How two toy & game entrepreneurs use trends to create hit products.
Scott Brown & Tim Swindle are the creators of PaddleSmash, a new outdoor active game that combines elements of Pickleball and Spikeball.
Scott Brown is the co-founder of Marbles: The Brain Store, a retail concept focused on building better brains through play, which eventually grew to 40 stores, a website, a catalog business and a proprietary product division.
Tim Swindle created Utter Nonsense, an entertaining card game that was quickly carried by several retailers and ultimately within all 1,800 Target stores. Utter Nonsense was acquired in 2017 by private equity backed, PlayMonster.
What did the learn and where are they going? Today is all about product development in the toys & games space.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
8/23/22
Kurt Elster: Today, on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are joined by a pair of serial entrepreneurs focused on the game space. Starting first with a Kickstarter years ago, in the before times, that successfully funded a game you may have heard of because it went everywhere, it was in Target and Walmart, called Utter Nonsense, that achieved rapid, rapid success. And now, they have gone on past those business ventures and onto a new one involving pickleball. Oh my gosh, pickleball. So hot right now.
And so, I want to hear from them that story of how you successfully launch a card game, which really popular then, still popular now, on Kickstarter and what that journey looked like, but more importantly as many years later, as they launch something new, in the works now as we speak, what are the differences there? What lessons have they learned and how are they gonna apply those? So, I welcome to the show Tim Swindle and Scott Brown. Except I forgot. I’m your host, Kurt Elster.
Ezra Firestone Sound Board Clip: Tech Nasty!
Kurt Elster: So, please, Tim, Scott, how you doing?
Scott Brown: Kurt, thanks for having us on. Nice to meet you.
Kurt Elster: My pleasure. All right, so we had a card game, Utter Nonsense. What year was that?
Tim Swindle: That was 2015. Something like that.
Kurt Elster: All right, so 2015, that’s like really like peak Kickstarter. Maybe a little later on Kickstarter, but it’s still this really exciting novel thing. How did that go? How much money did we raise on Kickstarter and how much heartburn did you get?
Tim Swindle: So, this was a passion project idea I had that was a game that we’d been playing at friends’ lake houses for several years, and how it came to be, just a quick backstory, was I’d read an article in Inc. Magazine that covered Cards Against Humanity, and very popular party game that had launched, and I was from Chicago, and they were from Chicago, and just found it very interesting of how they basically laid out their path to success. And I read this article and I was like, “You know what? I have a game that I’ve been playing with some friends over the past couple years. I think I could take this and take it to market.”
At the time, I was an entrepreneur working in the software space, and just wanted to do this as a side hustle, and they had done Kickstarter, so I was like, “Seems easy enough. That’s what I’m gonna do.” As you’re alluding to, it’s not nearly as easy as it looks.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Well, a few things there. Number one, I love that you said you essentially saw their success with that, realized you were doing… you had a similar thing or something that fit in that space or need, and which is party game, irreverent card party game, and you said, “Why not me?” Those three magic words that I think kicked off a lot of entrepreneurial journeys. Why not me? And then from there, of course, what helps you is not knowing what you don’t know. If you know how hard it is, the difficulty of the mountain you’re about to climb, you might talk yourself out of it. But when you went, “Kickstarter, how hard could that be?” You have just… You’re gonna start it and then be too far into it to realize maybe this was more, I bit off more than I could chew.
But ultimately it worked out, right? No risk, no reward.
Tim Swindle: Ignorance is bliss sometimes when starting a new company, especially in a vertical or in a genre that you’re not familiar with. So, yes, we had-
Kurt Elster: You owned a business at the time already.
Tim Swindle: Yeah. I was a partner at a software company. Very different. This was a VC-backed, cash burning, big team software, very different from a bootstrapped physical card game. I didn’t know the first thing about the toy and game space, and so there was a lot of Google searching going on those days.
Kurt Elster: All right. Tell me, run me through Utter Nonsense. I’m sure by this point we’ve all played our share of these style of card games.
Tim Swindle: Yeah, so you had two sets of cards. You had phrases, like funny, silly phrases, and you had accents, and accent could be like British, pirate… The first version we came out with was adult, so like orgasm was a version of an accent, so you’d have these cards, and you flip over pirate let’s say is the accent for the round, and everyone has to go around with their pirate voice and say whatever card they have in their hand. So, it’s like, “Aye, matey.” And one person’s the judge and just determines who the winter is, so very subjective, very silly, very silly, fun party game.
