I Helped Them Stop Wasting Money on the Wrong Audience⏐Ep. #247

The portable pickleball industry is exploding right now and I had to see for myself what the fuss was all about. So I went ahead and ordered a portable pickleball court. It's very heavy. I brought my friend in to help me out and we are going to see if we can turn a portable pickleball court into a viable, profitable business. So come with me and let's see what it's all about.

This is blowing my mind. This is so freaking good. It kind of scares me because it's like super high risk, high reward, right? Like let's say I wanted to do, I have $500, I want to do 500 surveys. You could get that within a. Really? Yeah, super quick. My brother in law, Owen launched Port A Courts. And the idea behind Port A Courts is a portable pickleball court. Pickleball courts are pretty expensive to put in. Like how much would it cost to put in a normal pickleball court?

50 grand.

50 grand. And so his contention is, hey, look, people want to play pickleball, but they don't want to necessarily spend the money to put in a pickleball court. And if they have a tennis court, they don't necessarily want to paint the lines on the tennis court. So what if there was a portable pickleball court where people could play on? So he did a bunch of research and he found this company Manufacturing worked with them and they have this. It's an acrylic material that is a court. It's really thin. You roll it out, it has all the lines on it and you can play pickleball on it. Now it's not like professional grade pickleball where you're going to host the world championships of pickleball, but you can go out and you can play pickleball on it. It's not super easy to install, but it's easy enough where if you were, let's say if you had a house that had a sports court in the backyard, you could roll it out on the sports court, not have to paint lines. Big driveway, big driveway. The gym and a church, the gym in a school, parking lots, like those types of places. So like instantly transforms those into a pickleball court without having to paint the lines. So it's cool. He loves the idea and he's like invested a lot of time, energy and effort into it. So that we've got a website. We've also got swag. You know, Owen always got swag. We also have an application that we developed. So what it does is it allows people to Find each other in different markets, organize games, keep track of scores, you can even pay people enter, you know, within the application. So it's kind of, he's like created this big old ecosystem because he loves pickleball and he thinks that there's nothing like it out there to facilitate pickleball being played in local markets. And we want to launch this business. But you're the guru, like you know E commerce inside and out. You've launched multiple businesses, seven eight figure brands. So I thought there's nobody better than you to come talk to about kind of our launch strategy, what we should be thinking about, how do we approach it? Because I have never launched a physical product before and I don't even know the things I should or shouldn't be talking about. So that was a lot of vomit on you. Where should I start?

Start with the demand side. What do you think your audience is going to be for this?

So I think there's like three potential categories of people. So I think the first one is a hardcore pickleballer. So these are going to be people who love playing pickleball and it's getting to be winter and they don't have a spot to go play outside. They're not just going to go play the tennis court because I have snow on, it might be raining, whatever, and there's no indoor options for them. There's lots of clubs that are popping up, but maybe they don't want to join a club. So it would be somebody who loves pickleball and wants to have an opportunity to play pickleball even in inclement weather. The second option I think is going to be rich people. I don't know how else to put that. People who might have a sports court already, right? They have a large enough house, they've got maybe a tennis court, maybe a basketball court, whatever. And they just want to have something that they can throw down on there to let their kids play pickleball without having to paint the lines or, you know, do a whole rigmarole. And then I think the third potential option are entrepreneurs. And the thinking behind this would be entrepreneurs who want to use these portable pickleball courts as the bounce house model. So in a local market, they buy a pickleball court and then they just rent it out. So people who are having birthday parties, schools, universities, conferences, you know, people always have the team building retreats. It's like we're going to have a trust fall today. Instead of the trust fall, maybe you organize like a little pickleball tournament within Your company and local entrepreneurs would have these portable pickleball courts. They'd buy them and they'd rent them out piecemeal. So that's my thinking is like, those are the kind of three different potential ICPs.

Yeah.

It's like, does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I can see a company, like, putting it in the parking lot and people go do it on their lunch break. It's a bigger version of a ping pong table in the break room. Right.

And like, the thing about the parking lot is you don't want to necessarily paint a bunch of lines in the parking lot.

You can't.

