Pickleball Entrepreneur Discusses Pain Point, Proof of Concept, MVP & Kickstarter Success

Josh Brown is an entrepreneur, inventor, founder, and CEO of Dropshot, a smart scoring platform designed to enhance Pickleball scorekeeping– the fastest-growing sport in America. Josh applied his 14 years of software engineering experience to address a pain point of passionate pickleball players like himself---how to keep score that easily eliminates on-court confusion and scoring squabbles.

In our discussion, Josh shares how he moved from product idea to market testing to Kickstarter success through manufacturing to market introduction. He shares his entrepreneurial and product design approach, offering insight to others pursuing product innovation. 

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I'm Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series, Experienced Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

Josh, thanks for being a guest on Experienced Voices. 

Josh Brown: Thanks so much for having me on the show, Jeanne it's great to chat with you. 

Jeanne Gray: The timing I don't think could be any better for what you're doing. Pickleball is really hot. So let's just start with the description of your new product that is going to make pickleball players very happy.

Josh Brown: Yeah. Dropshot is an electronic pickleball scoreboard. It connects to an Apple watch or remote control. We've designed it to let players keep score super easily, focus on the game while also providing player stats and a community to share their wins. 

Jeanne Gray: So where did you come up with the idea for it? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, the idea started shortly after we picked up playing a few years ago.

In Pickleball you have to remember four things. Your score, the opponent's score, the serving number, and then also which side you're serving from. So mid game, especially after an intense rally, that can get quite chaotic. So it really disrupts the flow. I wanted something that would allow players to focus on the game instead of the mental math, and I realized that existing solutions didn't quite cover all those bases.

So I thought, why not make something better? And that simple. What 

Jeanne Gray: What was some of the first steps that you took to go from just a concept or an idea to let's kind of move this forward. 

Josh Brown: Yeah, we went through many rounds of prototypes. We the initial concept was just an existing scoreboard that I bought on Amazon.

I took it apart, hacked together a way to control the buttons on it with an app that I wrote for the Apple watch and that validated the concept and it certainly helped to keep track of everything. But there were a lot of learnings still that we got from that first version. 

Jeanne Gray: So the tech on this doesn't sound like was a big challenge for you.

So just share a little bit about some of the tech that's in your background. 

Josh Brown: My background is a unique journey from working as a mechanical engineer on super yachts in New Zealand to starting a legal tech startup and then leading engineering at a health tech startup. So each role kind of brought new skills like navigating complex problem-solving and managing high-stakes timelines, which have been invaluable to Dropshot.

Jeanne Gray: That sounds some like really interesting projects that you got involved in. I, I mean, I'd like to take the conversation, just talk about super yachts for 20 minutes, but uh, but we'll stay on pickleball because I know there's a lot of people out there playing now. So you, you did prototype it and you, when you said you prototyped it, you yourself used it on the court and how long did you use it on the court to, , see how the prototype worked?

Josh Brown: Yeah, we went through probably about six versions by now. And each one we would take out and learn something new after the first one, we realized that the display wasn't large or bright enough. And we play out here outside in San Diego. It can be quite sunny and the sun reflecting off of that display makes it so that it has to be incredibly bright.

And that was one of the first learnings that we had to go overcome. And there were several other prototypes. We'd take it out to the court, play with it figure out that the app UI needed to be more user friendly and lots of other small things that it has to be simpler than trying to remember the score yourself in your brain, along with the other people that are, you're playing with, 

Jeanne Gray: so outside of yourself and obviously there had to be other people on the other side of the court. Did you share it among a broader target audience to get even a little bit more of a sense of the marketing potential. 

Josh Brown: Yeah, we would take, it started out the first version we would, before we even had a prototype, this was still in the concept phase we got a rendering that was done online, you know, through somebody on, I think it was Fiverr and we'd get a picture of it and we'd go down to our local Pickleball court.

And we would talk to everybody that we could about what they thought about the idea and how much they would pay for it. And all kinds of feedback that we would gather from the process. Cause this went through many phases we would have to go through a gate, each gate, we would try to figure out if we should proceed with this idea, whether it was something worth going to the next step, spending more money, more time on.