Kurt Elster: That does sound fun if I’m honest. That’s pretty good.
Tim Swindle: So, that was the concept, and so launched it on Kickstarter, very modest goal of about $15,000. We hit that just barely, but it was our first win, and that got the momentum going. We proved the concept. There’s enough people out there that believed in it and shortly after that is how I met Scott, so Scott had owned and just… He’d owned a company, a retailer called Marbles: The Brain Store, and was introduced to Scott through a mutual friend, and he had saw that we were successful on Kickstarter and liked the concept and decided to bring it into his stores.
A little bit of a backstory here is when I went into this, I was trying to copy the blueprint of Cards Against Humanity, and they had shunned retailers. They were only direct to consumer. So, I thought that’s what I was gonna do, and so I was very apprehensive about working with a retailer, but it was also like, “Just need the win.” And so, decided to work with Scott, and what I realized very quickly was that because of Cards Against Humanity’s immense popularity and them shunning retailers who were desperate to carry the game, they had this big void in their stores for other irreverent board games that didn’t exist.
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Tim Swindle: Because the big players didn’t want to touch that genre. The Hasbros of the world, et cetera. So, it had to be these independent publishers, and so once I kind of realized that, then I embraced retail.
Kurt Elster: And were you resistant to retail because that-
Tim Swindle: Yes. Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: The big one that you were modeling yourself after, your inspiration was Cards, and so you went like, “Worked for them and I don’t know. I’m new to this. I don’t know what I’m doing.” And so, you followed that model. What was the thing where you went… You said you needed a win. What was it where you went like, “All right, let’s give this a shot.” Or did you just realize like, “Hey, maybe these guys are missing something here,“ or to your point, they unintentionally created this void in demand.
Tim Swindle: You know, so working with Scott, he was local to Chicago. I was able to meet him in person. It wasn’t so many stores, so it felt low risk and I just… I immediately clicked with Scott, felt very comfortable working with him. The biggest change or the biggest shift in my approach was I was shortly then, about a month after we had launched on Kickstarter, contacted by the buyer at Target, and they were interested in carrying the game. And that was a whole different… I just was not ready for that. And so, that process became very interesting for us, because at first I said no.
Kurt Elster: And so, ultimately you did end up with this card game in Target and Walmart.
Tim Swindle: Yeah, so through a series of saying no, as I soon found out, buyers at Target are not used to being told no, and this buyer in particular who’s now become a good friend, both Scott and I, Mark, he made it worth my while to say yes. They’ve got a lot of leverage, a lot of levers they can pull to help something be successful in their stores with endcaps, and marketing dollars, all these things. All these terms, quite frankly, that I wasn’t familiar with.
We’d be on calls with the buyers at Target and I’m literally Googling because they’re talking about, “Hey, we can give you an endcap.” I had never heard of an endcap in my life, and so finally said yes just because they really made it hard for me to say no.
Kurt Elster: So, if someone’s listening and Target… Their phone is ringing, and it says like Target Buyer on the caller ID. Should they tell them no once and then see, because they want that endcap? Or just take the win?
Tim Swindle: Scott, you want to take this one?
Scott Brown: I mean, Tim’s story highlights the shifting dynamic of the toy industry, which is it used to be and maybe still is a little bit that everyone is at the mercy of two big players, Target and Walmart, and you’re really at the mercy of their moods. I have this story of working at this giant toy and game manufacturer, so I started as a retailer. That was acquired by a big manufacturer, and I was working at this manufacturer, and we’d work for a year on a new game. We were so excited to present it to this buyer and honestly had built out this showroom. I think we spent $50,000 on this showroom display for this game. It had this little door, you would knock on it, it would open mechanically, a dog would come out. It was beautiful.
And the buyer comes in, the buyer’s like, “I’m grumpy. I had a bad night’s sleep last night. I stayed up way too late.” She’s like, “You can show me this stuff, but I am just not in the mood for it today.” And we’re like, “All right. This is our shot.” We show her. She’s like, “It’s fine. I don’t know. Come back to me later. I don’t know.” And she left. The head of sales comes back in and he’s like, “Tear the display out. We’re not going forward with the product. It’s dead.” And that is like… That’s a year’s worth of work and I think well over $100,000 worth of money spent towards this idea, and that is the dynamic and I’d say still is the dynamic for many companies of the toy and game industry.
