November 14, 2025 • 36 mins
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HoldCo Bros are back! In this episode, Nik and I dig into a super interesting business idea — Porta Courts, a portable pickleball court company started by Nik’s brother-in-law. We break down how he can turn it into a real business, from testing demand with PickFu surveys to running Facebook ads the right way.
We go deep into how to identify the right target audience — from hardcore pickleball players and luxury homeowners to schools, hotels, and local entrepreneurs who could rent these courts out like bounce houses. I share a step-by-step framework for setting up ad campaigns, building high-trust landing pages, and using data to figure out what messaging actually converts.
We also talk about how this could evolve into a local franchise-style model and why every new product launch should start with real validation before spending a dollar on marketing.
Try PickFu and get 50% off your first poll with code TKOPOD at https://www.pickfu.com/#_r_tkopod
Enjoy!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
The portable pickleball industryis 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.
(00:21):
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 day.Really.
Yeah, super quick. My brother-in-law, Owen launched
Port of Courts and the idea behind Port of Courts is a
portable pickleball court. Pickleball courts are pretty
(00:42):
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 pickleball court.
And if they had a tennis court, they don't necessarily want to
paint the line from the tennis court.
So what if there was a portable pickleball court where people
can play on? So he did a bunch of research
and he found this company manufacturing work with them and
(01:06):
they have this. It's a an acrylic material that
is a court. It's really thin.
You roll it out, 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, butyou can go out and you can play
pickleball on it. It's not super easy to install,
(01:26):
but it's easy enough where if you were, let's say if you had a
house that had a sports court inthe backyard, you can roll it
out on the sports court and not have to paint.
Lines. Big driveway.
Big driveway, the gym and a church.
The gym and 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.
(01:47):
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 thatwe 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
(02:08):
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 localmarkets.
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, 7-8 figure brands.
So I thought there's nobody better than you to come talk to
(02:28):
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 there's 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 3
(02:49):
potential categories of people. So I think the first one is a
hardcore pickleballer. So these are going to be who
love playing pickleball and it'sgetting to be winter and maybe
they don't have a spot to go play outside.
They they're not just going to go play the tennis court because
it might 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
(03:09):
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, they have a large enough
house, they've got maybe a tennis court, maybe a basketball
(03:30):
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 pickleballcourts as the bounce house
model. So in a local market, they buy a
(03:51):
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 piece meal.So that's my thinking is like,
(04:13):
those are the kind of three different potential Icps.
It's like, does that make sense?Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
I could see a company like putting it in the parking lot
and people could go do it on their lunch break.
It's like a bigger version of a ping pong table in the break
room. Right.
And, 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 might not even own the Yeah,
(04:33):
exactly. So that would be obviously one
idea. I think it's pretty cool because
it's 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, playsome 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, youknow, what this would be good
for is actually, you know what, now that I'm saying that there's
(04:56):
probably a fourth category, I don't know a better word for it,
Institutions. So I could see a 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 it,
right. So.
(05:16):
What if I'm a hotel that wants asecond 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, putone 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.
(05:36):
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
wise or franchising called Flying Pickle.
But having these like, I guess, portable pickle 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 it to that. Just kidding.
(05:57):
Well, like real time ideas for this one, like let's say you
were renting it out or an entrepreneur bought 1 to rent it
out to businesses as like an amenity for their customers.
Have you ever heard of Pic Fu? 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 pic Fu and I would
(06:19):
say, all right, I'm going to I want this poll to show to only
business owners and say, would you ever consider offering
pickleball as an amenity to youremployees?
And then I would run a second pick food poll for employees and
say, if your employer offered pickleball as an amenity, like
like a break room, like a ping pong table, is it something that
(06:39):
you would take advantage of and use?
Because maybe we think yes, but in actuality, there 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
(07:00):
them, is this even interesting to you?
Then you can use that data to gorun Facebook ads against those
same audiences and see if if thedata looks the same have.
You run polls before in Pikfu. Oh yeah.
Is it selection bias like other types of people who are in
Pikfu? I guess?
Does it skew the data at all or like have you found it to be
(07:21):
pretty reliable? Yeah.
What's like a normal sample sizethat you do?
So it's a dollar. Per pole, per response.
Per response, Yeah. Are you 1 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, OK, if I get to 50, I know
I got something. I think it just depends on, it
just depends on the strategy andon what the pole is.
(07:44):
Like I, 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
(08:05):
entrepreneurs like the bounce house?
Oh, that could, yeah. I mean that could be 1/3.
So would you run like 4 different, 5 different?
Well, I would do it in order, soI would try both of those at the
same time and then based on whatthat shows me, then I would run
another Facebook ad campaign targeted to entrepreneurs.
Pickfoo, though you did pickfoo first.
Yeah, Pickfoo to guide my Facebook ad decision making and
(08:28):
then the 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 said that
says, hey, entrepreneurs, do youknow that 72% of business owners
in Dallas, TX have an interest in offering pickleball?
