Spikeball

“Jeff Knurek, the original inventor of Spikeball, turns out he's now the cartoonist and co-creator behind Jumble, the word puzzle that's syndicated in hundreds of newspapers around the world.”

“So we had a million dollars with zero full-time employees in 2013, and that's when my wife and I agreed it was safe to quit the day job.”

“So nearly every customer that bought at spikeball.com would get a personal email from me. It was not automated.”

“We finished that year at, I believe, 10,882 dollars.”

“We kept growing, and then another one showed up, and then another one, and I think there's, like, over 40 now, or something like that.”

“It was the final segment of the season finale. So yeah, we had a massive party at our office, huge sales on spikeball.com that weekend and in the weeks to follow. But the real lift was we started getting tons of inbound requests from retailers, primarily like …”

“You need to give away a ton of your product for free. And if the product can't really travel on its own, it can't market itself, then you might not have that great of a product.”

“I believe Spikeball was launched in 1989, so I was 14 at the time.”

“And if I remember right, I think it was about 40,000, maybe 50,000 dollars for those first thousand sets.”

“So we wound up raising, I think, a little over a 100,000 dollars. So it was roughly 10, 15,000 dollars a head.”

“And, yeah, it was about a year later that when Dick's Boarding Goods actually reached out to us and said, hey, we'd love to carry your product.”

“As long as they're willing to play for five to 10 minutes, they'll get it. But if they give up before then, our chances of keeping them are pretty low.”

“So I came up with, I think it was like a three-year plan where if I hit certain sales numbers, I would earn stock from them. If I didn't hit the number, then I don't get anything, and some of the guys were cool with that. Some were not, but, you know, I spoke …”

“And when we talked about sort of what direction it would be or what do we want to do, his main interest lied in licensing. So I think he said something along the lines of, you know, Chris, I've got friends at Marvel Comics. Let's maybe explore like a Spider-Ma…”

“To this day, you know, we don't have a formal business plan”

“We wound up getting a front page story on the Wall Street Journal on that topic.”

“Yeah, I absolutely think we will be recognized by the Olympics. I think there will be professional round net players, and we will be considered a legitimate sport.”

“There never was a patent on the product, so the design itself is kind of open, and the trademark, which protects the name Spikeball, has been expired, like, 10 years or something like that, so.”

“So we got spikeball.com for a hundred dollars.”

“They ended up having a lot of success initially with church youth groups. Just, they had no idea. Like, church youth groups started to buy, and Amish communities randomly were just buying Spikeball, because it turns out that it's a game that was safe to be pla…”

“We weren't in any stores for our first five years. 100% spikeball.com.”

“And I also thought that, you know, when I launched, I was like, yeah, volleyball players are gonna love this game, and that was just what I thought. They wound up hating it but it was these groups that I never would have thought of in a million years that love…”

“The time where it makes the most sense to really consider it is if you have that existing demand. If you don't, then, man, it feels like a really heavy lift”