It's pitch, pitch, pitch. It’s build up something, pitch to the buyer. If the buyer says no at Target and Walmart, the product’s toast. So, Tim lucked into this. He lucked into this situation where a buyer came to him asking. And it’s a funny thing, like Tim, sort of like he got into my stores, one. I think other buyers were paying attention to what I carried. We were a little bit of a tastemaker. But then also, Tim, correct me on this story a little bit, but his sister was working for him at the business. She was tasked with this job of getting PR for the business. And she got a PR piece in a publication in the U.K., and Tim’s like, “We don’t even sell in the U.K., but okay, good job.”
And as it happens, the Target buyer read that publication, saw his game, and got excited, so it was like these sort of dual paths of getting into a taste-making specialty retailer, plus getting a listing in a publication that got Tim this early win with Target. I think the lesson learned is you just don’t know where your wins are going to come from, so take them when they’re there.
You know, the question you posed is would we say no to Target if they came knocking on our current product, and I’d say probably not. I think I probably wouldn’t be brave enough to do that. One example is this morning we got an email from a retailer saying, “We want to carry your product.” And I texted Tim with just a bunch of exclamation points, and he texted me back an expletive-laden response back, like, “Oh my word. This is getting real.” I mean, we’re going to say yes to this retailer, but what we’ve done a little bit is we’ve built up some demand first. And I think that’s the big lesson we learned is you don’t want to feel desperate with these retailers. You don’t want to come begging at their doorstep. You want them to come to you a little bit and that’s what’s happened with this. It’s like we built a website, we’ve started to build a social media presence. Somehow this buyer at this big retailer has come across our listing and has reached out to us, and that just shifts the dynamic a little bit. It’s no longer this like, “Please, please, please.” It’s them coming to us and saying, “Hey, we would like to carry your product.”
And then we have leverage. That’s a long answer to your short question.
Kurt Elster: No, it makes sense. I think in part when Tim said no, I think that spoke to not knowing what you don’t know, but also like unintentionally that he ended up flexing on this guy, and then at the same time there’s this concept out there that I heard a TedTalk about. It’s called luck sale. Like can you be lucky? Maybe you can make yourself lucky in that you can do things that make opportunities more likely to appear for you. And we just heard it happen. You said, “All right, I got this PR piece in a U.K. magazine where no one could buy my thing.” But that buyer saw it, right?
And so, you don’t know what opportunities are gonna come to you by the things that you put out there and create, so I love that idea. You have this modest successful Kickstarter that lets you take this idea and grow this business, so you know you have something. You have it in Scott’s stores. He has a series of local regional stores in Greater Chicagoland?
Scott Brown: 40 stores across the U.S. We were coast to coast.
Kurt Elster: All right, very good. That’s 40 more store retail locations than I have.
Scott Brown: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then after that, then you get Target, then Walmart, and then you sell this thing?
Tim Swindle: Yeah, so ran it for a couple years and eventually we had a few different versions that we had launched, and just caught the attention of some of the bigger players that were interested in acquiring it, and so I had those calls, and one of them in particular was pretty hot for it, and just decided it was best to part ways.
Kurt Elster: You were happy with your acquisition?
Tim Swindle: I was. Yeah. So, it was a acquired by a company called Play Monster. They’re a PE-backed kind of mid-tier toy and game company based in Wisconsin. The style of my game was very U.S.-centric, so we weren’t a good fit for call it like the Hasbros of the world who are looking for a widget that they can put into their international distribution system and have it everywhere, right? This was a very U.S.-centric based game, and so Play Monster in particular is a bigger player for mostly U.S. toys and games.
So, it was a great fit. They were a great partner, and it was a very smooth exit. They didn’t pull any tricks or play any games, so we’d definitely do that again with them.
Kurt Elster: So, looking back on it, do you think your success was in part because you were riding a trend? Because… Do you think you would have been able to do this without Cards Against Humanity’s success first?
Tim Swindle: Yeah. No, I was riding a trend, and I’ll say that’s also why I sold, because I feared that this adult game genre that had become very popular was maybe gonna be not as popular eventually. And I saw a lot of players entering the space, also, and so I just thought, “Hey, let’s take the win here and move onto the next thing.”
Kurt Elster: I see there is an entire… its own industry of indie game publishing and new board games and card games that pop up regularly, especially the card games, and I suspect it’s popular. It’s also easy to manufacture. Now, I have never attempted to manufacture either of these things. Has it gotten easier over time? Like if you wanted to do this today, I bet it would be significantly easier for you.