Well, like you need to rent it out to them by the week, by the
(08:49):
month, by the year, etcetera. 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 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'sa 50 question survey.
(09:09):
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, itcan get pretty granular.
OK, so how would you architect the survey?
Like let's go through, let's do 2 bounce house or I guess of all
of these hardcore pickleball is rich people institutions or
these kind of two entrepreneur subcategories.
(09:30):
Let's pick two of them. Like which?
Which two do you think would be the first two that you do these
two on? Pickfoo.
Yeah, OK. 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 him a little more
(09:52):
info first, Like here are the unit economics.
The court will 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 beinteresting to you?
Yes or no? 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,
(10:14):
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, I think it's.
One question, I think I just like the one, hey, these are the
potential 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.
(10:35):
OK, what about the employee amenity?
That would be also split too, right, between employers.
And employees, OK. 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, likewould you be interested in that
yes or no? If yes, then it's like how often
(10:57):
do you think you play? Maybe just those two questions.
Why ask frequency just because it tells you how much demand
there might be? Yeah.
Because it, it kind of like putsthe, 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
(11:17):
often would you play? Once a month?
And like if if everyone's votingonce a month, it's like, oh, OK,
I'm glad I asked that because I was assuming it was going to be
twice a week. That's a good point.
Picked 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 in a hotel and
they had pickleball, would you play pickleball?
(11:37):
Yeah. And then you can go to the hotel
and see 80. 3% 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 cost $50,000 to
add a permanent pickleball court.
If you could rent one for 500 a month with no long term
commitment, would you consider offering one to your employees
(11:58):
as an amenity and then? A lease, Yeah.
If they, if they're not interested in it, then you, you
know, you can cancel your, your lease or whatever.
But it's important to like, I like to call it, invent a
disease, sell the 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.
(12:20):
Pickleball's the fastest growingsport 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
(12:40):
an employer and say, hey, 83% ofemployees 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.
(13:01):
Yeah. And explain the why.
Yep. Can I show?
You some of the like Facebook ads that I ran Yeah OK, I just
want to get your opinion on themin the task campaign.
I'll let you just tell me what you so we ran to and within the
two we ran two types. One was a video and the video
was what you've seen is of us putting the ickable court
together in that storage unit. And then the other one is just a
(13:23):
still image and we spent, I don't know, someone in a
ballpark of like $700.00 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
(13:44):
up, I would have done like 10 orlike 210 second videos, both
vertical, both similar vibe likesetting whatever, one talking
directly to the die hard pickleballers, one talking
directly to the what were the other the entrepreneurs.
Because in general, video ads performed better than static,
right? So we did.
Run one video for both and one static one for both.
(14:06):
OK. So are you saying you would have
just done 1 medium? Yeah, it's like.
You need to do static only for both or you do videos only for
both. Yeah.
Yeah. All right.
So whoever set this up did it ina good way.
They set the budget on the ad set level, which is it makes for
a more true AB test. If you if you tell Facebook like
(14:28):
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 right. He set this up in my opinion the
right way because he said like hey spend $15 a day per ads that
no matter what and then I'll decide for myself if enough time
(14:51):
has elapsed for us to know whichone is the winner or not.
Because in my. Facebook might be deciding too
early. They might have shown 20 people
and be like, oh, this one seems to be outperforming and yeah,
they're. Going to 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 a loser.
But if they would have waited a little longer and expanded it
out, they might learn, oh, thesegroup of people really like this
(15:12):
one. And in fact, like 80% of people
in general really like this one.But for whatever reason, the 1st
10% of people that showed it to you like that one, right?
For this setup piece, how intuitive is it for somebody who
has like me to 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 getit implemented.
(15:34):
Is it fairly intuitive or is it like you got to get it is
tricky. 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 toeveryone, is that?
Why it it's so much higher even though we said we're going to
(15:57):
spend 15 well. Because that Facebook will let
you set the budget on the ad setlevel, but it's still going to
decide on the ad level. So like when I said.
Because the ad set is entrepreneurs versus die hard
pickleballers, not static versusvideo.
Yeah. So I if I set this up, I would
have only done one ad per ad set.
(16:17):
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
said, oh, video program is better than static.
We're not going to show this static.
OK, 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 an entire. Not nearly enough, right?
(16:38):
And so if I were setting this up, I would make a a landing
page for people that know nothing about port accords, like
a dedicated landing page. So not.
The home page, 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.
(17:00):
Oh, really? Like, I just bought a basketball
hoop and it was $3000 and I didn't need to talk to anyone
about it 'cause 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. And this is a new product.
Basketball hoops are not do. Do any?
(17:21):
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 neverheard of, so it's like, OK.
The. More money you're asking for,
the more trust you need to come.So we got to build.