Jeanne Gray: Well, I think that's great that you shared the part about interfacing with the actual users. I, always love the story about an entrepreneur who had a financial app, and we're talking like over a decade ago, but he went out on the platform of a train station and, and, you know, handed out questionnaires, and then he sold his, his company for 150 million.

So, I was like, it wasn't a tech survey, he just stood out on the platform and, and asked people what they thought. So, so now you've gone through the prototype and you've gotten some really good feedback. Actually, did you learn anything from the broader marketing of it? Like talking to the people, not just your, your close associates?

Josh Brown: absolutely. Yeah. Everything from how it looked and how it should work to how much somebody would pay for it and all the features on it. We learned about the timers and the different types of scoring, like there's rally play and side out scoring. So there's different aspects of the game that people wanted to be included in the product.

And we learned all of that through talking to people. 

Jeanne Gray: When you try to figure out how much they were willing to pay, were some of the answers or the, was the spectrum of answers really wide, or did it come, it was a wide spectrum? Yeah, 

Josh Brown: absolutely, yeah, and also people usually, We'll put a low price if you just flat out ask them.

There's some specific questions you could ask that would get you a more accurate answer, because if you just flat out ask, how much would you pay for this? Somebody might say, five, ten dollars, when it's in actuality a product that's hundreds of dollars. 

Jeanne Gray: So actually, do you want to share the price points that you ended up with now or when it goes for actual launch?

Josh Brown: Yeah, we've been MSRPing for 279. We just finished a Kickstarter and the super early birds, the ones that I can talk about the Kickstarter process as well, because that whole thing. Thing goes from, you get a super, if you're an early, early adopter, then you get a much cheaper price. And if you join in later on it, the price continuously increases until the end of the campaign.

But at the very beginning, the earliest price was down at one 49. And that was for the people that had gotten in on day one. 

Jeanne Gray: Had you ever done Kickstarter campaign before? 

Josh Brown: This was the first time we did lot of research and we got a coach to help us through the process and there was a lot of 

Jeanne Gray: Well, what were some of the things that you I don't know if it's an aha moment, but maybe share a few bullet points on what another entrepreneur should look for if they're considering, especially for a consumer product possibly. 

Josh Brown: Yeah, absolutely. There, there was. There's probably, yeah, three main things that we could share about what we learned on, the Kickstarter journey.

The first would be to build the audience before the launch, and that's probably the most important. Start months ahead, create a landing page, gather emails, and then go one step further and ask them. To give a small amount of money to lock in a discount and become, we call it a VIP. We went with a dollar pledge.

it's less about the amount and more about how it shows the commitment. 

Jeanne Gray: the coach that you hired, was he or she a Kickstarter experienced? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, yeah, actually. And the data driven ads is also a huge aspect of the, of that whole campaign process. So the test multiple ad variants, see which messaging and visuals resonate the most, and then double down on those invest in the high performing ads during the campaign.

And yeah, they also taught us about keeping the pre backers early engaged throughout that whole process. So the people that did put the dollar down became VIPs. We invited them to join a Facebook group where we would post behind the scenes updates throughout the process.

Also, we got a lot of really good feedback there as well. Plus a community of passionate players. 

Jeanne Gray: So in timeframe, cause you're trying to synchronize everything that's going on, you've got the prototype, you're getting ready for manufacturing and you're, trying to figure out your marketing. So actually, did you always think that you were going to use Kickstarter or when did that kind of emerge as part of the plan?

Josh Brown: Yeah, we kind of knew pretty early on that Kickstarter was going to be part of our strategy. It's a great platform to validate the demand and also raise the early funds that we would need for the mass production. Yeah, it was, a lot of mold costs and other aspects of The funding process that happens after the Kickstarter campaign that that pre launch really helps with because otherwise that all it's, it's a, it's a much bigger gamble if you don't have the backers all those pre orders.

Jeanne Gray: so just from the point of the pre launch was the pre launch say three months and the, and the actual campaign was X a months. How long should an entrepreneur think of? A kickstarter campaign as far as a timeline. 