Tim Swindle: Well, yes. Easier because I know what I’m doing now. Not easier to be successful. So, I’d say it’s harder to be successful because of what you just described, which is that markets become saturated, and I think people caught on to how easy it is just to launch a box of cards, right? I mean, there’s just not a whole lot there. You need really good content to put on the cards, but then the process of manufacturing the cards is quite easy. So, there’s other intricacies in terms of distribution, and actually selling it, and things like that, but to get it started it’s never been easier. But that’s why it makes it harder to be successful at the same time.
Kurt Elster: Absolutely. So, if you had to do it today, would you use Kickstarter?
Tim Swindle: I don’t think so. I think now seeing where Kickstarter’s kind of found its niche is in the kind of heavier board game styles, more European styles, like the Settlers of the Catan, that style of a game, whereas for the quick and easy party games, I just don’t think the audience is on Kickstarter, quite frankly. So, yeah, I don’t think I would.
Kurt Elster: Who do you think is on Kickstarter these days? Because I could… I used to back a whole bunch of stuff and now I couldn’t tell you the last time I even looked at Kickstarter.
Scott Brown: Yeah. I think that we know. We launched a game together about a year ago. We were warned going into it that Kickstarter probably wasn’t the right platform even by Kickstarter. They kind of said, “Listen, here is our market. Our market is 20 to 40-year-old guys.” I mean, that’s probably all of us here on this call, but they are kind of geek centric. It’s the guys looking for tech or heavy board game, so this is like the Euro-style intricate rules of board games. If you’re launching a product where mom is the primary buyer, Kickstarter is not for you. Moms don’t know Kickstarters, they don’t know where to find Kickstarter, and it was true. We were warned. We knew going in. Our product got funded but not nearly at the level we had hoped. I mean, it funded at the kind of bare minimum level we had put in, but the reality is if you’re launching a product that is tech centric targeting 20 to 40-year-old dudes, Kickstarter might still be for you. Outside of that, I’d probably say no.
I mean, Tim’s game might still do well there, but I’d say even that… It is probably not rule heavy enough for this audience.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think my issue with Kickstarter now is in the past Kickstarter was like it kickstarted businesses and it was an entrepreneurial platform. And I thought it was really cool. And today, it really… It feels like it’s been more overrun by people who the business is launching Kickstarters, period. And it’s like we launch the product, we sell it out, and then we move onto the next thing, and the next thing, and that works. That’s a business. I think it just changed the nature of what you would use Kickstarter for.
Scott Brown: It’s true. And once you have one that works really well, you can use that momentum for other products, and you see that with Exploding Kittens. They came into Kickstarter. They already had this built-in audience with The Oatmeal, and then they used that audience to leverage a really successful Kickstarter, and now every Kickstarter they launch, they’re able to tap into that same audience over and over and over again. It makes a ton of sense for them to keep doing it over and over again.
But for Tim and I, with our products that it just barely hit thresholds on Kickstarter, we don’t have that audience to tap into every time.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I think that’s the other big difference, and now that’s what levels the playing field. It’s who has the audience, right? And that’s part of Target’s attraction when you had those calls, was like, “This guy has an existing audience.” And so, they know that there will be some level of built-in success there, where people will go to the store to seek it out. And that seems to be, at least in my experience, which is probably quite biased, that that’s more what retailers are looking for now. Like publishers, retailers, they want… They’re looking as much at the product as the audience.
Tim Swindle: Yeah. I think we… You know, the new thing that we found success with is because you can control your own destiny now with eCommerce selling direct to consumer, both via your own Shopify website and Amazon, you can get those same social proof data points that the buyers are looking for. Kickstarter’s great, because it’s so public. It’s very obvious if something is successful.
Kurt Elster: And there’s social proof built into it.
Tim Swindle: Yes. But you can find something similar with Amazon, right? You get the reviews going. You see the number of reviews. I know there’s software out there that they can look at to see just what kind of sales you’re likely doing if they don’t have the exact numbers. So, that’s become… Amazon really has kind of become the new breeding ground. Back in the day, it was like it was the mom-pop kind of one off, onesie-twosie specialty toy and game stores, so you’d have to do a couple years of sales to them to build up that track record, then take it to the bigger players to sell into.
Kickstarter came along, that just escalated the time period of like how quickly you could get into working with them. Amazon, same thing, right? So, now that has become where these bigger retailers, they have teams just searching on Amazon, looking for what’s trending, what’s working, et cetera, and then that’s leading to a lot of these new products that you’re seeing brought into stores.
Kurt Elster: And so, jumping forward to new products, you two have joined forces again and you are working on something related to pickleball?