Some more trust cues on here. And or book a call instead of
buy now because people need to learn more about it or like an
(17:41):
at least a form submit button and then because we don't even.
Know how long the sales cycle isright?
Especially if it's an entrepreneur like they might
want to go validate demand before they buy it and.
That actually might be two separate landing pages for the
Entrepreneur ad set as 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
(18:06):
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 eventin Meta ad Meta wants to know,
like, what is a conversion? What does success look like?
(18:26):
And you could say a link click which you almost never want to
choose. So what do?
We have do, do you know? Campaign objective sales.
So it's optimizing for sales, but it doesn't know.
If we had a sale or not or is ittracking it?
It might. Know if if if Hunter set it up
right and he put the conversion pixel on the thank you page,
which only people see if they'vealready bought something right
(18:48):
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 smarterright right, because right now
it's showing it to people that are likely to click but often
times 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. If you're a lot of times if you
(19:09):
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
conversion, you kind of got to trust the process because you
you might be spending $5 per click instead of $1.00 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
(19:30):
much more selected. Like they're going to show it to
people that routinely buy $7000 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 gonna 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
(19:51):
convert people, yeah, then like medic can only do so much,
right? Like they can point us to the
site, but it's not gonna necessarily make them buy so.
For these. In particular, we had maybe I
think it's like 5 or 600 people click, they go to, they went to
our website, they went to that page.
What happens to those 5 or 6? I mean, meta knows who they are.
We don't know who they are. Like can we, can you retarget
(20:12):
those people? On if you have a pixel, only if
you've. Got the pixel set up on the
website, yeah? And you can keep showing them
more ads. And it's like, hey, you know you
check this out, we 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% Ford ad campaign like this is that it's
(20:35):
not bad. It's not.
Bad, Yeah. Would that make you go, Oh yeah,
let's just focus on the hardcorepickleballers 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 samecampaign, then there's just
going to be overlap. You're kind of confusing meta a
little bit. Does that make sense?
(20:56):
Yeah. Why would we have run it in the
same so the same campaign would have been like die hard pickle
Ballers is a campaign and then maybe 3 different.
Videos, videos. All.
Pointing to die hard pickle Ballers and then three different
ads, right? That way the budget is split
evenly between all three three. Different ads.
Sorry, what's the? Yeah, so there's. 3 levels, the
(21:16):
campaign level, ad set level andthen the ad level.
OK, right. And So what he 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 Dyer
Pickleballers was a campaign campaign ad set level would be
what? Oh, thanks.
So like we'll do these are two campaigns.
(21:39):
OK. 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 going to go ads this.
Is now the AD set level? Yep.
And then add 123123, that's three different videos and there
are three different copy OK. And then, and then on the ad
(22:01):
level, it's just three differentads, but right now, so it will
be an. Example like I would.
I think the video is the ad. I guess that's what I'm trying
to hard. 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 4 squares on the asset level is where you choose
(22:23):
where the conversion location ismaximize number of conversions.
And we learned on the campaign level that your conversion is a
sale, right 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 that as AI. And he said anywhere in the US,
(22:45):
any age, all gender, I trust youMeta, do your best.
And that's smart. That's smart.
And then he picked where do you want to show it?
And he, he said, I trust you Meta.
Show it on threads, show it on Facebook, Instagram stories,
Reels, post sidebar, audience network, other websites.
(23:05):
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 the 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
(23:28):
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. OK, so that's.
These are the decisions you makeon the ad sell level, and then
this is the ad level. And that's where you put the
creative, the picture of the video, wherever and where you
choose the copy, the headline, the oh so.
(23:49):
The primary type, the video is these pieces.
Yeah, Like the creative. Yeah, like you said, OK, The
creative is these pieces. And then this is the audience.
The main reason you're making 3 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
(24:11):
different videos underneath eachad 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 AB test that
right? Like actually with the
conversion I want is that they left their e-mail because
whatever, I have a lead back on my site and I want to see how
(24:31):
many give me an e-mail and I want to also see how many
actually do convert to a sale. Yeah.
Yeah, I've AB tested that before, but the 8020 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
them my e-mail, giving us their e-mail, or making a purchase or
(24:54):
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 AB test until 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 gonna see that everyone's
tired of that. You gotta go make another one.
(25:15):
You gotta go AB test all over again and then find another one.
You're like, Oh my gosh, we found it.
It's gonna get tired, right? That is the hardest part of
Facebook ads is getting the right creative and never getting
complacent with your creative. So.
Walking 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?
(25:35):
Lots of emojis. That's good, right?
It's good. From ChatGPT 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 like, talking about it, yeah.
That's the person who stands behind, right?
(25:55):
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. It's someone pushing out the
role like that. Like that, that's where.
I would start and like, what arethey doing?
(26:15):
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 doesn't matter.