You might not even own the building. Yeah, exactly. So that would be obviously one idea. I think it's pretty cool because it, like, it could be a total side hustle type business. It doesn't have to be something you necessarily quit your job and do full time. You just, you buy one of these units, you have it on hand, place some ads, whatever, and then rent it out. Those are the three assumptions that I've had. Do you think I'm missing anybody in there? Like, does anybody come to mind where you're like, actually, you know what this would be good for is actually, you know what? Now that I'm saying that, there's probably a fourth category. I don't know a better word for it. Institutions. So I could see a university, a school, a conference, an event center, a hotel. Again, I don't know what the right word is, but maybe like a large corporation who's like, hey, yeah, we want to play pickleball, but we don't necessarily want to put it on the lines. Maybe they have something on here. Right.

So what if I'm a hotel that wants a second amenity to my pool, and I think that my customers would love it, but I don't know yet. I want to test it out first. Put one of these down in the parking lot. And if people are playing with it, then it's like, yeah, we need to get a real, it could be like a try before you buy situation.

Right? Yeah, I totally think so. So, yeah, I think those are probably the four groups throwing those institutions in there. What comes to mind just generally of portable pickleball courts because pickleball's exploding. Local clubs are popping up everywhere. In Boise, they just created one that's now lice or franchising called Flying Pickle. But having these like, I guess, portable pickleball courts. What do you think? What are your thoughts? You can give me real thoughts. Like, if I don't like it. I'll add them to that. Just kidding.

Well, like, real time ideas for this one. Like, let's say you were renting it out or an entrepreneur bought one to rent it out to businesses as like an amenity for their customers. Have you ever heard of Pickfu? It's a website where you can poll people, specific demographics. You pay a dollar per poll response. And so to prove this out or not, I would go to PickFu and I would say, all right, I'm gonna. I want this poll to show to only business owners and say, would you ever consider offering pickleball as an amenity to your employees? And then I would run a second pick through poll for employees and say, if your employer offered pickleball as an amenity, like. Like a break room, like a ping pong table, Is this something that you would take advantage of and use? Because maybe we think, yes, but in actuality, they're in Florida and it's really hot and humid 80% of the year. And who wants to go out in a shirt and tie and get sweaty? Whereas playing pickleball in the air conditioning is a different story. Right. So we have our assumptions about this, but if you can go poll some people in different geographies, different demographics, and ask them, is this even interesting to you? Then you can use that data to go run Facebook ads against those same audiences and see if. If the data looks the same.

Have you run polls before in pickfu?

Oh, yeah.

Is it selection bias? Like, are the types of people who are in pickfu? I guess. Does it skew the data at all? Or, like, have you found it to be pretty reliable?

Yeah.

What's like a normal sample size that you do? So it's a dollar per response response?

Yeah. One to 500 people.

Do you, like, a sweet spot? Is there like a number? I know we've talked about this before, but, like, is there a number you have that you're like, okay, if I get to 50, I know I got something.

I think it just depends on. It just depends on the strategy and on what the poll is. Like, I'll use it for, like, logo design. And at that point, like, oh, really? Yeah. Like, which logo do you like better? Or like, we're trying to convey in this logo that we serve the best chicken wings in town.

Right.

Which logo tells you that more?

Why do you go, like, why was that the first thing you went to of employee amenity as opposed to entrepreneurs, like the bounce house? Oh, that could.

Yeah. I mean, that could be a third.

So would you run like four different. Five different.

Well, would do it in order. So I would try both of those at the same time.

Okay.

And then based on what that shows me, then I would run another Facebook ad campaign targeted to entrepreneurs.

Pickfu, though. You do pickfu first?

Yeah, pickfu to guide my Facebook ad decision making. And then the fit. And then the Facebook ads are another form of surveying. Right. You're looking at the results of your ads and whatever it shows you. Then you make a new ad campaign to entrepreneurs and that says, hey, entrepreneurs. Did you know that 72% of business owners in Dallas, Texas have an interest in offering pickleball? Well, like, you need to rent it out to them by the week, by the month, by the year, etc.

How long does the campaign usually last? Like, how long does it. Let's say I wanted to do. I have $500. I want to do 500 surveys.

