Most founders build the software, then go find the market.
Some who actually win it do the opposite: they build the market first, then sell software into it.
Ron Shell spent years owning the demand.He built the professional pickleball league and had a close to hundred thousand players. Only then did he created a software and sell it back into the market he had spent three years making.
Cremorne Connect: Pickleball to Software: How to Create a Market, Then Sell Into It
📅 Wednesday, 23 September | 5:30PM – 8:00PM AEST
📍 Cremorne Digital Hub (80 Balmain St., Cremorne)
Join us for an evening with Ron on what it takes to earn the right to sell software into a market you developed.
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