Spikeball: Chris Ruder

When Chris Ruder set out to revive a ball-and-net game from his childhood, he was pretty sure he would fail. He wasn’t really into sports and had never run a business. But after 15 years, Spikeball has grown into a thriving brand with a global following. Spikeball is a two-on-two game where players hit a rubber ball onto a circular net. Invented in 1989, it never took off. But in 2003, when childhood friends dusted off a duct-taped set, Chris began daydreaming about bringing it back to life. For a few years, it was just a crazy idea, until Chris dug deeper and discovered it was never patented. Chris ran the business by himself for six years and discovered Spikeball was taking off with PE teachers and Christian youth groups. When he was offered a deal on Shark Tank, he turned it down because he didn’t want Spikeball to be marketed as a toy, and instead focused on growing it as a competitive sport. Now, the game is popular around the world and its international governing body has Olympic ambitions. This episode was produced by Chris Maccini, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Edited by Neva Grant, with research help from Chris Maccini. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:10Guy Raz?

  Hey, you know, we hear a lot of stories on How I Built This about overcoming self-doubt. I recently talked with Sigourney Weaver about this exact thing and why she was reluctant to pursue acting for so many years. I know, it's hard to believe that one of the most acclaimed actors of her generation almost didn't act. You should definitely check out my interview with Sigourney Weaver on my other podcast. It's called The Great Creators. Just search for The Great Creators with Guy Raz wherever you listen to podcasts. And now, on to today's show.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  At that time, I had no idea how much it was going to cost to manufacture. I had no idea how much to make a website. Back then, all websites were hand-coded, so they were really expensive to make. Packaging, marketing, et cetera.

• 5:59Guy Raz?

  What did you think you needed? How much money did you think you needed to raise?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  We actually didn't set a number. We kind of just said, invest whatever you're comfortable losing, because chances are very good that you're gonna lose it.

• 6:21Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:33Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a game with four players, one ball, and a circular net was almost forgotten, until Chris Ruder revived it and turned it into a thriving brand: Spikeball.

• 6:52Guy Raz?

  Sometimes products or ideas come out too early. General Motors built an electric car in 1996, but there wasn't a whole lot of interest, so they killed the program three years later. Today, GM is once again in the electric car business, but now frantically trying to catch up. In around 2000, Microsoft released a tablet computer. Bill Gates even said it would outsell personal computers within a few years. Except it didn't, and Microsoft shelved it, until many years later, after the iPad started selling like crazy. Anyway, today's story is also about an idea way ahead of its time. It's a game, actually.

• 7:35Guy Raz?

  You've probably seen people playing it on a beach or at a park. It's called Spikeball, and it looks like a cross between volleyball and four-square, but instead of hitting the ball over a net or bouncing it on the ground, you bounce it on what looks like a mini trampoline. And over the past few years, Spikeball has grown a lot. But the game actually dates back to the late 1980s. For a couple of years, you could buy Spikeball sets at places like Toys R' Us, but alas, it never took off and eventually was discontinued.

• 8:10Guy Raz?

  That is, until Chris Ruder and a few friends decided to revive it and try and turn it into a competitive sport. And to say that it was a grind, or at least initially a quixotic business idea, well, that would be an understatement. For starters, Chris had to contact the inventor of the original Spikeball and deal with the delicate matter of who actually had the rights to the game. Then, for six years, he ran the business all by himself while simultaneously holding down a full-time job to provide for his family. And at times, he struggled with sales. But he noticed an interesting trend among a few

• 8:50Guy Raz?

  particular groups of people that would actually help get Spikeball on a different trajectory. And one of those groups? The Amish. But we'll get there. When Chris was growing up about an hour south of Chicago, he wasn't that interested in sports. He actually dreamed about being a photojournalist, like for National Geographic or something. And in his early 20s, he moved to San Francisco to try to make it in the world of journalism. But instead, he found himself working in advertising sales in the midst of the dot-com explosion.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Without trying to overdo it, I think intoxicating is the word I'd use. I was there from 98 to 02, and the city was just exploding. The amount of money people were raising, the new businesses were starting. And another thing I liked about it, like nobody was really from there. Everybody was kind of in search of something better, myself included. And yeah, the whole city was just on fire back then.