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, you don't see
(26:37):
what it is until the very end. And then it's like porta courts
like a logo at the end. It's like, oh, it's a, it was a
portable pickleball court. I had to watch the whole thing
to learn that. Cause the more that people watch
the video, the less you're goingto, the less you're going to
spend on ads. It like if you put a crappy
video out there, Facebook has towork harder to get people to
actually watch it. So you'll have to pay them more.
(26:57):
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 likeyou make more money so.
If if you were to look at this and be like, OK, will the video
sucked, what are the green flagsand like red flags?
Just knee jerk reaction from thecampaigns we ran?
Because that's the only data I have right now, right?
(27:18):
Like we have our theory, but butthat's the only real data that
we've gone out into the world and gotten the highest.
Priority is to fix your landing pitch and to change the
conversion for a form submissionso.
Make the landing page be. This is what pickleball's about.
Would it be a video like a VSL or just probably?
Not they're probably not going to watch it.
OK. So just have it be like and is
(27:38):
it long or is it just like a quick pretty?
Short. Yeah, like long enough to show
that you're 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 pickable courts are versus like we have
10 quarts and you can get the 20by 40 for 75.
(28:01):
You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't think.
You get into 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.
But what's? The CTA Hey, give us your
information and 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.
(28:21):
Back to you, you can try both. What do you?
Think of these for just like after we've been talking, what
do you I know we need to get data.
I like I really like the Pikfu. 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 to point Facebook ads
to. Yeah, that's more of a LinkedIn
thing. I think hardcore, this might
even be in order of like easiestto hardest to self through
(28:43):
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 is it an entrepreneur someone like more
like me and like testing all kinds of side vessels and then
right here Facebook's like, I don't know, try LinkedIn you.
(29:07):
Know right yeah, because a lot of institutions aren't
necessarily there in order that they're 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 ish and
I haven't tested the $6500 one but the $8500 hundred dollar one
(29:30):
is just the better material bounces better, it's easier to
work with. So $8500 to buy the court
probably. If you don't already have a
truck, either buy a truck or buya trailer for your truck that
can haul the stuff around. You have to have some more to
store it. You get some license, insurance,
whatever, probably $20,000 off, maybe all in investment,
(29:51):
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 $1000 per event per day.
So I probably have to get 8 to 10 events a month, I guess 8 to
10. If I got 8 to 10 events in the
(30:11):
first month, I could quote UN quote pay my investment back
within two months. So that makes sense, like 20
events to pay my investment backessentially.
I just don't know like are thoseeconomics exciting for a
entrepreneur 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
(30:33):
kind of like a bounce house business.
I can buy 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.
OK, 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
(30:54):
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, well, 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
(31:14):
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. So all it's like they become a
yeah, affiliate distributor, whatever.
And so then they can make money on the rental side, but they
also make money on the sale of the actual courtside to those
corporate sponsors. Oh, the other thing I didn't
(31:35):
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 thereto 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
(31:58):
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 going to
have a pop up. She spent four weeks just
hammering that local area millennials with Facebook ads
(32:20):
talking about your pickleball pop up tournament, right, $20
buy insurance 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, to like
you could put it in APDF, it could be a lead magnet to say
like how to make $10,000 a monthwith pickleball pop ups, right?
(32:42):
But then like, imagine if 200 people came to your pickleball
tournament, they paid 50 bucks each.
That's a 10,000 dollars, 10,000 bucks per day.
And then every single one of them, you just shell these
courts to them hard, right? Those are like hardcore
pickleballers. They might want in their one in
(33:02):
their backyard, They might want to be the entrepreneur that does
this. Like you're most likely
entrepreneur is someone that hasa love for the game, right?
And those 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 people and
(33:24):
you might sell like 3 licensing agreements to three more
entrepreneurs, you know, so you could get, if you get, you know,
6 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, OK, I don't
(33:46):
want to go sign the lease, pay for the build out, do all the
TI, paint the courts, right, Launch this thing, I'm 100 grand
in and then it flops. OK, I could spend 8 or 20 grand,
just test the demand. And then if there is enough
demand, then I open a little ball club.
Yeah, 'cause yeah, 'cause that by that.
(34:07):
But then by that point, if you've got 1000 people who
participated in your tournamentsover the course of a year, then
you've got 1000 like warm leads of hey, I'm starting a club.
Would you be interested? That would 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 leave 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.
(34:28):
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 togo like, hey, we know 5% of
(34:50):
people who show up buy a court. Yeah, so it changes.
The whole calculus of your next ad campaign?
Well, similar. To meta ads, once you know what
it is, it's like, OK, now we gotthe money printing machine.
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 courtsdirectly or do you think the
(35:12):
best model would be I know that we need to see the data.
I'm just asking like knee jerk, what 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
(35:33):
out or to do events, make them like local salespeople as well.
Like distributors? Because if they can make 500
bucks for rental or 1000 bucks from selling one, it changes it
changes it for them. Because if they sell it, it they
they can just get rid of it. But if they rent it, it's 500
bucks to have to go unroll it. That's not even.
