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

Chris Koerner (0:00)

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.

Nik (0:20)

Dude, 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.

Chris Koerner (0:30)

You could get that within a day.

Nik (0:31)

Really?

Chris Koerner (0:32)

Yeah.

Nik (0:32)

Super quick. My brother-in-law, Owen, launched Porter Courts. And the idea behind Porter 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?

Chris Koerner (0:45)

50 grand.

Nik (0:46)

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 can roll it out on the sports court and not have to paint lines.

Chris Koerner (1:35)

Big driveway.

Nik (1:36)

Big driveway, the gym in a church, the gym in a school, parking lots, like those types of places. So instantly transforms those into a pickleball court without having to paint the lines. So it's cool. He loves the idea, and he's invested a lot of time, energy, and effort into it. So 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 within the application. So he's created this big old ecosystem because he loves pickleball, and he thinks that there's nothing out there to facilitate pickleball being played in local markets. And we want to launch this business, but you're the guru.

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 you about 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?

Chris Koerner (2:41)

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

Nik (2:46)

So I think there's like three potential categories of people. So I think the first one is a hard-core pickleballer. So these are going to be people who love playing pickleball, and it's getting to be winter, and maybe they don't have a spot to go play outside. They're not just going to go play the tennis court because it might have snow on it, 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 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'd 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 buy them and they'd rent them out piecemeal. So, that's my thinking. It's like, those are the kind of three different potential ICPs.