Scott Brown: Yeah. This is the irony of it all is that we’ve climbed that mountain, we’ve seen how hard it all is, and we’ve decided to do it again. I think it’s just one of those things-
Kurt Elster: Can’t stay away.
Scott Brown: … like you can’t stay away. You just forget how hard it was and so you just get drawn back in. Tim and I, we spend a lot of our days just looking for opportunities, for trends. Pickleball came by us organically. I got into it myself. I play pickleball four or five times per week. I played it for five-and-a-half hours yesterday, so it’s just sort of this passion of mine that I’ve been very tapped into for the last call it two-and-a-half years. I’ve just known about it, watched it, I’ve been part of these Facebook groups, and so I knew that that was a booming sport.
And it actually is the fastest growing sport in North America right now. And before our call, you highlighted one of the reasons is that we’ve got all of these unused tennis courts in these parks, and so you drive by my local park and there are six tennis courts never being used. Almost never being used. And then you drive to these pickleball courts, and they’re jam packed. You’re waiting in line to play. And so, I think these city governments are seeing that and they’re converting tennis courts into pickleball courts because they’re wanting to bring communities together.
And so, you know, this massive trend, we see this and we’re like, “Well, there’s something here. Do we want to jump right in and be smack dab in the middle of the pickleball space? Do we want to be another paddle manufacturer? Another whatever it is?” I’ll say it is a gold rush to pickleball right now and most of them are going after paddles. There’s not much else to do in pickleball. It’s either a paddle, a net, or a ball, and paddles are the ones that make the most sense, and so there are call it 40 companies right now making paddles.
We didn’t want to do that. We wanted to do something a little bit different.
Kurt Elster: This is the first time we’ve brought up pickleball on this show. Just define for us for the laypeople. What the heck is pickleball?
Scott Brown: Yeah. It’s like tennis and ping pong got married and had a baby. It’s like a shrunken down version of tennis. You’re playing with an oversized version of a ping pong paddle and you’re playing with a wiffle ball, so it’s a plastic ball with the holes in it. And you can play singles, and it’s fun to play singles, but most people play doubles. The biggest attraction of pickleball I think is that… is the serve. Where tennis requires the overhead serve and you’re hitting as hard as you can, and most of them don’t go in at the amateur level, and so it’s just serving, missing, serving, missing, and then finally you get it in and then you play a little bit. Well, pickleball, it’s an underhand serve and almost all serves go in, and so it just opens the playing field for a broad range of ages, and I especially say the senior range, where seniors can get in, play pickleball, do the underhand serve, and be able to play quickly and easily.
It’s also a much smaller court, so the ground you have to cover is much smaller, so that’s a quick and dirty overview of pickleball.
Kurt Elster: The theme here, I heard trend a lot, and the theme here, and we know pickleball certainly is on trend. Is it a happy coincidence where you saw the overlap of I’m interested in this genuinely and I see it’s a trend, so now I know there’s opportunity here? Or are you plumbing trends? Or just after years of experience it’s like a natural sense, drive, and instinct for you, where you’re just recognizing opportunities that fit you?
Scott Brown: Yeah. I think it’s… Well, I used to in my role over the chain of stores was to see new concepts, and so I was being pitched thousands of concepts per year, and I’d say over the course of 10 years of running that business my antenna got really good at recognizing good games, good opportunities, and so we’re trying to apply that antenna to future opportunities, and so yes, we see the pickleball trend. Yes, every park I drive by now has a group of kids out playing Spikeball, and so we’re like, “All right, this outdoor game space is booming.” And it is. It is booming. And it’s one of the fastest growing categories in toys and games right now.
I think COVID helped. It was people looking for things to do outside, so it spiked this category and we thought, “All right, well, there’s an opportunity.” So, Tim and I were already thinking about this. We were thinking, “Well, what is it? What’s this marriage of these concepts?” And because I have been in the role of considering concepts, people are still constantly coming to me with their ideas, and saying, “Will you evaluate it and tell me if it’s good?” Well, I was put in touch with an inventor who happens to be from the same state I live in, Utah, and most of the time… Honestly, most of the time these ideas are bad. They’ll show them to me and it’s always the same pitch. I played it with friends and family. My friends and family love this game. Can’t wait to show it to you. I’ve already spent-
Kurt Elster: That’s how Tim started with Utter Nonsense. He was like, “This is what we play.”
Scott Brown: You know, a little bit, although like Tim did it slightly differently. We can get into how he did it differently and then how we’re doing it differently this time. But you know, friends and family are the worst validation you can get.