• 9:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So, I mean, you're basically in San Francisco, surrounded by all these people working in this tech startup world. But you were in a different...

• 10:03Guy Raz?

  Environment, like a different community of people, right? I mean, because you were getting jobs in like enterprise sales. I think, and eventually, I think you went to go work for Monster.com, which is a big job site, right? And you did enterprise, also enterprise sales there.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I took that job, that was right after sort of the dot bomb implosion in '02 and moved to Cincinnati for that job.

• 10:29Guy Raz?

  So you leave San Francisco and you moved to Cincinnati. And did you have, I mean, this is like, you know, early 2000s, around 2002, 2003-ish. Did you have any ambitions at the time to start a business? Or were you thinking, yeah, you know, I've got a good job, I've got benefits, and, you know, I'll just kind of climb up the ladder as much as possible?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  I think I always wanted to. My dad was an entrepreneur, my grandfather was, both of my grandfathers were. My brother runs his own business. And I saw the freedom that they had. And I didn't have that at any of my jobs. And that really bothered me. And I don't know why, but it really bothered me when I'd have to ask for vacation days.

• 11:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  You know, if I'm doing, if you're doing your job well and everything, and, you know, you're going to make sure things are covered while you're out, you know, the default answer should be yes.

• 11:20Guy Raz?

  Or it should just be like, hey, tell me when you want to take vacation days.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. And so that never sat right with me. It was just one little thing. So yes, I absolutely wanted to run my own thing, but I didn't have an idea. I didn't know what it was. And I remember having this conversation with this guy in Cincinnati. I stumbled on some article about how broken windshields, I guess they take up a massive amount of space in landfills. And somebody had created this like huge piece of machinery to figure out how to recycle windshields. And I must have spent two hours on a call with this guy. Like, I read the article, looked him up, called him, and he was selling the machinery. And I was like, hmm, can you actually make money selling that, those raw materials?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  And I wasn't convinced I could, so I didn't move forward with it. But I remember getting really excited about that for maybe a few weeks, a month, but then, like a lot of other things, it just kind of fell by the wayside and inertia took over and I went back to my day job.

• 12:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, all right, so you're working in Monster. Meantime, there's a sort of a side story in your life, which is you, in 2003, you go on vacation to Kauai with some friends and family. And I guess this was ostensibly to propose to your now wife, right? Is that, is that what the trip was originally for?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we went to, we, meaning me, my brother, my now wife, childhood friends, Tim and Pat Kennedy.

• 12:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  And I knew I was going to propose. I knew we had this trip coming up and I was like, you know what? I think this would be a perfect place to do it. So my wife and I snuck away for the afternoon and landed at this like little waterfall and had a little lunch and then went swimming. And I dropped to a knee and the rest is history.

• 13:15Guy Raz?

  Wow. All right, so you engaged, you're on vacation, and these are like childhood friends who live in your block, right?

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:23Guy Raz?

  Pat and Tim Kennedy.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:25Guy Raz?

  And on this trip, they bring a game with them, which is, what was the game they brought?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  The game is Spikeball. They had purchased one years ago. So this was 2003. I believe Spikeball was launched in 1989. So I was 14 at the time. You know, I was kind of that annoying brother, so I wasn't really allowed to play with them, but I'd kind of watch from afar. And I'm like, yeah, that's, that's kind of cool. And didn't really play much until that trip in Hawaii. And, you know, they had this beat up set that was probably 10 plus years old, you know, had duct tape on it. It had a different ball, you know, not the same one. It was kind of falling apart, but it worked.

• 14:06Guy Raz?

  And I guess we should explain here how Spikeball works a little bit. I mean, because the rules are, I think, a little like volleyball, except the net is on the ground and it's, it's round. It's like a, like a, like a mini trampoline, sort of.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 14:19Guy Raz?

  And basically, it's two teams playing against each other, two on two, right? And so like volleyball, you can hit the ball up to your other teammates three times in the air, up to three times. But on the third hit, it has to be spiked at the net, right? And then the other team has to either spike it back on the net or hit it to another teammate. And when the other team misses it, you get a point. And And if you can't catch the ball, that's like traveling in basketball, right? You can't catch it.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  Exactly. You can play two on two. Rather than hitting a volleyball over the net with spike ball, you hit the ball onto the net. Three hits, essentially a bump set spike motion and yeah.

