Brendan Candon of SidelineSwap discusses why athletes rarely buy and sell across sports categories. Overlap is minimal at the high-school level but more common among younger kids and in individual sports like golf and skiing. The company focuses on building inventory through trade-in programs rather than pushing cross-category sales, though it remains an unsolved challenge.
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Mike, you wanna jump on? I saw you raise your hand there. Yeah, I'm really curious about how you've thought about and how successful you've been in cross-pollination of different verticals with users. I would imagine with sports specifically, you know, people have their sport, right? They play lacrosse or they play baseball. Maybe with kids, you're a little bit more successful when they're trying other sports. But at Uber and beyond, I think my team and I have been consistently overly bullish on how successful we'd be on upselling across verticals. So just curious how successful you've been there. And has it been naturally successful? Or have you had to experiment a lot with making that successful?
Yeah, great question. I think I would agree that we— well, I think your assumptions are right, right? That like people are typically more focused on specific sports. And I think that was especially true early on, where like, We were in lacrosse and hockey and then baseball. Like there's, it's actually pretty minimal overlap, especially at like the high school level there where people start to get pretty serious about it. The youth level, there's more cross-pollination. So as we've gotten better selection of used inventory, we start, I think that's helped drive better adoption. The other thing is like more individual hobby sports. So golf and skiing have a better, like We're more likely to get you into those sports next, right? From hockey to golf and hockey to skiing than we are from hockey to lacrosse or tennis, right? Like those are. So I think we're starting to fill those out. Apparel is a big crossover, although you could debate like is that a is like apparel sometimes lives within hockey or lives within baseball. So I'd say you're right that it's hard. I think. We've been like moderately successful at times. We've like tried to make these bigger pushes to drive increased cross-pollination, and with minimal success. We honestly like it hasn't been as much of a priority for us. I think the way we've thought about it for the last year or two is is really again like this focus on supply. Like let's get as much high quality supply across as many sports as we can, and that will be the best way to lift. Kind of the tide in all other sports. And we are seeing that with trade-in. It's like, and it's hard to get a sport like tennis where it's not a focus to like build the supply side there. So trade-ins like helped us build higher quality supply across more categories, which creates more opportunities for cross-pollination without necessarily marketing. And I think we're trying to find ways to do it more in product and through email communication of what are the right touchpoints to do it. I wouldn't say we've totally cracked it. I'd be probably— I'd love to talk more about like what you guys have seen and talk about some ideas. But yeah, it's, it's been a challenge overall to, to get that to really happen.
