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Is PaddleSmash the Next Pickleball?
Table of Contents
What better example of living the dream than turning a passion into a successful career? That’s what game enthusiasts Scott Brown and Tim Swindle are doing with PaddleSmash, a new outdoor game combining the best elements of pickleball and spikeball.
The game was invented by Joe Bingham, a Utah structural engineer. His family, consisting of seven kids, loved pickleball, but there wasn’t enough room in their backyard for a pickleball court. Bingham solved that problem by meshing the pickleball and spikeball concepts, and the result is PaddleSmash. Brown and Swindle licensed the game from Bingham and brought it to market.
From side hustle to main career
Brown’s professional game journey started when he landed at a venture capital firm in Chicago. Principals were given the opportunity to come up with concepts fitting their own personal interests. In 2008, he co-founded Marble the Brain Store, a brick-and-mortar retailer just off the Magnificent Mile, which focused on toys and games to boost brain health. It grew over the next decade to 40 locations across the country. In 2017, it was acquired by Spin Master, the world’s fourth-largest toy company.
Brown stayed on for three years as the head of Spin Master’s creative games division before feeling the itch to be independent again. Since then, he’s partnered with Swindle and the two have launched a few games together, most recently PaddleSmash. The two met when Brown’s store was one of the first to carry Swindle’s game, Utter Nonsense, funded by Kickstarter.
“What I’m constantly doing is looking for things that I’m wildly interested in and then hoping I can find a business to suit that interest,” he says.
Swindle worked in software but managed to turn his hobby side hustle in the game space into his main career. “I love bringing fun to the world,” he says.
The hardest part
Brown has a million game ideas. The hardest part is getting the idea into physical form in front of customers to see if they’ll part with their money. He points out that the development process has to be done in such a way that you don’t give up or get distracted.
The PaddleSmash prototype weighed 50 pounds. There was no way to comfortably carry it to the beach or a park. They had to make the prototype functional and retail-friendly. Doing so took about six months longer than anticipated.
Furthermore, PaddleSmash requires a court of sorts. That foldable court is a big piece of plastic that needs to balance well on a lawn or beach. It also needs to be lightweight enough to carry. Brown and Swindle wanted it to fold, too, so that all components were stored inside. Even after hiring an outside engineering firm, it took months before they could figure out a solution.
“We went to Home Depot and found a table that you can do construction projects on, and it was everything we were looking for,” says Brown. They tested for bounce and were ultimately able to tell factories to use this construction table as a template for the court. The design delay meant they ended up launching in the fall of 2022, rather than in the spring or summer, the ideal time for an outdoor game.
PaddleSmash influencers
In the journey they’ve had so far, Brown and Swindle are seeing their product’s alignment with pickleball really resonating with people who like and play the game. That’s where influencers come in.
Brown says if they were launching a new brand of tennis rackets, finding a partner in a professional tennis player as a startup is almost impossible, as they’re just too expensive to work with. But “professional pickleball players are still very approachable. They are looking for stuff like this,” he says.
“One of the reasons we’re really attracted to this space is that it is so new that there are unique opportunities in the pickleball world right now.”
PaddleSmash is currently available at select Scheels’ stores.