You could get that within a day. Really?

Yeah, super quick. Yeah. And then the survey could be as broad or as narrow as I wanted. Like, it could be which of these two logos. Or it could be, here's a 50 question survey.

You can even say, like, show it to people who have no interest in pickleball. Oh, really? Or show it to people that have an interest in pickleball. Yeah, it can get pretty granular.

Okay, so how would you architect the survey? Like, let's go through, let's do two bounce house, or I guess of all of these hardcore pickleballers, rich people, institutions, or these kind of two entrepreneur subcategories. Let's pick two of them. Like, which, which two do you think would be the first two that you do? These two on?

Pickfu. Yeah.

Okay, so let's do the bounce house rentals first. How would you architect that?

What would you ask to get to see if there's demand from entrepreneurs? I would say if you had an opportunity to buy a portable pickleball court to rent out as a business, would this be interesting to you? Or maybe give them a little more info first. Like, here are the unit economics. The court would cost this much. The rentals average this much per day. We're estimating you would have your payback in six months. Right. If that were like, would that be interesting to you? Yes or no.

Okay.

And then the next question could be, like, if. Yes. Like, would you be interested in being sent leads for these? Like, we generated leads for you. Right. But honestly, the more there's a trade off, the more questions you ask, the more kind of rabbit trails you're Going to want to chase. Right. Whereas if you just like the one.

I think I just like the one. Hey, these are the potential unit economics. Would you be interested in a business like this? Yeah, because then if there's obvious data behind that, then we can throw it behind meta. Okay, what about the employee amenity? That would be also split too, Right. Between employers and employees. Okay. And would you just do one question?

I'd probably do two or three. In the employees case, I would say if your employer offered pickleball at work, like, would you be interested in that? Yes or no? If yes, then it's like, how often do you think you'd play? Maybe just those two questions.

Why ask frequency. Just because it tells you how much demand there might be.

Yeah, because kind of like puts the, it kind of keeps them more honest, you know, it's, it's like a second data point to prove out the first. So if they're like, yeah, I would. Well, it's like, how often would you play? Once a month. And like if everyone's voting once a month, it's like, oh, okay, I'm glad I asked that because I was assuming it was going to be twice a week.

That's a good point. Pick food might be good for any of these that we do. Right? Like let's say we targeted hotels and we just did a pick food where it's like, hey, if you were staying at a hotel and they had pickleball, would you play pickleball?

Yeah.

And then you can go to the hotel and say, yeah, 83% of respondents said that they would play pickleball. And then for the employers, what would you ask?

Maybe you could feed them some information first. Like say, hey, on average it costs $50,000 to add a permanent pickleball court. If you could rent one for 500amonth with no long term commitment, would you consider offering one to your employees as an amenity and then a lease? Yeah, if they, if they're not interested in it, then, you know, you can cancel your lease or whatever. But it's important to like, I like to call it, invent the disease, solve a cure.

Right.

You need to tell the employer that like there's a problem. And that's like 72% of employees are not happy. There's a solution. Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in America. And according to our surveys, 83% of pickleballers or people really want it at work. Right. Just to decompress, you know, blow off some steam. So like you're giving them a Reason to say yes, because they don't already have it. Right. Whereas for other things, it's like, like you would never go to an employer and say, hey, 83% of employees want healthcare benefits. Like, they know that it's a well established industry. Right. You're just going to.

If you're selling that because they already know the disease.

Yeah. But here it's like, hey, no, there, there's a problem because you've got to.

Create a market for like this, this is new. Right. Portable pickleball courts. You've got to create a market for it.

Yeah.

And explain the why.

Yep.

Can I show you some of the, like, Facebook ads that I ran?

Yeah.

Okay. I just want to get your opinion on them. The test campaign. I'll let you just tell me what. So we ran two, and within the two, we ran two types. One was a video and the video was what you've seen of us putting the pickable court together in that storage unit. And then the other one is just a still image and we spent, I don't know, somewhere in the ballpark of like $700 of that. It looks like the die hard pickleballers were actually more interested than the entrepreneurs.