Josh Brown: Yeah, for the pre campaign ours was probably longer than most. Ours was probably about eight months and that was because we started building up that list pretty early on when we, it was just a concept and we were trying to get the feedback and learning what the product actually was.

So we were gaining those email addresses very early on. A lot of people that start that already have all of that figured out and they know they're about to launch in a, they don't have to do that, you know, seven, eight months, people do it in one month, two months, and just strictly testing out the messaging.

They're not testing out aspects of the product that they're building. 

Jeanne Gray: And how long has your campaign been run? has the campaign ended? 

Josh Brown: The campaign ended. Yeah, it typically runs, ours was for a month. You can actually set it to be longer or shorter and one month is pretty typical. 

Jeanne Gray: And how are the funds released once the campaign is over?

Are there any other milestones that Kickstarter requires before you can use the funds? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, they hold it for about two weeks after the campaign ends, and then they take their cut, which I think was about 5%, and then they release it to you after that. Because not every backer has valid credit card payment or not everybody that actually put their money down because the, they don't end up paying until the very last day when the campaign ends.

So somebody that ordered on the first day of the campaign and then a month later and maybe they moved me, I don't know if they changed their credit card and now that payment doesn't go through. So a small percentage of those don't actually end up closing either. But then, so that's why they wait until they give them a week of, they send messages out, Hey, update your credit card payment.

And then, so it takes that time. Plus they like to keep afloat, I'm sure. So they get a couple of weeks in there. 

Jeanne Gray: Right. They kind of keep you out of the cleanup before they resolve everything. So now you have to deliver the product. What do you say to the Kickstarter? People who committed the time frame for them to expect product.

Josh Brown: Yeah, we put a pretty conservative timeline in the campaign because One of my pet peeves is when, I've backed a few kickstarters before and often you'll see on there you'll back it and then when they said they were going to deliver it they say oh such and such came up and now it's actually going to be Three months later or a year later or years later, sometimes they never deliver.

So I wanted to have a pretty conservative timeline. I've seen lots of things that can go wrong on others. So we put it down as June, 2025. We're working with manufacturers now and fingers crossed the timeline is delivered much sooner than that. yeah, just in case, worst case scenario, we put a June 25.

Jeanne Gray: Yeah, so you've been around the block with your other innovations that you've done and your mechanical engineering background. So, sourcing out a manufacturer, can you share like two or three points of, you know, were you already in the vicinity of the, of the type of manufacturer, or did you have to even do some basic research?

Josh Brown: Yeah, choosing a manufacturer was definitely a learning curve. There was a lot of research and I also worked with another coach on the manufacturing aspect of this. And we eventually landed on one that actually ended up being a recommendation from a friend of mine who's working on Another product that's kind of relatively similar with this manufacturer themselves, but I'd recommend looking for a manufacturer that is experienced in similar products, especially if it's early stage startup like this, one that has the flexibility to prototype as well, and also has some clear communications, because that can be a challenge as well.

I could talk for hours on just the topic, but tools like Alibaba and there's another one called import yeti are definitely really helpful Alibaba. You can search for manufacturers that have experience with similar functioning products and also see their third party audits to make sure they have the quality and the standards that you'll need.

And then Import Yeti is kind of a hidden one. It's super useful. If you can think of a company that already makes a product that's very similar to yours, then you can go on there. And since all of the bill of lading data for sea shipments is publicly available, you can find out about the factory that those companies are using to make those products.

And so that's really helpful if there's a product that is pretty similar to yours.

Jeanne Gray: Now, once you've committed to a particular manufacturer, is there a process of which they give you first samples and a timeline of You know, it's just not like, you know, here, I'll see you in three months and, and here's your 10, 000 you ordered.

Do you have sort of like a process that you go through, a quality process where the milestones are met? And your anxiety level is, is kept to a minimum? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, that's a good question, because yeah, there's so many steps, more than you would actually imagine then that goes into it. But that's why it's really important from the, from the get go to find a manufacturer that has really good communication, because throughout the whole process, there's going to be talking almost every day, if not every day.

throughout the whole day about everything that they're working on, the details of how it should look, the materials that are going to use. And that's just the early stage. And then you'll get usually a prototype of just the, an approval on the enclosure. It doesn't have to have the functionality yet.

