Episode 1: Zero to One
From Zero to One: Month One of Building PCKLD
Considering we’ve both dropped out of University, this may be a bit of a challenge, but when did getting a degree ever help with writing a monthly blog.….right? At some point this may not make sense, it may not flow correctly, it may run in circles and I may have to get my mother to check the grammar, but you don’t go from Zero to One by caring about what other people think, you get there by trying, failing and then trying again to only fail once more, but lucky for us, there’s no fun in winning straight away. Which is obviously why we didn’t win a game in our first tournament last week….
The aim of this monthly blog is to provide a reflection of the month gone by. A scripture to look back on, once we reach One and a timeline for you to follow along and feel a part of the journey. We want this blog to be a direct insight into what it’s actually like starting a business from scratch - cold calling customers, setting up trusts, building a website, liaising with suppliers, designing merchandise and facing plenty of rejection.
It feels like we’ve been doing this for months, but we only started 31 days ago.
Thirty One Days.
From our end, it’s extremely hard to believe. From yours? Maybe not so much.
How It All Started
As does everything, it started with an idea. Daniel’s idea to be exact and Zak’s addiction to Pickleball that bought the spark to a flame. We both noticed that Pickleball was fresh on the coast. Maybe not fresh to the older generation, but definitely fresh to ours. We could never find anyone our age to play with (no offence to the boomers) and we knew that this was bound to change. For a while, Dan had wanted to start a Pickleball brand, selling products online for the new generation of players. The idea was there, but it was stuck at Zero, until I learnt about the current state of Pickleball Recycling.
From Zero to PCKLD
We cycled through the names.. SecondServe.. Reform.. Rebound.. Flux. Spinr… then pckld.
I didn’t even send the text in capitals.
The next day we locked in PCKLD and started planning the business structure. We had three sectors in our head. Recycling, Apparel and Events. We knew that Pickleballs in Australia weren’t currently being recycled and that we had the ability to change this. Within 5 days we had sourced collection bins, contacted local courts and dropped off our first bin to the Pickleball Palace on Wises Road, followed by another 6 drops, we now covered all of the most popular locations on the Sunshine Coast.
We expected the turnover rate to be about a month at the busiest venue, but we were pleasantly surprised when it was only two weeks.
We’re about half way through the month and we’ve covered 9 locations, established our logo, typography and colour palette. Our website was built and our presence was starting to be known.
The Recycling Reality
From the start we’ve known we’d need external help with recycling the pickleballs, due to plastic shredding machines being out of our budget. By this stage we’d collected 526 balls, so we knew we could collect them and now we just had to figure out the how. It always comes down to who you know, not what you know and thankfully for us we were connected via a friend with Plastic Free Noosa (PFN). PFN is a community driven plan to reduce single use plastics and work towards zero waste. We knew they’d have an industrial plastic shredder, so Zak got in contact and booked a zoom meeting.
The zoom went well. PFN understood our direction and was intrigued with what we are doing. One small problem. We needed to provide the specifics. PFN wanted to know the grade of plastic (specific recycling codes) and what materials the pickleballs were made out of. Easy fixes via a follow up email. The ball was now rolling with PFN and a potential partnership could be explored (to be continued).
End of Month One
It’s the end of the month. We’ve established our vision and have started to make an impact. But like anything, progress isn’t linear, we’re currently waiting on designers and suppliers for our first round of apparel and we’ve encountered another issue… the government……
Zak and Dan.