The bottom line, right, Right, we learned today.
(35:55):
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 localwho'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, etcetera.
(36:17):
And they might buy more pickleball courts later.
Like it all of a sudden becomes an account that they manage as
opposed to A1 time sale. Yeah.
And because it's such high ticket, you need the high touch.
Yeah. That's interesting.
Dude. This is fascinating.
The portable pickleball industryis 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.
(00:21):
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 day.Really.
Yeah, super quick. My brother-in-law, Owen launched
Port of Courts and the idea behind Port of Courts is a
portable pickleball court. Pickleball courts are pretty
(00:42):
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 pickleball court.
And if they had a tennis court, they don't necessarily want to
paint the line from the tennis court.
So what if there was a portable pickleball court where people
can play on? So he did a bunch of research
and he found this company manufacturing work with them and
(01:06):
they have this. It's a an acrylic material that
is a court. It's really thin.
You roll it out, 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, butyou can go out and you can play
pickleball on it. It's not super easy to install,
(01:26):
but it's easy enough where if you were, let's say if you had a
house that had a sports court inthe backyard, you can roll it
out on the sports court and not have to paint.
Lines. Big driveway.
Big driveway, the gym and a church.
The gym and 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.
(01:47):
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 thatwe 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
(02:08):
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 localmarkets.
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, 7-8 figure brands.
So I thought there's nobody better than you to come talk to
(02:28):
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 there's 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 3
(02:49):
potential categories of people. So I think the first one is a
hardcore pickleballer. So these are going to be who
love playing pickleball and it'sgetting to be winter and maybe
they don't have a spot to go play outside.
They they're not just going to go play the tennis court because
it might 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
(03:09):
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, they have a large enough
house, they've got maybe a tennis court, maybe a basketball
(03:30):
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 pickleballcourts as the bounce house
model. So in a local market, they buy a
(03:51):
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 piece meal.So that's my thinking is like,
(04:13):
those are the kind of three different potential Icps.
It's like, does that make sense?Yeah, it makes perfect sense.
I could see a company like putting it in the parking lot
and people could go do it on their lunch break.
It's like a bigger version of a ping pong table in the break
room. Right.
And, 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 might not even own the Yeah,
(04:33):
exactly. So that would be obviously one
idea. I think it's pretty cool because
it's 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, playsome 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, youknow, what this would be good
for is actually, you know what, now that I'm saying that there's
(04:56):
probably a fourth category, I don't know a better word for it,
Institutions. So I could see a 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 it,
right. So.
(05:16):
What if I'm a hotel that wants asecond 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, putone 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.
(05:36):
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
wise or franchising called Flying Pickle.
But having these like, I guess, portable pickle 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 it to that. Just kidding.
(05:57):
Well, like real time ideas for this one, like let's say you
were renting it out or an entrepreneur bought 1 to rent it
out to businesses as like an amenity for their customers.
Have you ever heard of Pic Fu? 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 pic Fu and I would
(06:19):
say, all right, I'm going to I want this poll to show to only
business owners and say, would you ever consider offering
pickleball as an amenity to youremployees?
And then I would run a second pick food poll for employees and
say, if your employer offered pickleball as an amenity, like
like a break room, like a ping pong table, is it something that
(06:39):
you would take advantage of and use?
Because maybe we think yes, but in actuality, there 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
(07:00):
them, is this even interesting to you?
Then you can use that data to gorun Facebook ads against those
same audiences and see if if thedata looks the same have.
You run polls before in Pikfu. Oh yeah.
Is it selection bias like other types of people who are in
Pikfu? I guess?
Does it skew the data at all or like have you found it to be
(07:21):
pretty reliable? Yeah.
What's like a normal sample sizethat you do?
So it's a dollar. Per pole, per response.
Per response, Yeah. Are you 1 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, OK, if I get to 50, I know
I got something. I think it just depends on, it
just depends on the strategy andon what the pole is.
(07:44):
Like I, 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
(08:05):
entrepreneurs like the bounce house?
Oh, that could, yeah. I mean that could be 1/3.
So would you run like 4 different, 5 different?
Well, I would do it in order, soI would try both of those at the
same time and then based on whatthat shows me, then I would run
another Facebook ad campaign targeted to entrepreneurs.
Pickfoo, though you did pickfoo first.
Yeah, Pickfoo to guide my Facebook ad decision making and
(08:28):
then the 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 said that
says, hey, entrepreneurs, do youknow that 72% of business owners
in Dallas, TX have an interest in offering pickleball?
Well, like you need to rent it out to them by the week, by the
(08:49):
month, by the year, etcetera. 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 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'sa 50 question survey.
(09:09):
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, itcan get pretty granular.
OK, so how would you architect the survey?
Like let's go through, let's do 2 bounce house or I guess of all
of these hardcore pickleball is rich people institutions or
these kind of two entrepreneur subcategories.