And then they'll work on the actual electronic, depending on if it's electronics, it can work for backpacks and Glasses and whatever you're manufacturing, but ours is electronics. And so they would do another phase of the electronics inside of it. And then you go into the, the mold making. And once that's all approved, then you go into pre production and then you get a testing phase and make sure that everything is Things like water tightness and drop resistance and things like that.

And then you get the actual product that is final for the prototype. And then you also, once they start making a bunch of those, then you get a third party person to go in and sample random parts that they've made in there and make sure that they're working. The quality is good enough and before it gets to you.

Cause if it gets to you and then half of them have smudges all over them or something, then you got to open up all the boxes. 

Jeanne Gray: Yeah, I've been there and I've done that. So I definitely understand what you're saying. I've opened boxes before it went out the door and said, we're not shipping today. You know uh, I learned my experience.

So when they came up with the timeline and, and I guess this is a lot you learn with developers as well, is that they say two months, it's four months, or if it's four months, it's eight months. So how did you manage your conservative approach of. You know, I know the Kickstarter had a complete, but it's still, you could put things underway while the Kickstarter is being prepped as well.

Everything doesn't have to be, you know, consecutive. You can run things at the same time. So, how did you consider a conservative approach for your manufacturing part of it? Did you double or triple? Yeah, 

Josh Brown: it was about that. It was about two and a half times. So yeah, it was 

Jeanne Gray: your coach, I guess on the manufacturing side was able to bring some of that insight.

Josh Brown: Absolutely. Yeah, that helps a lot having somebody that's been there before to really help those conversations and then also the planning and roadmaps. 

Jeanne Gray: So you are a wise man in going and using coaches. So how do you find coaches then? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, a lot of, some of it's word of mouth. A lot of it's just finding stuff online.

Google is helpful to find those. And once you start looking for them, then you'll see on your feed for whatever you're looking on Google or Instagram. And then now all of a sudden you're seeing every ad you get is a different one. So they'll find you as well. If you, once you start looking. 

Jeanne Gray: But you, you know, it's funny.

You're, you're open minded to know what you don't know, and a lot of entrepreneurs, I don't know what percentage, but there is a portion who feel they need to do every single part themselves. So how do you weigh that kind of approach that, or you may even know from fellow entrepreneurs, where they get too deep into the weeds when they're working on a project?

Josh Brown: Yeah, I learned that the hard way as well. That was for previous startups. I definitely said, Oh yeah, I could do that. I could do that. And it ends up taking a ton longer, usually end up spending more money. And it's not always that way. Sometimes finding somebody else to do it. If you're not hands on is actually takes longer to do that.

I learned that with programming. It's how I got into software development was because I was managing a team of engineers about it and I didn't know how to talk the language. So I ended up. learning it myself. But if you don't have, I think coaches are really strategic. So not necessarily finding somebody to handle a whole aspect of your company, especially when it's really small, but learning how to do it yourself, but doing it correctly, getting that guidance along the way is really valuable.

Jeanne Gray: And did you ask the coach, give me an example of a project that you previously have done sort of checking the, the credentials and the references, because it's, you know, actually I sometimes fall prey to this. You enjoy talking to someone, you, they tell you a lot, but then in the end, you forget to qualify that they actually have the depth of experience.

So. You did ask them a series of questions that kind of, or did you actually interview two or three to come up with the right person? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, usually. And some of the ones that I ended up using were pretty larger scale. So they actually had a team of people that would help go through this and then videos and class materials, resources, everything that can kind of help you go through that process.

It wasn't necessarily a person that's done this once before. Right. Which certainly helps. And sometimes those people are good, but you might want to do a little more validation on ones like that. 

Jeanne Gray: So when you make a commitment for the first round of production, you have a certain amount of orders now on hand.

