service golf simulator. Customers come for two reasons: to refine their swing using the data the simulator captures on every shot, and to play virtual rounds on real-world courses without weather, walking, or a five-hour calendar block. The whole experience is engineered around what isn’t there. No reception. No barista. No hovering attendant.
“A self-service golf simulator means you can play golf without any interaction with other people,” Zimmermann says. The economics of subtraction are straightforward, and he doesn’t dress them up: removing staff frees the budget for high-end hardware and a comfortable interior. The result, he says, shows up in the numbers — more than 29 percent of customers come back, many of them on a near-weekly cadence.
The Hardware Came From the Defense Industry
Inside the simulator box, infrared sensors and a high-speed pressure camera track the ball off the tee mat. The technology is called a tracer, and Zimmermann notes its origin without flourish: it was developed for measuring the spin and velocity of projectiles in the armaments industry, then re-applied to golf. The same equipment now computes spin, launch angle, club-face contact, swing path, distance, height, and roll, and projects the result onto the canvas the player just hit. TrackMan software handles the calculation; a high-spec PC, which the founders built themselves, runs the simulation.
For Zimmermann, the data is the product. “We’ve already helped a lot of people play better on the actual course,” he says, “and that’s only possible because we translate the swing into numbers.”
Built by the Founders, in Three Months
When asked who installed the rig, Zimmermann answers: nobody. He and Wulff did it themselves, working from YouTube tutorials and using a single contractor for the wall. The space had been a nail salon. They gutted it, framed the simulator box, laid the floor, mounted the tracer, wired the door-keypad system to the booking platform, and coded the website on Webflow with a custom layer for animations and the booking pipeline. Two and a half months, three at most.
The two co-founders divided the work cleanly. Zimmermann handles the technical and operational stack — the simulator hardware, the booking-to-door automation, the back end. Wulff focuses on positioning, customer experience, and the question of how to scale beyond a single Hamburg unit.
A Quieter Argument About German Golf
Both founders return to the same word when describing the German golf scene: stiff. Wulff grew up in England, where municipal courses are common and a teenager can play without a Platzreife certificate or club sponsorship. Zimmermann attended high school in the United States in 2013 and 2014 and remembers golf there as a Gesellschaftssport — a social game, not a status one.
Lazy Golf is, in part, a quiet argument with the German version. No mandatory club membership. No dress code. No initiation fee. The optional membership is, in keeping with the company’s approach to almost everything else, a stripped-down version of the idea: it discounts every booking by 50 percent, and that is the whole of it.
At Lazy Golf, what mattered to me was getting the stiffness out of the sport. In England, even a young person can play golf without a Platzreife or any of the certificates the Germans love so much. That’s how you get a wider, better player base.
— Louis Wulff, Co-Founder, Lazy Golf
The customer base has surprised them. They expected a younger, data-curious crowd. What they got was an even spread, including 60-plus regulars who book the simulator in groups and stay an entire afternoon. One Australian customer — a regular since the early weeks — has worked his handicap from 35 down to 6, a transformation Zimmermann attributes directly to the data-driven feedback the system provides on every swing. (For the non-golfers: a 35-handicap is a beginner, a 6 puts you within striking distance of professional play.)
A Financial Partner That Keeps Up
Lazy Golf runs its finances on Vivid. Tim Zimmermann found the platform online, looked at the alternatives, and chose it for two reasons. The first was speed. He submitted documents, and one day later he had account access and could start trading. In Germany — a country, he notes, "often shaped by long bureaucratic processes" — that turnaround was decisive. The second was philosophical fit: an online financial platform that, like Lazy Golf, runs lean on staff.
Day to day, the app is the surface he interacts with most. Real-time notifications when payments come in. Sub-accounts for organizing cashflow. A compact dashboard view of the metrics that matter most to a small business owner who is also his own operations team. Bookkeeping at Lazy Golf goes through LexOffice, integrated with Vivid via the standard interface — an integration that, Zimmermann says, runs without friction. That kind of detail compounds across hundreds of monthly transactions from a payment provider.
Vivid didn’t just meet all of our requirements — it operates on a similar concept to ours. It’s an online financial platform, not staff-heavy, just like us.
— Tim Zimmermann, Co-Founder, Lazy Golf
He has one suggestion: Vivid’s cash flow analysis would benefit, he thinks, from more granular controls over the time-period selector — a small product request from an operator who reads his own dashboard daily.
What’s Next
Lazy Golf intends to stay self-service and stay cost-efficient, but it does not intend to stay one location. More Hamburg sites are coming in the next weeks, with expansion into the broader EU and the UK on the medium-term map. The thesis is straightforward: simulator-based, data-driven golf is already standard among professionals on tour and is overdue for a serious amateur infrastructure. Lazy Golf is betting that the unbundled version — without the traditional gatekeeping and the staff overhead — is the version that scales.
The Hamburg unit, late on a weekday, is empty of people but not of activity. A code goes in, a door clicks open, a swing happens. The data lands on a separate screen. The ball, on the canvas, finishes its trajectory across a fairway thousands of kilometers away. No one is watching. That is the point.