(09:30):
Let's pick two of them. Like which?
Which two do you think would be the first two that you do these
two on? Pickfoo.
Yeah, OK. 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 him a little more
(09:52):
info first, Like here are the unit economics.
The court will 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 beinteresting to you?
Yes or no? 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,
(10:14):
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, I think it's.
One question, I think I just like the one, hey, these are the
potential 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.
(10:35):
OK, what about the employee amenity?
That would be also split too, right, between employers.
And employees, OK. 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, likewould you be interested in that
yes or no? If yes, then it's like how often
(10:57):
do you think you play? Maybe just those two questions.
Why ask frequency just because it tells you how much demand
there might be? Yeah.
Because it, it kind of like putsthe, 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
(11:17):
often would you play? Once a month?
And like if if everyone's votingonce a month, it's like, oh, OK,
I'm glad I asked that because I was assuming it was going to be
twice a week. That's a good point.
Picked 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 in a hotel and
they had pickleball, would you play pickleball?
(11:37):
Yeah. And then you can go to the hotel
and see 80. 3% 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 cost $50,000 to
add a permanent pickleball court.
If you could rent one for 500 a month with no long term
commitment, would you consider offering one to your employees
(11:58):
as an amenity and then? A lease, Yeah.
If they, if they're not interested in it, then you, you
know, you can cancel your, your lease or whatever.
But it's important to like, I like to call it, invent a
disease, sell the 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.
(12:20):
Pickleball's the fastest growingsport 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
(12:40):
an employer and say, hey, 83% ofemployees 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.
(13:01):
Yeah. And explain the why.
Yep. Can I show?
You some of the like Facebook ads that I ran Yeah OK, I just
want to get your opinion on themin the task campaign.
I'll let you just tell me what you so we ran to and within the
two we ran two types. One was a video and the video
was what you've seen is of us putting the ickable court
together in that storage unit. And then the other one is just a
(13:23):
still image and we spent, I don't know, someone in a
ballpark of like $700.00 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
(13:44):
up, I would have done like 10 orlike 210 second videos, both
vertical, both similar vibe likesetting whatever, one talking
directly to the die hard pickleballers, one talking
directly to the what were the other the entrepreneurs.
Because in general, video ads performed better than static,
right? So we did.
Run one video for both and one static one for both.
(14:06):
OK. So are you saying you would have
just done 1 medium? Yeah, it's like.
You need to do static only for both or you do videos only for
both. Yeah.
Yeah. All right.
So whoever set this up did it ina good way.
They set the budget on the ad set level, which is it makes for
a more true AB test. If you if you tell Facebook like
(14:28):
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 right. He set this up in my opinion the
right way because he said like hey spend $15 a day per ads that
no matter what and then I'll decide for myself if enough time
(14:51):
has elapsed for us to know whichone is the winner or not.
Because in my. Facebook might be deciding too
early. They might have shown 20 people
and be like, oh, this one seems to be outperforming and yeah,
they're. Going to 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 a loser.
But if they would have waited a little longer and expanded it
out, they might learn, oh, thesegroup of people really like this
(15:12):
one. And in fact, like 80% of people
in general really like this one.But for whatever reason, the 1st
10% of people that showed it to you like that one, right?
For this setup piece, how intuitive is it for somebody who
has like me to 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 getit implemented.
(15:34):
Is it fairly intuitive or is it like you got to get it is
tricky. 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 toeveryone, is that?
Why it it's so much higher even though we said we're going to
(15:57):
spend 15 well. Because that Facebook will let
you set the budget on the ad setlevel, but it's still going to
decide on the ad level. So like when I said.
Because the ad set is entrepreneurs versus die hard
pickleballers, not static versusvideo.
Yeah. So I if I set this up, I would
have only done one ad per ad set.
(16:17):
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
said, oh, video program is better than static.
We're not going to show this static.
OK, 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 an entire. Not nearly enough, right?
(16:38):
And so if I were setting this up, I would make a a landing
page for people that know nothing about port accords, like
a dedicated landing page. So not.
The home page, 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.
(17:00):
Oh, really? Like, I just bought a basketball
hoop and it was $3000 and I didn't need to talk to anyone
about it 'cause 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. And this is a new product.
Basketball hoops are not do. Do any?
(17:21):
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 neverheard of, so it's like, OK.
The. More money you're asking for,
the more trust you need to come.So we got to build.
Some more trust cues on here. And or book a call instead of
buy now because people need to learn more about it or like an
(17:41):
at least a form submit button and then because we don't even.
Know how long the sales cycle isright?
Especially if it's an entrepreneur like they might
want to go validate demand before they buy it and.
That actually might be two separate landing pages for the
Entrepreneur ad set as 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
(18:06):
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 eventin Meta ad Meta wants to know,
like, what is a conversion? What does success look like?