So right off the bat, the, the, the medium in which the ad is delivered could be throwing off your data. Right. Like, it can't be the same because it's to two audiences. But if I were to have set this up, I would have done like 10 or like two 10 second videos, both vertical, both similar vibe, like setting whatever. One talking directly to the die hard pickleballers, One talking directly to the. What was the other? The entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs. Because in general, video ads perform better than static.

Right. So we did run one video for both and one static. One for both. Okay, so are you saying you would have just done one medium?

Yeah.

So you either do static only for both or you do videos only for both.

Yeah. Yeah. All right, so whoever set this up did it in a good way. They set the budget on the ad set level, which is it makes for a more true AB test. If you tell Facebook, like, hey, just distribute my daily budget however you see best, then sometimes it will automatically start assigning budget to a winning ad too soon before you really have a time to.

Before you have enough data to know whether or not the A or B.

He set this up, in my opinion, the right way because he said, like, hey, spend $15 a day per ad set, no matter what, and then I'll decide for myself if enough time has elapsed for Us to know which one is the winner or not.

Because Facebook might be deciding too early. They may have shown 20 people and be like, oh, this one seems to be outperforming.

Yeah, they're gonna take a pocket of people and show it to all them. And that first pocket might show this one's the winner and that one's the loser. But if they would have waited a little longer and expanded it out, they might learn, oh, these group of people really like this one. And in fact, like, 80% of people in general really like this one. But for whatever reason, the first 10% of people, it showed it to like that one. Right.

For the setup piece. How intuitive is it for somebody who has no like me to it? Because I didn't do this. I had, you know, I had Hunter set it up because I was like, dude, I don't know what. And he was super gracious, set it up for us. Helped us, like, get it implemented. Is it fairly intuitive or is it, like, you got to get some base level?

It is tricky. Yeah, it's a little tricky, but. All right, so that's the static in the video for the Die Hard Pickleballers. Right. And so what you see here is Facebook immediately saw, all right, no one cares about this image. We're going to show the video to everyone.

Is that why it's so much higher? Even though we said we're going to spend 15?

Well, because that Facebook will let you set the budget on the ad set level, but it's still going to decide on the ad level.

So, like, when I said, oh, because the ad set is entrepreneurs versus Die Hard pickleballers, not static versus video.

Yeah. Okay, so I. If I set this up, I would have only done one ad per ad set. That way I could have ensured that the whole budget for that ad set would have gone to that one ad. But because of the fact that it was split, Facebook immediately saw, oh, video promo is better than static. We're not going to show the static.

Okay, that makes sense.

I mean, it gave up really fast. Like, it only showed this one to less than 200 people. And then it gave up on it entirely.

It's not nearly enough. Right.

And so if I were setting this up, I would make a landing page for people that know nothing about Porta Courts. Like, a dedicated landing page.

So not the homepage, but like a dedicated landing page for this campaign.

Yeah. With just, like, one call to action. And that's like, book a call. Because this is such an expensive product, it really needs to be Sold over the phone. Unless people already know who you are.

Oh, really?

Like, I just bought a basketball hoop and it was $3,000 and I didn't need to talk to anyone about it because my friend used them. They've been around for years. It's a name brand in the industry and I felt safe. Right. But this is a new industry. Basketball is not okay. And this is a new product. Basketball hoops are not do. There's just, there's a lot of unknowns here that would make like anyone wary about sending that much money to a website they've never heard of. So it's like, okay, the more money you're asking for, the more trust you need to convert.

So we got to build some more trust queues on here and.

Or book a call instead of buy now because people need to learn more about it or like an at least a form submit button because we don't.

Even know how long the sales cycle is.

Right. Especially if it's an entrepreneur. Like they might want to go validate demand before they buy it.

Right. And that actually might be two separate landing pages for the entrepreneur. Ad set is a different landing page than the die hard pickleballer ad set.

Yep. So I click learn more and it just goes to these products. It doesn't go to contact us. So like, I mean, at the end of the day, you don't need to overthink it. Like this form could be on a landing page that just has like background of the company, background of the founders, how it works, who it's for. And then the most important part is to have your conversion event in Meta ad. Meta wants to know like, what is a conversion? What does success look like? And you could say a link click, which you almost never want to choose.