Kurt Elster: That’s true.
Scott Brown: They can help you work through rules. They can help you work through. But going to friends and family and asking, this is like going to your mom and saying, “Do you like this thing I’ve made, mom?” Mom loves you. Mom’s going to say, “Yes. Absolutely. I love what you made.” And so, we’re very cautious about that, and when an inventor pitches me a concept and says their friends and family love it-
Kurt Elster: That’s a red flag?
Scott Brown: The red flags go up. And so, this inventor, it was almost the first thing he said to me is, “I’ve been playing this for two years with friends and family. They love it.” But I was like, “All right, it’s still worth seeing.” So, here’s the cool story. This guy, Joe, Joe’s a dad of seven kids. He’s got six sons and they play Spikeball, but Joe couldn’t keep up with them in Spikeball. It’s like these teenage kids were just too good. They’re jumping all over and it was just a game Joe could no longer play with them.
They started to get into pickleball, but it was like 20 minutes to the nearest court, and it was jam packed all the time. And Joe, he’s a structural engineer, and he’s like, “All right, listen. I’m gonna use my engineering brain. I’m gonna come up with something.” And so, he started kind of fiddling with plastics in his garage. He was using a router and he started gluing all this stuff together and he created this marriage of pickleball and Spikeball, and then he kind of took it out to his kids. They started playing it. They refined it. And really over two years refined it and it got to a really good state by the time I saw it.
I went up to his house, played it, and I was like, “You know what? Actually, there is something real here.” And so, I immediately got on a call with Tim. Tim is my go-to guy. I think we work really well together. I work well in a partnership and so Tim’s kind of my sanity check on this stuff, so I was like, “Tim, I think we’ve got something. You should take a look at it.” Tim’s like, “I’m flying out.” And literally I think a week later he was out in Utah and we’re testing it in my backyard. We’re testing it in my brother-in-law’s backyard. And so, we’re getting all this sort of like good validation but still not sure. And then we decided to take it to the local pickleball courts.
And I’d say here’s the big lesson that I’ve learned over the course of testing ideas, is if you pitch an idea and say, “This is my idea,” to a group of people and ask them what do they think, they’re almost always going to give you feedback that is false positive. People do not like-
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
Scott Brown: People do not like to tell you your idea is bad. And so, what we did is we went down to the local pickleball courts. We set this thing up outside of the courts and it was like flies to honey. People were stopping midgame, coming up to the fence and looking through, coming over, trying it out with us, but we were pitching it as, “Hey, listen. We make games for a living. This random inventor has brought us this concept. We don’t know if this is good or not. Help us evaluate this thing.”
And so, we had no personal affiliation with it in that pitch. And then people were giving us honest feedback. You know, they’re trying it out. They were giving us constructive criticism. But it was good enough. I mean, one guy loved it so much he drove home and brought his son back to play. He was like, “I have to show it to him.” We walked away from that feeling like we had gotten a true sample, true feedback, and it was so positive that we’re like, “All right, we gotta go with this thing.”
Kurt Elster: You can go to a public space where people play outdoor games, whether it’s a beach, it’s a field, it’s a park, and find people who… You can find your audience and say, “Hey, check this out.” And I love that idea of being careful to not tell them it’s your idea and then ask for the feedback, because you’re right. They don’t want to offend you about your… No one’s gonna tell you you have an ugly baby, right? That person probably… You don’t want a Larry David type giving you feedback, but if you don’t tell them it’s yours, they’ll give you more honest feedback.
And so, all right, this guy says, “I’ve got this idea,” and you liked his rationale. You know it’s on trend. You see it. You’re like, “All right, absolutely. We think there’s something here.” You both play it. You like it. You love it. You’re like, “All right, let’s go see what the people think.” And the fact that people are like immediately interested upon seeing it and it’s like you have your target market right there, which is so fabulous, and then they’re willing to give you feedback on it, was that all the validation you needed to move forward?
Tim Swindle: It was. Yep. So, I think there’s just… A couple years of experience, just having seen, like Scott in particular, that’s what he did for a living for 10 years was look at concepts, so he has a really fine tuned antenna, like he was saying, for seeing what’s good and what’s garbage. And I’m fairly skeptical, as well, but when he said that when he first called me, that’s very rare because he’s also very skeptical, and so when he was like, “I think there’s something here,” I was like, “Got it.” And so, between us playing it, us liking it, this kind of story, getting to know Joe a little bit, talking with some of his neighbors that have been playing it, and then ultimately bringing it to the pickleball courts and getting that pure, uninhibited feedback or whatever with just zero back knowledge of who we are or this game prior, just it felt like really raw data that we were getting and it was overwhelmingly positive.