(18:26):
And you could say a link click which you almost never want to
choose. So what do?
We have do, do you know? Campaign objective sales.
So it's optimizing for sales, but it doesn't know.
If we had a sale or not or is ittracking it?
It might. Know if if if Hunter set it up
right and he put the conversion pixel on the thank you page,
which only people see if they'vealready bought something right
(18:48):
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 smarterright right, because right now
it's showing it to people that are likely to click but often
times 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. If you're a lot of times if you
(19:09):
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
conversion, you kind of got to trust the process because you
you might be spending $5 per click instead of $1.00 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
(19:30):
much more selected. Like they're going to show it to
people that routinely buy $7000 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 gonna 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
(19:51):
convert people, yeah, then like medic can only do so much,
right? Like they can point us to the
site, but it's not gonna necessarily make them buy so.
For these. In particular, we had maybe I
think it's like 5 or 600 people click, they go to, they went to
our website, they went to that page.
What happens to those 5 or 6? I mean, meta knows who they are.
We don't know who they are. Like can we, can you retarget
(20:12):
those people? On if you have a pixel, only if
you've. Got the pixel set up on the
website, yeah? And you can keep showing them
more ads. And it's like, hey, you know you
check this out, we 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% Ford ad campaign like this is that it's
(20:35):
not bad. It's not.
Bad, Yeah. Would that make you go, Oh yeah,
let's just focus on the hardcorepickleballers 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 samecampaign, then there's just
going to be overlap. You're kind of confusing meta a
little bit. Does that make sense?
(20:56):
Yeah. Why would we have run it in the
same so the same campaign would have been like die hard pickle
Ballers is a campaign and then maybe 3 different.
Videos, videos. All.
Pointing to die hard pickle Ballers and then three different
ads, right? That way the budget is split
evenly between all three three. Different ads.
Sorry, what's the? Yeah, so there's. 3 levels, the
(21:16):
campaign level, ad set level andthen the ad level.
OK, right. And So what he 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 Dyer
Pickleballers was a campaign campaign ad set level would be
what? Oh, thanks.
So like we'll do these are two campaigns.
(21:39):
OK. 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 going to go ads this.
Is now the AD set level? Yep.
And then add 123123, that's three different videos and there
are three different copy OK. And then, and then on the ad
(22:01):
level, it's just three differentads, but right now, so it will
be an. Example like I would.
I think the video is the ad. I guess that's what I'm trying
to hard. 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 4 squares on the asset level is where you choose
(22:23):
where the conversion location ismaximize number of conversions.
And we learned on the campaign level that your conversion is a
sale, right 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 that as AI. And he said anywhere in the US,
(22:45):
any age, all gender, I trust youMeta, do your best.
And that's smart. That's smart.
And then he picked where do you want to show it?
And he, he said, I trust you Meta.
Show it on threads, show it on Facebook, Instagram stories,
Reels, post sidebar, audience network, other websites.
(23:05):
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 the 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
(23:28):
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. OK, so that's.
These are the decisions you makeon the ad sell level, and then
this is the ad level. And that's where you put the
creative, the picture of the video, wherever and where you
choose the copy, the headline, the oh so.
(23:49):
The primary type, the video is these pieces.
Yeah, Like the creative. Yeah, like you said, OK, The
creative is these pieces. And then this is the audience.
The main reason you're making 3 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
(24:11):
different videos underneath eachad 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 AB test that
right? Like actually with the
conversion I want is that they left their e-mail because
whatever, I have a lead back on my site and I want to see how
(24:31):
many give me an e-mail and I want to also see how many
actually do convert to a sale. Yeah.
Yeah, I've AB tested that before, but the 8020 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
them my e-mail, giving us their e-mail, or making a purchase or
(24:54):
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 AB test until 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 gonna see that everyone's
tired of that. You gotta go make another one.
(25:15):
You gotta go AB test all over again and then find another one.
You're like, Oh my gosh, we found it.
It's gonna get tired, right? That is the hardest part of
Facebook ads is getting the right creative and never getting
complacent with your creative. So.
Walking 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?
(25:35):
Lots of emojis. That's good, right?
It's good. From ChatGPT 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 like, talking about it, yeah.
That's the person who stands behind, right?
(25:55):
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. It's someone pushing out the
role like that. Like that, that's where.
I would start and like, what arethey doing?
(26:15):
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 doesn't matter.
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, you don't see
(26:37):
what it is until the very end. And then it's like porta courts
like a logo at the end. It's like, oh, it's a, it was a
portable pickleball court. I had to watch the whole thing
to learn that. Cause the more that people watch
the video, the less you're goingto, the less you're going to
spend on ads. It like if you put a crappy
video out there, Facebook has towork harder to get people to
actually watch it. So you'll have to pay them more.
(26:57):
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 likeyou make more money so.
If if you were to look at this and be like, OK, will the video
sucked, what are the green flagsand like red flags?