So what do we have? Do you know?

Campaign objective sales. So it's optimizing for sales, but it.

Doesn'T know if we have a sale or not. Or is it tracking?

It might know if Hunter set it up right and he put the conversion pixel on the thank you page, which only people see if they've already bought something.

Right? Right.

Then it knows this campaign is not getting any smarter because it's had zero conversions and every conversion you get, it gets a little smarter. Right?

Right.

Because right now it's showing it to people that are likely to click. But oftentimes the people that are most likely to click are not the people that are most likely to buy. You want to spend more for a click and less for a conversion. That makes sense. A lot of Times if you optimize for clicks, it's like, oh, a dollar per click, we're winning. But no one ever buys.

I mean it's like on social media, cool, I got a bunch of views, but how many followers did I get or how many subscribers to my newsletter did I get?

Right. But if you optimize for conversions, you kind of got to trust the process because you, you might be spending $5 per click instead of $1 per click. But they're going to be more likely to buy if they do click. It's a, it's a person that's much more selective. Like they're going to show it to people that routinely buy $7,000 things on the Internet. It's going to find a random pocket of people that really buy high ticket stuff from the Internet, that love pickleball, that don't really care about trust all that much. Right. And it's going to optimize for them. But right now it's optimizing for people that just click on every ad.

Well, and it's only one half of it. Right. Like if our funnel doesn't convert people.

Yeah.

Then like Meta can only do so much.

Right.

Like you can point us to the site, but it's not going to necessarily make them buy. So for these in particular, we had maybe, I think it was like five or six hundred people click. They go, they went to our website, they went to that page. What happens to those five or six? I mean Meta knows who they are, we don't know who they are. Like, can we, can you retarget those.

People on met if you have a pixel?

Only if you've got the pixel set up on the website. Yeah.

Then you can keep showing them more ads and it's like, hey, you know, you checked us out, we now have a 20% off sale. And retargeting will bring your customer acquisition down 10 to 50%. Really? Because it's just more touch points in front of the same audience.

What do you think of that click through rate? So the like 4% versus 2% for an ad campaign like this is, it's not bad. It's not bad. Yeah. Would that make you go, oh yeah, let's just focus on the hardcore pickleballers and not the entrepreneurs. Or is it still not enough data? Because we've never, we haven't gotten a sale yet.

Honestly, I would have put these in two completely different campaigns because when they're in the same campaign then there's just going to be overlap. You're kind of Confusing. Meta A little bit. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Why would we have run it in the same. So the same campaign would have been like, Die Hard Pickleballers is a campaign. And then maybe three different videos all.

Pointing to Die Hard Pickleballers and then three different ads. Right. That way the budget is split evenly between all three.

Sorry, what's the difference between.

Yeah, so there's three levels. The campaign level, ad set level, and then the ad level. Okay. Right. And so what? He put two ads on each ad set, which split the budget up. That's why that one. So I would have just put one ad per ad set.

So let's. Let's say Dire Pickleballers was a campaign campaign. Ad set level would be what? Oh, thanks.

So, like, we'll do. These are two campaigns.

Okay.

And then this is like Die Hard. And then this is.

Love that movie.

What was the other one? Entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs. Yeah.

So this is campaign level. And then you're gonna go ads.

This is now the ad set level.

Yep. And then add 1, 2, 3. 1, 2, 3. That's three different videos.

And they're three different copy. Huh. Okay.

And then. And then on the ad level, it's just three different ads. But right now.

So it would be an example. Like, I would. I think the video is the ad. I guess that's what I'm trying to heart.

Yeah. So let me. Let me show you this real quick.

This is blowing my mind. This is so freaking good.

It's fun. So on the. This is the ad set level. These four squares on the ad set level is where you choose where the conversion location is. Maximize number of conversions. And we learned on the campaign level that your conversion is a sale.

Okay. Right.

Oh.

Because that's how you define it. What is a conversion?

