What does the phenomenon of Pickleball have in common with great products?
It’s been a bit since I wrote something as I’ve been heads down on a few projects (will share more details soon!)1. But, there was one thing that I wanted to share some quick thoughts on and that’s Pickleball!
I’ve wanted to write about Pickleball2 for some time now after just being blown away with its surge in popularity. Perhaps I have been living under a rock for a number of years or the COVID-19 pandemic hid some of its growth, but it seems to me that in the last year or two, Pickleball has really been picking up steam in popularity. I can’t go a day now without seeing it or hearing about it.
One of the first signs of this surge in popularity for me personally was the result of the renovation done on a park near where I live. Part of the park’s renovation was redoing its tennis courts. Naturally, I thought this just meant that they’d resurface and paint the existing courts, but much to my surprise, they did a bit more than that. Instead of just resurfacing the courts, they instead went from 3 tennis courts to 2 tennis courts and 2 Pickleball courts.
In fact, this was the first time I’d ever even seen dedicated Pickleball courts. I found this particularly interesting because you can play Pickleball on a tennis court, but you cannot play tennis on a Pickleball court. In other words, they went from 3 tennis courts/Pickleball courts to 2 tennis courts /4 Pickleball courts.
And despite that, the Pickleball courts are full almost every hour of every day. On the weekends, they can be so busy that you see groups of people hanging around waiting to claim a court. And it’s not just old people filling the courts. I’ve seen everyone from children to seniors playing. Including full-on Pickleball lessons and packed courts in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday.
The phenomenon is real. So, what’s causing it? And why now?
Some Common Traits Amongst Pickleball and Successful Products
As I asked myself these questions and started doing a little bit of research, I started also noticing a number of parallel characteristics between Pickleball and what makes some products become very successful.
The first of these traits is accessibility. Tennis is a hard sport. You have to be in at least decent shape to run around the court enough to be somewhat competitive with others who play. It also requires a lot of strength, dexterity, hand-eye coordination, etc. If you watch the pros, they’re serving the ball well over 100mph, even amateurs can touch 100mph. Because of the physical demand and requirements, tennis is not accessible to a large body of the population.
But Pickleball isn’t accessible only because it’s less physically demanding than tennis. Take another sport that is less physically demanding than tennis, golf.
Golf is definitely a popular sport amongst the older male crowd, but I wouldn’t say it’s quite the phenomenon that I see with Pickleball. I’d argue this is because golf is less accessible because of its money and time requirements. To buy even a low cost golf club set will cost you $100s. Want a mediocre set? $1,000+. But even if you have the money, golf takes A LOT of time. Not everyone has 4+ hours at a time to spend playing a game.
It also doesn’t help that golf is extremely frustrating and challenging. Hit the ball ever so slightly off and good luck finding it, let alone enjoying the day after you’ve lost seven balls in the water, two in grass you didn’t even know could grow that high, and one you just left on the course because you hit it so short off the tee, you hoped no one noticed that it was yours.
But Pickleball? All you really need physically is some hand-eye coordination, which isn’t even that bad since the equipment (which also happens to be pretty cheap) is a wooden paddle and a wiffle ball that’s almost as big as the paddle itself.
Does Pickleball get competitive? I imagine it does, but that also makes it accessible. If you’re athletic and competitive, you can find others like you to play. But even if you’re not, there’s even more people you can find to play with.
And this is what the best products do really well. They take a problem that’s demanding, tricky, inaccessible to a lot of people and create a solution that makes that problem addressable for an even larger group of people.
A great example of a product that has done this is the iPhone. Many people might have a hard time even remembering the world before the iPhone. But, the world before the iPhone was one of a ton of different offerings that were all pretty bad.
I remember one of the first phones that I ever had was this tiny little Nokia phone with keys so small that I’m still unsure how anyone with adult fingers could hit only one number at a time. And trying to type out a text message on that thing? How many times do you have to tap the number 9 to get the letter Y? What happens if you tapped it 5 times? Good luck trying to write out a love letter text to your high school sweetheart. And that’s to say nothing of the screen size, which even the game of snake felt too big to contain in that screen. It was a terrible experience that was not at all accessible to the average person.
Then along came the iPhone, a phone where you didn’t even have to look at its manual to figure out how to use it. You sort of just turned it on and played around with it. They created that phone to be so intuitive that even children now get confused when they come across something that doesn’t respond to their swipes and taps.
And when you make something more accessible to a larger portion of the population, you also create a much larger market that you can serve. Sure, the problem you are solving must be large enough that it’s a common one that many people have, but you’d be surprised by how many people might not be solving a particular problem today because they either are so discouraged by the current solutions that they don’t even try, or they don’t even know they are capable of solving it.
While accessibility is definitely a major reason why Pickleball is taking over the world today, it doesn’t fully explain why it’s happening now. After all, Pickleball was invented in the 1960s. As they say, all overnight successes were 60 years in the making.
So, why now?
The second common trait between Pickleball and the most successful products is the lollapalooza effect. This is a term coined by the great Charlie Munger3. The word lollapalooza means “an extraordinary or unusual thing, person, or event; an exceptional example or instance”. Another way of saying that it’s something where a number of different things combine to have an unusual outcome.
