Pickleball to Software: How to Create a Market Then Sell Into It

​Most founders pick a market, build something better than what is already in it, and go and take share. It works. Most of the companies you admire did exactly that.

​But the build stopped being the hard part. A small team ships in weeks now, and so do the four people down the road working on the same idea. The scarce thing was never the software. It is the people who want it. So if anyone can build, what are you actually meant to build first?

​Either you own the demand, or you rent it from whoever does.

​Ron Shell spent three years owning it. He picked pickleball off a list of ten ideas at a point when around twenty thousand Australians played it. He built the professional league, bought the courts, signed the sponsors and helped take the sport to close to a hundred thousand players. Only then did he build software and sell it back into the market he had spent three years making.

​Join us for an evening where our very own Darren Huang, sits down with Ron for a conversation on what it takes to earn the right to sell software into a market you made yourself.

​Ron is the co-founder and CEO of the National Pickleball League, and the founder of LADER, tournament software built specifically for the sport his own league created. This is the working account of how that sequence actually happened, not a story about pickleball.

​We'll get into:

• ​What the filter was for picking pickleball off a list of ten ideas, in a market that did not exist yet

• ​Why creating share is a completely different job to taking it, and what that costs you in years

• ​Why LADER was built by people who had run tournaments themselves, and what that has to do with a sixty person dev team where almost nobody had ever placed a bet

• ​What is left to defend when anyone can clone your product in a weekend

​About Ron Shell:

​Ron Shell is the co-founder and CEO of the National Pickleball League, Australia's professional pickleball competition, and the founder of LADER, the tournament and league platform now used by clubs and organisers in Australia, Canada and the United States. Before pickleball he was the first employee at PointsBet, where he helped launch the company's United States operation and watched the business grow from five people to more than a thousand, finishing as SVP of Customer and Insights. He holds a Masters of Finance from the University of Melbourne. The through line is a habit of arriving early to markets nobody else has noticed, and then building the infrastructure everyone ends up needing.

​About the National Pickleball League:

​The National Pickleball League is Australia's professional pickleball competition, founded by Ron Shell and running eighteen teams across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland with six figure prize money and a national finals series. Alongside the professional league it runs social competitions, corporate days, school and university programs and introductory sessions, and it owns and operates its own venues rather than renting court time. It has partnered with Tennis Australia, carries national sponsors, and has built the participation base that LADER now serves.