And then on the ad set level, you set the budget and then you set the audience. And so what he did here is he used Advantage plus, which is basically using meta's AI. And he said, anywhere in the US any age, all gender. I trust you, meta. Do your best. And that's smart. That's smart. And then he picked where do you want to show it? And he said, I trust you, Meta. Show it on threads, show it on Facebook, Instagram stories, reels, post, sidebar, audience network, other websites. Show it everywhere you think is best. I don't prefer that most of the time because I've never had good results outside of Meta. I like to keep it on stories and reels and like news feed. Oh.

So Meta will. This is for all Meta products.

Yeah. But also their audience network where, like, meta ads will show on random websites, like a pickleball paddle website. Your ad will show up there.

And potentially this could have been shown on Instagram or one of those sites. Interesting.

Okay, so that's. These are the decisions you make on the ad sale level, and then this is the ad level, and that's where you put the creative, the picture, the video, wherever and where you choose the copy, the headline, the.

Oh, so the primary text, the video is these pieces.

Yeah.

Like the creative. Yeah, like you said. Okay. The creative is these pieces, and then.

This is the audience. The main reason you're making three is just to get to this. Three different ads.

Got it.

So you really want to leave everything else the same right here. And so I'll make one ad set and then I'll just copy it twice, and then I'll go put three different videos underneath each ad set.

Do you ever mess around with the definitions of, like, what a conversion is or what a? Does that make sense? Because like he says, conversion here is add to cart.

But do you ever a B test that?

Right. Like, actually with the conversion I want is that they left their email because whatever, I have a lead magnet on my site and I want to see how many give me an email, and I want to also see how many actually do convert to a sale.

Yeah, yeah. I've ab tested that before. But the 80, 20 of AB testing is on the ad level, the creative. On the creative level, because you want.

To identify quickly which of these catch people's attention, captures it, and actually gets them to make a decision whether it's giving me them my email, giving us their email, or making a purchase or whatever. And then you throw money behind that.

Yes. This is the hardest part of Facebook ads. This is the most tedious part is the creative. Because you're going to a B test till the cows come home. You're going to find something winning, and then you're going to be like, oh, my gosh, we found the legal money printer. Let's put all the budget behind this one. And then pretty soon you're going to see that everyone's tired of that. You got to go make another one. You got to go ab test all over again and then find another one. You're like, oh, my gosh, we found it. It's going to get tired.

Right.

That is the hardest part of Facebook ads is getting the right creative and never getting complacent with your creative.

So walk me through. Can we look at the creatives and just give me your feedback.

Yeah. So is this the still image one? There it is. So that's one of your ads. Just that image.

Right. Lots of emojis. That's good, right?

It's good. From chat gbd. All right, there we go.

Here.

Click edit change.

I'm guessing just from everything that you just said, it has to be high trust while you're pulling this up. Probably the biggest thing I could do to improve conversion is have me or Owen like talking about it.

Yeah, that's the person who stands behind.

Right.

So first of all, it's a. It's a 51 second video, which is way too long.

Oh, really?

15 is like 10 to 20 seconds. Even when mine get close to 20, they underperform. Really?

Yeah.

So I would, I'd make the opening frame like someone pushing out the roll like that.

Like that.

That's where I would start. And like, what are they doing? What is that? And then I'd speed it up like a ton. Like more of a time lapse.

Would you voice over or keep the music?

No, this would work. So like this could be 10 seconds. Like you. I'm picturing like the camera angle like on the ground. And then it just like rolls out on kind of on top of it. And then it's like a time lapse of just putting it all together. And then like you don't see what it is until the very end. And then it's like Porta Chords, like a logo at the end. It's like, oh, it was a portable pickleball court.

Okay.

I had to watch the whole thing to learn that. Because the more that people watch the video, the less you're going to. The less you're going to spend on ads. Like, if you put a crappy video out there, Facebook has to work harder to get people to actually watch it. So you have to pay them more.

Oh, interesting.

But it's like the same principle for an organic video. Right? Right, right. So it's twofold good creative equals. You spend less and you get more money. Like you make more money from it.

So if you were to look at this and be like, okay, well the video sucked. What are the green flags and like red flags? Just knee jerk reaction from the campaigns we ran because that's the only data I have right now.

Right.