Why does a particular song become popular? Or why is a particular piece of art more valuable than many other seemingly similar pieces? These are phenomenons that can be hard to explain if you look at them trying to identify traits like quality or strategy or functionality.
Take Pickleball for example. It’s obviously been around for a really long time but hasn’t really taken off until recently. I don’t believe that’s for any one reason. Even the first trait that I shared above, accessibility, cannot alone explain why it’s taking off now. The game hasn’t changed all that much in 60 years, if at all. So it’s not only because it’s accessible. Accessibility is part of the equation of the lollapalooza effect, but not the full equation. Necessary, but not sufficient.
What else might be part of this equation? A couple things come to mind for me. The first is that it’s no secret the world is getting older and unfortunately, also fatter. This might be good for nursing homes and fine dining establishments, but not exactly good for highly athletic sports. Yet at the same time, people still want to be active. They want to go outside and do something. If they can’t play basketball or tennis because those things are too challenging, then they need to turn to something else.
Another factor that comes into play is competition. People might want to be active, but couldn’t they just walk? Yes, and I’m sure lots do but we’re humans. Our biology makes us want to compete for things like mates, food, shelter, and security. It’s in our makeup to want to compete. But society today is also far from the caves of old. So we’re hunting for ways to be competitive in more civilized ways. Sports are a great outlet for this4. If you want to compete but are getting older, slower, and heavier, you don’t have that many sports to turn to.
But that’s not all that’s combining to make Pickleball take off. You also have to consider timing. This may sound funny to talk about timing since the sport has been around for almost 60 years, but one of the things you learn in business and building products is that timing is more powerful than you think. Something that is the exact same product and fails to gain any traction, can suddenly get a lot of traction years later. Typically, this is because markets just weren’t ready for it yet or it required a number of things to align before it could take off (perhaps a result of the lollapalooza effect itself).
Think about all the stories you read about the Dotcom Bubble and Pets.com being a prime example of companies of that era gone horribly wrong. Then look at Chewy’s valuation today. Same idea, same product, different time period.
Another thing you learn building products and companies is just being around for that moment is nearly half the battle. It’s why perseverance and survivorship are such important qualities of entrepreneurs and businesses. In order to be ready for when it’s your time to shine, you need to actually be there. And now’s is Pickleball’s time to shine.
Coming off the COVID-19 pandemic, people wanted to be active, competitive, and get out of the damn house, without having physical contact with others. Pickleball was just ready for the masses to try it out in some unforeseen circumstances.
The last part of the Pickleball lollapalooza equation that’s worth mentioning here is social proof. There have been many books, papers, and articles written about social proof (also referred to as peer influence), so I’m not going to go into the details about the theory behind it5. Social proof is just what it sounds like. If you see others doing something, you’re much more willing to try it yourself because by seeing others doing something, they have given you “proof” that it’s worth it.
Social proof comes out in successful products in many different ways. One of my favorites is lines, whether they be at restaurants, ice cream shops, bars, stores, etc. If you see a line outside of a place, I bet you that one of the first things you think to yourself is “huh, I wonder what’s going on there, we should check it out”. Being social animals, we cannot help but be influenced by what others are doing.
But here’s the hard part, it takes some unknown amount of people to influence you, otherwise it doesn’t have the same effect. And that critical mass varies for each of us, for each subject matter that we come across. For example, it may only take 10 people in line for you to jump in line at an ice cream shop you’ve never tried before. But it may take 1,000 people to influence you to jump out of a plane.
So, it’s not just a matter of seeing or hearing some people trying something out. It needs to surpass your personal threshold in order to influence you enough to give it a try. That’s why something like Pickleball can exist in the same form it has for 60 years, without blowing up until very recently. The right number of people in the right social circles just hadn’t been there yet. It might have required something like a world-wide pandemic to get there.
Almost every successful product that you’ve ever come across in the consumer space has this factor as part of its success. You’ve heard it as “going viral” and all the other versions of that phrase, but it’s almost impossible to build a successful consumer product without cracking this nut. Because in order to be a successful consumer product, you need to get it into the hands of A LOT of people. Extremely hard to do. Again necessary, but not sufficient.
And that’s what it really takes to have something take off and become the number one fastest growing sport in America. It’s not any one factor or trait that does it. There’s no one way or easy formula for making things work. The truth is it requires the combination of a number of different factors coming together to find that success. And even though we may want to believe that it’s all us when something goes in our favor, we shouldn’t be naive to think there’s no luck or randomness involved.
Alright, now I guess I should go play some Pickleball 🏓✌️.
For anyone interested in testing early products, please shoot me a quick note here: alex@betterthinkingsoftware.com
For those of you unfamiliar with this game/sport, here’s a bit more information about the game, its rules, and how to play.
At least I believe it originates from him in the way that I’ll talk about it here. And no, it is not related to the concert, although I believe the definition applies there as well.
And much better than another alternative that way too many of us turn too, aka politics.
If you are looking for good and easily digestible resources to dig deeper on this topic, two really good ones that I have read and recommend are Influence and The Tipping Point.