A one million dollar opportunity

GM. This is Work "After" Work, your side hustle tour guide. We know all the goodies and only show you the good stuff!

Here's how we're starting the week:

• 🏃 Pickleball opportunities

• 😂 Meme of the day

Summer is right around the corner and you know what that means! People are starting to get out and about.

Summer is the time to soak in the sun, drink Piña Coladas, and get outside!

And I’m willing to bet that a ton of people this summer will pick up a pickleball paddle for the first time. We talked about how fast the sport was growing last year… and it’s only gotten bigger.

There are now three professional pickleball leagues (MLP, APP, & PPA) with ~10M in prize money, and over 50M people have played in the past 12 months.

Every data point you look at shows Pickleball is exploding, which explains why it’s been the fastest-growing sport in the US for three years running.

Google Trends:

Reddit:

Source: Subreddit Stats

Hopping on growing trends is important because even if you’re small, you’ll still grow with all the other players. Everybody eats.

Here’s one business I’d go after:

Custom Pickleball Paddles

This pickleball set on Amazon does ~10,830 sales a month at $39.99. That’s almost $450k a month!

I don’t think you should compete on generic items like these. Yes, you could still make money but you’d have to put a lot of ad spend behind your product just to show up on the front page of Amazon and its insane competition.

Get more niche and hop into the customization industry. Why? Because when someone creates something it becomes special; aka you can charge way more.

When I type in “custom pickleball paddle” on Google this is the first site to pop up. It’s somewhat cool, you can upload any picture and text you want, but there’s not much else you can do.

Here's an example of what I made:

This is a great idea but there are limitations. The background is stuck on white and the grip is always black. Offer more customization options.

I’m talking cooler backgrounds. Take your pick from a Hawaii sunrise, a cool firework pattern for the 4th of July, or of course, your friend's face.

Add in colored grips (red, blue, green, orange, yellow, or rainbow) and now people can not only put their friend's face on a paddle but also make it custom at the same time.

Customization is a huge market. DivvyUp, a company that lets you put your dog or cat’s face on socks makes over $5M a year 🤯

Lesson learned: people pay for custom.

Marketing this is somewhat easy too! Create a couple of funny sayings to show what's possible... maybe “Smack that", "Dill-lightful", "Relish the moment" 😂 or a picture of a dog (whoever you're trying to target) and the custom grip colors customers can choose from.

Use these pictures as your ads on Facebook to show customers what’s possible and lead them to your site.

Custompickleball.com had 2,500 visits last month. They charge $100 per paddle. That means if just 2% of viewers converted they’re making $5,000 a month.

You’re still early to the game. Now is the time to work out all the kinks and get your paddles ready for the summer!

You can even build these yourself if you’re crafty!

MEME OF THE DAY

😂😂 I love this guy

That's a wrap ladies & gents!

DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. Please be careful and do your own research.