Like we have our theory, but. But that's the only real data that we've gone out into the world and gotten.

The highest priority is to fix your landing page.

Okay.

And to change the conversion for a form submission.

So make the landing page be. This is what pickleball is about. Would it be a video like a VSL or.

Just probably not.

Doesn't need.

They're probably not going to watch it.

Okay, so just have it be like. And is it long or is it just like a quick.

Pretty short. Yeah, like it long enough to show that your real people, what your location is, what your phone number is, what you do, you know, and is it.

Like, how important is it to be like, hey, I'm Nick or hey, I'm Owen. This is our story. This is what portable pickleball courts are versus like we have 10 quarts and you can get the 20 by 40 for 75. You know what I mean?

Yeah, I don't think you get in any of that. It's like what we do, what problem we solve, who we are. Submit form.

And the submit form is for a call.

Just depends what's the cta?

Hey, give us your information, we'll get back to you. Or is it hey, give us your information and we will. Here's a lead magnet.

We'll get back to you. You could try both.

What do you think of these four? Just like after we've been talking, I know we need to get data. I really like the pick Fu. I'm definitely going to try that out. What's your gut reaction?

Well, I always default to Facebook ads and this is going to be the hardest point. Facebook ads to. Yeah, that's more of a LinkedIn thing, I think hardcore. This might even be in order of like easiest to hardest to sell through Facebook ads. Facebook ads knows exactly. They know exactly who the hardcore pickleballers are. They know exactly who the rich people are. They kind of know who the entrepreneurs are. Is a business owner an entrepreneur or is he just a business owner? Or as an entrepreneur, someone like more like me and like testing all kinds of side hustles. And then right here, Facebook's like, I don't know, try LinkedIn, you know?

Right. Yeah. Because a lot of institutions aren't necessarily there in order, are they giving them a ton of information. What do you think about the price point for entrepreneurs? I don't even know if I'm publishing this. So like, like honest feedback.

What is the price point?

So currently the two types of courts are 6500 and 8500. And I haven't tested the $6500 one, but the $8500 one is just the better material balances, better, it's easier to work with. So $8,500 to buy the court, probably. If you don't already have a truck, either buy a truck or buy a trailer for your truck that can haul this stuff around. You'd have to have some more to store it. You get some license, insurance, whatever. Probably a $20,000, maybe all in investment, including running those first set of ads. And then if I were to just. Back of the envelope, if I'm an entrepreneur, I'd probably target corporate events. So maybe 900 to $1,000 per event per day. So I probably have to get eight to 10 events a month, I guess. Eight to 10. If I got eight to 10 events in the first month, I could quote, unquote, pay my investment back within two months. So that makes like 20 events to pay my investment back back, essentially. I just don't know. Like, are those economics exciting for a wantrepreneur or are there lots of other low risk type options that would be.

I think it all depends on how you frame it. If you frame it as like, this is kind of like a bounce house business. They're gonna be like, I can buy a bounce house for 500 bucks. This is a great alternative to spending $200,000 on a franchise. Interesting. This is 95% cheaper than a franchise. Hmm. Okay. Another thing you could do is scrape all of the bounce house business owners and reach out to them and say, hey, you know, you rent out wedding tables and chairs, you rent out bounce houses, slip and slides. Why aren't you renting out this? You already have an established customer base that trusts you.

That's interesting.

I'll tell you what, why don't you advertise that you already have this even though you don't. Only once you get a booking will I sell it to you.

You know what else would be really interesting is if you could get entrepreneurs in local markets. Maybe they buy one of those. And all that ever is is not a loss leader, but like a sample. And so once the hotel sees it, they buy the courts, but the entrepreneur gets the majority of the commission of that sale. Yeah, so it's like they become an affiliate. Yeah, affiliate distributor or whatever. And so they can make money on the rental side, but they also make money on the sale of the actual court side to those corporate sponsors. Oh, the other thing I didn't even talk about was the upsell with equipment. So like, if you're going to a corporate event or a conference, they're going to want the paddles and a bag and balls and maybe sunglasses that are branded or whatever. So there Is an opportunity there to sort of upsell.

