My friend and I pooled $10,000 to start an e-commerce company. After months of brainstorming products, we chose pickleball paddles.

Pickleball is the fastest-growing sport in the United States. 

When my friend and I committed to building our own e-commerce business, our first task was selecting a product to sell.

We knew we wanted to create something of our own (rather than use an arbitrage model and buy and resell an existing product) — and that was about it.

There were infinitely many directions we could pursue. We talked in circles for weeks, plagued by decision fatigue. Our working list included but was not limited to kitchen sponges, elbow braces, zip ties, wind-up toys, cookie cutters, and even seasonal-specific items such as holiday socks. And it felt like the blind leading the blind: My experience with e-commerce was secondhand, having reported on successful Amazon sellers. My business partner worked in film.

Rather than spend more time working through whether there was enough demand for elbow braces or too much competition in the cookie-cutter space, we decided to ask for help.

I reached out to Joe Reeves, who, in addition to building his own e-commerce empire, cofounded the consulting business 330 Trading to help people do exactly what we were hoping to do: make money selling things online.

He and his cofounder, Tyler Walter, agreed to meet. They assigned us homework ahead of the call: select a category we wanted to sell in and come up with a list of specific product ideas in that space. To get the ideas flowing, they encouraged us to think about our hobbies and how we generally spend our time. What do you know and like?

It was an easy question to answer; we both grew up surrounded by tennis and competed collegiately. Years after graduating, we still played recreationally and spent our weekends teaching. We dabbled in other racket sports, including pickleball, padel, and paddle tennis.

It wasn’t kitchen sponges or zip ties we should be producing; it was something racket-sport-related.

After pinpointing our category, the next step was listing specific product ideas. We came up with tennis-ball tubes, overgrips, lead tape, shock absorbers, pickleballs, and pickleball paddles and, under Reeves’ counsel, signed up for a software called Helium 10 to start researching our product ideas. It offers a lot of data, and Reeves recommended we start by paying attention to demand — whether people were actually buying the product — which can be identified by looking at the search volume.

We purchased Helium 10 Platinum ($79 a month when billed annually and $99 a month when billed monthly). Our $99-a-month subscription also granted us access to “Freedom Ticket,” an online course that consists of an extensive library of video content designed to help you build a successful Amazon, which Reeves suggested we take advantage of.

One of the first tools we started tinkering with was Xray. It allows you to see sales data that, in theory, can help you identify a profitable product niche.

Here’s the data we pulled on “tennis shock absorbers,” “tennis grip tape,” and “pickleball paddles.” I highlighted the search volume and the BSR, which stands for “best sellers rank” and indicates how well a product is selling on Amazon. The lower a product’s BSR, the higher its sales.

“Tennis shock absorbers”:

“Tennis grip tape”:

“Pickleball paddles”:

Pickleball paddles were the most intriguing, at least based on search volume and BSR, but with an average price of $63, we wondered whether they’d be too expensive to make on a $10,000 budget.

We sent our list of racket-sports products and accompanying Helium 10 data to Reeves and Walter ahead of our call, not entirely sure what to make of the numbers — and not entirely sure we were even using the software correctly.

When we met over Zoom, Reeves helped us nix a few products right off the bat. Tennis ball tubes, for example, had a low search volume, signifying low demand, and they were irregularly shaped, which means they’d likely be difficult and expensive to ship. He asked us, as tennis coaches, if we used tennis-ball tubes. The answer was no — another reason to pass.

We ultimately narrowed the list down to overgrips (a cloth-like tape that you wrap around the grip of a racket) and pickleball paddles. Grips were the cheaper (and, therefore, safer) option for first-time Amazon sellers, but you could feel the energy behind the paddle idea. It would be easier and more fun to market, there was competition but notable demand as the sport continued to grow in the US, and the margins seemed excellent based on back-of-the-napkin math.

The one catch was the cost. Reeves estimated that our first inventory order alone could wipe out our $10,000 budget.

He recommended we talk among ourselves and sleep on it, which we did, but the decision already felt made.

It was time to make a pickleball paddle.