So, all those factors just kind of led us to be like, “All right. Let’s move forward.”
Kurt Elster: What are we calling our pickleball meets Spikeball/Roundnet game?
Scott Brown: It’s called PaddleSmash. In pickleball, the downward shot is a smash shot, and it’s everyone’s favorite shot. It’s the shot we all screw up over and over. It’s the one you feel like you should never miss, and you miss probably half of your shots, so that’s the smash, and the way our game is built, there was one thought. We were like, “Why not just use a Spikeball net and pickleball paddles and a pickleball and just play off of that net?” We experimented with that, and it was like you’d hit that pickleball into that net, it would fly a mile into the air. There was just no containing the game.
And so, our big mission here was to capture some of the magic of pickleball, and that magic is it’s accessible to a broader range of ages. You know, our lesson from the inventor was Spikeball is hard for older adults to play, so can we create a game that is easier for families to play together? And so, our whole mission throughout this process was to create a game that was more contained, that didn’t send the ball flying a mile into the air or a mile out, and so we have a net system, and we have a plastic base. The plastic base absorbs the shot, so it keeps it from bouncing a mile into the air. The net system requires you to hit downward rather than a side shot. A side shot without a net system would be unreturnable, and so that downward shot then pops that up into the air and keeps the ball in play.
We now, we have 30-shot rallies where you’re just going back and forth, so the idea here is you’ve got… You can play it one-on-one. You can play it with three. But the best way to play our game is to play it two-versus-two, and you’re standing opposite your teammate, you’re serving it to them. As soon as the ball gets into play, a team has three shots to get it back into the court. And so, you’re bump, set, and smashing it back into the court. A legal shot hits that base and clears the net. And then the other team has three shots to get it back into the court.
So, it’s a little bit of that volleyball, Spikeball, kind of three shots to get it back in, and you’re working with your teammate to get it back in. And so, we recognize that this has been proven by other games, so can we leverage this. It’s sort of this similar ruleset into our game but make it so it’s more family accessible. That was our mission. I think we still weren’t quite sure if we had nailed that mission. We got our final factory prototypes… I don’t know, a month or so ago, and I’ve been out kind of hitting the circuit. I’ve got a sunburn on my forehead right now because I was on Saturday spending an entire day at a community fair demonstrating this product. It was just like over and over, it was parents coming up with kids, and I’d be like, “Everyone come in and play.” And we’d start to play. There was a couple of minutes of, “We can’t do this thing. This is kind of hard.” And then it would click, and then everyone was loving it.
And so, I think we just… we nailed that mission of making a family friendly version of these games that are so popular.
Kurt Elster: I can’t buy this now. This is available for preorder. Obviously, it’s coming soon. You’ve got a final factory prototype. We’re moving forward with this. How are you gonna get the word out there? How are you gonna launch this thing? I’m gonna guess it’s not Kickstarter this time.
Scott Brown: No, I mean admittedly this is one of the reasons we’re on your podcast, Kurt, so we are talking to some different podcasters and trying to get the word out there. We also are gonna be doing social media advertising, so we engaged with an agency who we feel very confident with despite everything you’re hearing right now with the struggles of advertising on social media, specifically Instagram, and Google, that’s still gonna be a good channel for us. We just feel like the buyer in our situation is probably that mom, that mom of teenage kids that’s looking for something that they can all do as a family, and that mom largely still loves on Facebook and Instagram, and this is the theory we have. This is also… You know, you’re living and breathing it with us right now, is that we’re gonna test this out in a few weeks.
Obviously, we hear the same things that you do with TikTok is all the rage, and we plan on having a strategy for TikTok, as well, to be able to get it in front of some of the younger audience. And then Amazon, and so we’ll be launching on Amazon along with our Shopify website, and to start out that’s basically it. We’ve got social media, Shopify, Amazon, and just gonna start getting the word out there.
Kurt Elster: So, we’re still going back to that traditional DTC product launch playbook. We’re gonna make it ourselves, we’re gonna sell it direct. You’ve invented a new game here, so this is a fair… It is a semi-new category, right? It overlaps into some other things, so on trend, and then we’re gonna use social media to get awareness out there. We know our buyer is… You’re right. It’s often mom who makes the purchase decision on like here is a family activity that will get my kids off screens and outside. That’s like a consistent theme and need we see with outdoor games and similar things.