Yeah, I think you could also do like, I think it would be wise for you as a company to prove out the demand for entrepreneurs yourself. Like use Facebook ads to have a pickleball pop up right in like a Kohl's parking lot. Like for, let's say it's today's October 6th, you know, let's just say on November 6th you're gonna have a pop up. So you spend four weeks just hammering that local area millennials with Facebook ads, talking about your pickleball pop up tournament, right? $20 buy ins or whatever, and you get hundreds or thousands of people to sign up to this thing. And then you have a case study of your own right? To like, you could put it in a PDF, it could be a lead magnet to say, like, how to make $10,000 a month with pickleball pop ups, right? But then like imagine if 200 people came to your pickleball tournament. They paid 50 bucks each. That's that $10,000, 10,000 bucks per day. And then every single one of them, you just shill these courts to them hard, right? Those are like hardcore pickleballers. They might want in their one in their backyard. They might want to be the entrepreneur that does this. Like your most likely entrepreneur is someone that has a love for the game, right? And though like Statistically speaking, 10% of Americans are business owners, right? So if you have 200 people to show up for pickleball tournament, 20 of them are going to be entrepreneurial and they all love pickleball, right? So you might sell three courts to three of the 200. 200 people. And you might sell like three licensing agreements to three more entrepreneurs, you know, so you could get, if you get, you know, six sales out of 200 people, that's a very small conversion rate. But that's like what, $50,000 in court sales plus $10,000 in revenue, dude.

That might be another actually interesting way for entrepreneurs who are interested in opening a pickleball club where it's like, okay, I don't want to go sign the lease, pay for the build out, do all the ti. Paint the quartz, right? Launch this thing. I'm a hundred grand in and then it flops. Okay, I could spend eight or 20 grand, just test the demand, and then if there is enough demand, then I open a ball club.

Yep.

Yeah, because then, but then by that point, if you've got a thousand people who have participated in your tournaments over the course of a year, maybe you got a thousand like warm leads of, hey, I'm starting a club. Would you be interested? That'd be really interesting. It's like a gateway into opening a club.

It'd also be interesting to have a tournament. Let's say you lead with the assumption that you're going to be able to sell a handful of courts. You don't really care as much about the tournament revenue. Let's say that's $10,000, but the court sales could be $50,000. You want to charge something or else people won't show up. You want them to be invested.

Right.

So make tickets, like, $5. Right. And then as just a test, as a case study, see how many of them you can really close, how many courts you can actually sell from that.

And then once, you know, then it's easy to go like, hey, we know 5% of people who show up buy a court.

Yeah. So it changes the whole calculus of your next ad campaign.

Well, it's similar to meta ads. Once you know what it is, it's like, okay, now we got the money printing machine.

Mm.

It would be the same thing once you kind of know the data of how many people actually convert. Yeah, that. That would be amazing. So you would. Do you think the best model is selling the courts directly, or do you think the best model would be. I know that we need to see the data. I'm just asking, like, knee jerk. Or do you think the best model would be help entrepreneurs start local businesses that leverage the pickleball, and then, like, you can help them generate the leads or help them run the ad campaigns and, like, be a support service, kind of like a franchise.

But I think you should go the entrepreneur route. But instead of just encouraging them to rent them out or to do events, make them, like, local salespeople as well, like distributors. Because if they can make 500 bucks from a rental or a thousand bucks from selling one, it changes. It changes it for them. Because if they sell it, they can just get rid of it. But if they rent it, it's 500 bucks to have to go unroll it, roll it.

That's not even the bottom line.

Right, Right.

We learned today.

But if they sell one, I mean, they never have to. They could. You could just drop. Ship it for them.

Yeah. And then you have somebody local who's like, hey, whatever hotel, I'll come by, I'll show you how to unroll it, I'll show you how to store it. I'll show you how to do all these. Because the odds are if they get in with that hotel, they're probably. They could buy pickleball paddles from them balls, swag bags, etc. And they might buy more pickleball courts later. Like it all of a sudden becomes an account that they manage as opposed to a one time sale.

Yeah.

And because it's such high ticket, you need the high touch.

Yeah.

That's interesting. Dude, this is fascinating.