Just knee jerk reaction from thecampaigns we ran?
Because that's the only data I have right now, right?
(27:18):
Like we have our theory, but butthat's the only real data that
we've gone out into the world and gotten the highest.
Priority is to fix your landing pitch and to change the
conversion for a form submissionso.
Make the landing page be. This is what pickleball's about.
Would it be a video like a VSL or just probably?
Not they're probably not going to watch it.
OK. So just have it be like and is
(27:38):
it long or is it just like a quick pretty?
Short. Yeah, like long enough to show
that you're 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 pickable courts are versus like we have
10 quarts and you can get the 20by 40 for 75.
(28:01):
You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't think.
You get into 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.
But what's? The CTA Hey, give us your
information and 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.
(28:21):
Back to you, you can try both. What do you?
Think of these for just like after we've been talking, what
do you I know we need to get data.
I like I really like the Pikfu. 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 to point Facebook ads
to. Yeah, that's more of a LinkedIn
thing. I think hardcore, this might
even be in order of like easiestto hardest to self through
(28:43):
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 is it an entrepreneur someone like more
like me and like testing all kinds of side vessels and then
right here Facebook's like, I don't know, try LinkedIn you.
(29:07):
Know right yeah, because a lot of institutions aren't
necessarily there in order that they're 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 ish and
I haven't tested the $6500 one but the $8500 hundred dollar one
(29:30):
is just the better material bounces better, it's easier to
work with. So $8500 to buy the court
probably. If you don't already have a
truck, either buy a truck or buya trailer for your truck that
can haul the stuff around. You have to have some more to
store it. You get some license, insurance,
whatever, probably $20,000 off, maybe all in investment,
(29:51):
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 $1000 per event per day.
So I probably have to get 8 to 10 events a month, I guess 8 to
10. If I got 8 to 10 events in the
(30:11):
first month, I could quote UN quote pay my investment back
within two months. So that makes sense, like 20
events to pay my investment backessentially.
I just don't know like are thoseeconomics exciting for a
entrepreneur 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
(30:33):
kind of like a bounce house business.
I can buy 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.
OK, 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
(30:54):
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, well, 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
(31:14):
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. So all it's like they become a
yeah, affiliate distributor, whatever.
And so then they can make money on the rental side, but they
also make money on the sale of the actual courtside to those
corporate sponsors. Oh, the other thing I didn't
(31:35):
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 thereto 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
(31:58):
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 going to
have a pop up. She spent four weeks just
hammering that local area millennials with Facebook ads
(32:20):
talking about your pickleball pop up tournament, right, $20
buy insurance 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, to like
you could put it in APDF, it could be a lead magnet to say
like how to make $10,000 a monthwith pickleball pop ups, right?
(32:42):
But then like, imagine if 200 people came to your pickleball
tournament, they paid 50 bucks each.
That's a 10,000 dollars, 10,000 bucks per day.
And then every single one of them, you just shell these
courts to them hard, right? Those are like hardcore
pickleballers. They might want in their one in
(33:02):
their backyard, They might want to be the entrepreneur that does
this. Like you're most likely
entrepreneur is someone that hasa love for the game, right?
And those 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 people and
(33:24):
you might sell like 3 licensing agreements to three more
entrepreneurs, you know, so you could get, if you get, you know,
6 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, OK, I don't
(33:46):
want to go sign the lease, pay for the build out, do all the
TI, paint the courts, right, Launch this thing, I'm 100 grand
in and then it flops. OK, I could spend 8 or 20 grand,
just test the demand. And then if there is enough
demand, then I open a little ball club.
Yeah, 'cause yeah, 'cause that by that.
(34:07):
But then by that point, if you've got 1000 people who
participated in your tournamentsover the course of a year, then
you've got 1000 like warm leads of hey, I'm starting a club.
Would you be interested? That would 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 leave 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.
(34:28):
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 togo like, hey, we know 5% of
(34:50):
people who show up buy a court. Yeah, so it changes.
The whole calculus of your next ad campaign?
Well, similar. To meta ads, once you know what
it is, it's like, OK, now we gotthe money printing machine.
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 courtsdirectly or do you think the
(35:12):
best model would be I know that we need to see the data.
I'm just asking like knee jerk, what 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
(35:33):
out or to do events, make them like local salespeople as well.
Like distributors? Because if they can make 500
bucks for rental or 1000 bucks from selling one, it changes it
changes it for them. Because if they sell it, it they
they can just get rid of it. But if they rent it, it's 500
bucks to have to go unroll it. That's not even.
The bottom line, right, Right, we learned today.
(35:55):
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 localwho'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, etcetera.
(36:17):
And they might buy more pickleball courts later.
Like it all of a sudden becomes an account that they manage as
opposed to A1 time sale. Yeah.
And because it's such high ticket, you need the high touch.
Yeah. That's interesting.
Dude. This is fascinating.
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