And then at the same time, you also want that TikTok strategy because yeah, no one leaves TikTok. That’s kind of the catch. They stay on TikTok. They don’t go in like an in-app browser like you would see with Instagram. But it kills for brand awareness, and so then when you have that combo, now suddenly you have created that luck sale again, where it’s like all these touch points and all you need is that person who happens to have seen it in two, maybe three places, and is in that position where they go, “I would love to play this with my kids and get them outside.” And now you’ve got that sale.
And you’re launching it going into Q4. I think it’s brilliant. Knock on wood, I absolutely believe you’re gonna see some success here. And certainly, you’ve got the experience behind you, as well, and Scott’s finely tuned radar.
Scott Brown: Yeah. I hope so. You never know until people have to part with their money whether you’ve got a viable product. We are still… We’re still cautious about it. We only ordered 1,000 units to start when we could have ordered 10,000 and just said, “Let’s go for it.” Ordered 1,000. It’s sort of the minimum viable test this fall is this is a soft launch. We’re going to test a bunch of things and figure out what works best and then to Tim’s point of spreading out your surface area of luck, it's just you don’t know who’s going to see what you’re doing. It’s kind of amazing how this works. We’re pre-launch. We don’t have any product out there in the marketplace. And already through just a few social media posts we’ve reached a buyer of a chain of stores that would be awesome for us to get into. Somehow they found us through that network of posts. I don’t know. We need to find out why.
We also reached a guy that’s starting a whole chain of pickleball meets restaurant concepts. He’s gonna be opening a bunch of these across the U.S. He came across a Facebook post. He’s searching for pickleball. And he gets served our video. And so, it’s just like we’re just at the beginning stages of this, but what we do know is we’ve got a product that looks great on video. It’s tons of fun to watch and can be explained in three seconds. It’s pickleball meets Roundnet. You say those two things to most people, or pickleball meets Spikeball. You say those two things to most people, and they go, “Okay. I get it. I know what it is.”
And so, I think it is a good lesson here is if you’re gonna launch a brand new product, make sure you’ve got anchor points that are familiar to people that they can then go, “Okay. I get what it is. I get this mashup that you’re doing.” I mean, it helps also that a product looks so good on video that like that TikTok strategy, just watching people play is a ton of fun. So, that’s kind of our hope is that we’ll see. We don’t know but we believe that there’s an opportunity here, and if there is, we’ll know soon, and then the plan would be a big, huge launch in the spring with retail partners and still direct to consumer, and a lot more inventory.
Kurt Elster: And so, this initial launch, this is we’re looking for… We’re really, we’re validating, and really starting to lay the groundwork on word of mouth.
Scott Brown: Yeah. It’s test and learn and start to build awareness. This is where we’re trying to improve our chances of success in brick-and-mortar retail. What we don’t want to do is throw it straight into brick-and-mortar retail and then just cross our fingers and hope that people will find it, and get it, and understand. If you spend the first six months building an awareness and a little bit of campaign around it, and then you put it into retail, there’s at least a base layer of awareness that you’ve helped build.
Kurt Elster: So, I love the fact that even after years of serial success and learnings, you left and returned to entrepreneurship to see this product through because you’ve got this sense of like this is an exciting product. This was someone’s idea and their baby, born out of a pain. They couldn’t keep up with Roundball, Spikeball, and came up with this thing that you, through years of experience with product development, went, “That’s a winner and I want to back that.” And now we’re carefully and systematically going through validating it, driving awareness, selling it, and doing it like a really sane, safe, bootstrapped way. So, I really… I appreciate that approach.
We want to get one. Where do we get one? Tell us how. Give me the URL of the toys. I want it.
Tim Swindle: Yeah, so we’re currently available for preorder at PaddleSmash.com. It’s also gonna be available on Amazon shortly, so as of right now those are the two places that it can be found. PaddleSmash.com and then Amazon.
Kurt Elster: Scott, anything to add?
Scott Brown: Yeah. I think just I don’t know when this podcast is going to air, but we’re looking to launch this in early September. We’re expecting our inventory to arrive, so be looking for it live on our site and on Amazon early September.
Kurt Elster: I hope you’ve sold out of those first 1,000 by the end of the month. I got faith. Tim Swindle, Scott Brown, PaddleSmash. Get it, PaddleSmash.com or Amazon. Thank you so much for sharing your journey with us.
Tim Swindle: Thanks, Kurt. It was great. Appreciate it.
Scott Brown: Thank you.