How much. do the initial quantities have to marry for the manufacturer to be willing to even speak with you? So it was one of your anxiety points of, well, how many people will help us out in the Kickstarter campaign that's going to meet the minimum that the manufacturer is saying, hey, if it's less than such and such, we can't do it.

Josh Brown: Yeah, and that goes back to the manufacturer search, because if somebody is really large, if they're, let's say you go on import yeti and you find a manufacturer that makes something similar, but they're selling 500, 000 of them a year and you go to reach out to that manufacturer, their minimum order quantity is going to be probably above if you're just starting out and making the first version is probably going to be higher than what you would want.

And you'll be, Little and not even on their radar. You probably won't even warrants of response to them, but if it's something that is, some of those companies have smaller quantities and some of them also diversify and they'll have multiple factories. And some of those will have a smaller minimum order quantity.

And you want to generally be trying to think of the metric that the, you want to be about a certain percentage of their distribution because you don't want to be a half a percent, but you also don't want to be 70 percent because if you're 70 percent then they're going to not be set up for the scale that you're hopefully going to need.

And within a year or two, so you want to be a, probably about 5 percent of their entire Quantity and then that would give you the size that you'll want to see in a year or so. If let's say you 10x scaling, then you're still going to be comfortably within their purview and not something that's outside.

Jeanne Gray: And I don't know if you have direct contact, but does the intermediaries sort of challenge or Need to believe in your product as well. Do they ask a lot about, you know, your startup and then do they ask you for a lot of background information to qualify you for the next conversation for the actual production?

Josh Brown: Yeah, good. Because I, I actually would think it's closer to the, I've kept some of it to my chest, like with the manufacturer, I don't, when reaching out to manufacturers, I'll typically have. Unbranded un IP linked spec sheet that I can send out to them in order to get a feel of what the quote size would be for how they would be able to price something like this.

And it wouldn't really have any kind of IP, anything that they could really, you know, take this and like, Oh, this is a good idea. I'll make it. And so when you're dealing with manufacturers, that is something to consider because when you're early stage, they've got a lot of leverage.

And if you don't handle that, right. I think later on in those conversations, you can start to divulge more. Especially if this is a partnership you see lasting a long time. Okay. But in that early stage where you're just starting to talk with them, I usually don't even have information about what the product generally is.

It's really just has the overall functionality of it and make sure that they can handle that kind of project. 

Jeanne Gray: Yeah, it's, it's definitely a dance from both sides and trying to find the manufacturer who sees the initial production order as a lead in for the A much larger relationship makes that process go faster or better.

 I've had some experience in what you've done, so. It's a lot of anxiety to get through the very first production run. And with the internet, I think it's a heck of a lot easier now. Because, like you said, you could do the research. So, Did the success of the Kickstarter campaign, which gives you an initial production order, how did that kind of free up your thinking, not just for the manufacturing, but sort of like energize you to then say, I've got a company here.

I can now look at some of the numbers. I've seen some of the feedback and we've these orders on hand. or taking our thinking to another level. \ , how did that inspire you? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, the Kickstarter actually gives a lot of confidence. I guess that's the word in it because before that you'd have to go into the manufacturing process blind, not knowing how many orders to make, how much, people even want the product.

So having that confidence going in, Knowing there's demand, it also gives you some cashflow. You can now finalize the development, making improvements that you learned from people that have gone through the campaign and said, Oh, if only I had this, so it gave a lot of validation and plus a customer base that you can engage with and it offsets some of those high costs that are involved with getting it to mass production.

So very valuable. 

Jeanne Gray: And that opens up then your marketing plan. Cause I actually, I didn't ask you at the beginning, but I know because you have prior experience, did you write a business plan or you kind of knew the checklist in your head before I asked you about the marketing plan? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, not necessarily a marketing plan or a business plan.

We strategized on validating the interest first. So in those early stages, it's, I find that it's. Agility is much more critical than following a rigid plan. And so that validation took lots of steps. So it was the talking to people and at the pickleball court and finding out the pricing and finding out the manufacturability.

And so each step was the, was the gate to figure out how we should proceed to the next. 

Jeanne Gray: Now, are you familiar with minimum viable product? Have you, , is that something that was part of your thinking? Is, maybe you want to share with the listener what MVP is, if that's, was some of your thinking? 

Josh Brown: Yeah, absolutely.

And coming from an engineering mindset, that's, yeah, that was the first phase was, and that first prototype that we built. So we took apart that scoreboard and hacked together the buttons and we figured out that, okay, so you can connect an Apple watch to a scoreboard and Bluetooth works far enough. And those were all the things to test on making sure that it was a.

That's a minimum viable product. So you have an app that connects to a scoreboard and it, and you can say, I won the rally and All of the other logic of the gameplay is handled the scoreboard and that's our minimum viable product And so that first prototype was what made it work. It didn't look good It looked terrible and they didn't look good until much later probably about the third prototype But that was yeah, the process is just iterating on that minimum viable product is very valuable 

Jeanne Gray: And, and you achieved so much, which is the purpose of an MVP, with as low a cash outlay as possible to sort of refine accept or reject your, your initial idea.

So, and as we discussed previously, you went through various then iterations to refine. What your initial concept was. So then now it's into the marketing. You're an engineer by background. Is there a team now forming behind you or you have a marketing executive somewhere in the off stage that's now going to move into the the venture?

Josh Brown: Yeah, well the next phase is probably going to be also some, raising some capital in this to get those full time people, because in our case the Kickstarter isn't enough to start hiring a whole team, but I do have a lot of contractors, a lot of coaches that help along the way to give advice and provide guidance on those things, but yeah, there's, there's a lot of, digital marketing and social media marketing that we're going to be doing.

Also establishing partnerships with pickleball facilities and influencers to bring brand awareness. And as we get closer to the fulfilling those orders from the Kickstarter in about June, our focus is then going to shift to retargeting the past visitors and leveraging those testimonials to drive more organic growth.

Jeanne Gray: If you're looking for future investors. You know, there, there are VCs or angels that specialize in certain areas. Is this a general consumer product play or it's a. An app play or a consumer electronic play what you know are or or is it all all of the above and others 

Josh Brown: Yeah, and others and the others would be b2b because selling directly to pickleball facilities, especially these franchises that are growing and there's 150 of the same pickleball facility franchise across the states and they have 5 000 courts and so that's it's also a b2b play.

So there's a subscription aspect with the You With the app and there's also the, the consumer goods play with selling the scoreboards. So definitely different verticals. 

Jeanne Gray: So you've done your financial projections. Cause that's what I'm hearing is that you sat down and you did do the research for the size of the addressable market and how many of these facilities and the growth of the industry.

So guess the growth of the industry is really encouraging because I guess we're only at the early stage of pickleball 

Josh Brown: Relatively. Yeah, I mean it started picking up during the pandemic Before that it was relatively Lesser known But probably about three, four years ago, it started taking off and really hasn't slowed down.

It's actually been speeding up. There's double digit growth each year. And now I heard the quote the, or the stat that I heard recently was that 20%, one in five adults have played pickleball in the last year. 

Jeanne Gray: All those tennis players, right? Actually, I'm not even going to go there because I am I've been a long time tennis player and my friends are all on the pickle court right now.

So, well, look it, it was great talking to you, Josh. I just like your product because of the timeliness of it and that you're, you're solving a pain point and people that I know I spoke to would appreciate anyone that would stop the squabbling that might go on on a court. Cause it went on with tennis court was, is it deuce or is it ad right?

And so I don't know what the fights are on pickleball, but I imagine Scorekeeping is, is a constant. Would you say that's true? 

Josh Brown: Absolutely. Yeah, it doesn't end actually. There's too many things to try and keep in your mind at the same time. 

Jeanne Gray: and it's a competitive sport now as well. So it is not just social.

Well, thank you for being guest on experienced voices. I've enjoyed our conversation. 

Josh Brown: I as well. Thank you so much for having me on Jeanne

Jeanne Gray: you have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit americanentrepreneurship. com forward slash podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.

I'm JeanneGray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series, Experienced Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

You have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit americanentrepreneurship. com forward slash podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.