• 14:59Guy Raz?

  All right, so you guys are playing this game. You guys have fun with it and that's it. You go back to Cincinnati.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, so side note, we moved to Chicago in January of '03.

• 15:11Guy Raz?

  Right, okay. So you go back to Chicago after this trip to Hawaii and that's, that's it. That's the end of the story, really. But there was something about playing that game that stuck in your head. Tell me what, what it was.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, you know, sports has never really been my thing. It was my brother's thing. And, you know, when he and I were kids, we were not all that close. And I remember when we were playing spike ball and it was he and I on a team together. It felt great. And I was like, wow, this is, you know, I love the game. I love that it's bringing my brother and I closer together. I'm having a blast doing this. There's strangers walking by asking us about this game, so seemingly they're into it as well. And I think it was more of that social side, bringing people together side that I found so attractive. It wasn't necessarily, I want to be the best player. I want to absolutely win.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Like, of course, I want to, but that wasn't really my driver.

• 16:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  And we did start talking like, huh, I wonder if we could like bring this thing back to life. And, you know, we'd talk about it for four or five minutes, but that was about it. You know, really never did anything.

• 16:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I remember I had this dream in 1994 to bring Blow Pops, you know, Charms Blow Pops? To England, because I was studying abroad there and everyone loved them. And I really thought I could do this, but I realized I couldn't do it because you had to have a lot of money to do it. But, but, so people have these ideas. You're like, oh, wouldn't it be cool if?

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 16:46Guy Raz?

  Like, this is a conversation that's happening right now. Like, 100,000 people around the world are having this. Like, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? And like 99,999 of those conversations don't go anywhere, right?

• 16:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And yes, like, we would get together, you know, me, Matt, Tim, Pat, and other friends and would occasionally talk about Spikeball and, you know, somebody would casually mention like, "Yeah, it would be, you know, wouldn't it be cool if?" And, you know, that happened every once in a while, but nothing ever really took root. While I'm not certain, I do believe I remember the, my first couple of years at Monster were great. I loved it. But the last couple of years, culture went kind of toxic. Company got in some trouble with the SEC. I think maybe an exec or two went to jail. And it became a pretty toxic environment and kind of, I don't know if that was what wound up pushing me to say,

• 17:43Speaker 01

  "You know what? I'm actually gonna do some research and see if we can actually do this." I'd imagine if I were able to go back in time and interview myself, that probably was a factor. And, yeah, when I started researching, it wasn't like, "Oh, my God, this would be amazing. We can make so much money." But it was, "This would be a fun side project."

• 18:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And as you mentioned, Spikeball had been around for a while. Like, it had been around for about 15 years, I think, when you guys played it in Hawaii. So, I mean, when you really started to look into this, I would imagine that the first thing you would have done would be to go to Google and type in Spikeball, like, or owner, something like that. Is that how it started?

• 18:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, I looked it up and reached out to an attorney friend. And he looked it up and he's like, "Yeah, there never was a patent on the product, so the design itself is kind of open." And the trademark, which protects the name Spikeball, has been expired like 10 years or something like that, so...

• 18:43Guy Raz?

  Wait, hold on. Let me just clarify something. I think, I mean, this is a game that was actually introduced in 1989. And it was invented by this guy named Jeff Knurek. I hope I'm pronouncing that right.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:56Guy Raz?

  And he, I guess he was working for like some small company and they worked with Tomy, the Japanese toy company. It was a Japanese toy company. I remember Tomy when I was a kid. Tomy Toys. And watching, you know, G.I. Joe cartoons on Saturday, you always see Tomy Toys. And they actually put it out and marketed it as this, was a net with a ball and it was a game, right? And, but it went nowhere. Like, it was, that was it. And then they just stopped making it after, like, 1991.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think their main retailer was Toys R Us, if I remember right. And you need not great hand-eye coordination, but I'd say probably age 11 or 12 and up is probably what's appropriate. And there's not many teens or people in their early 20s, or at least there weren't, shopping at Toys R Us back then.

• 19:44Guy Raz?

  So there's no patent on this product. Just a trademark on the name that expired 10 years earlier, in 1995. And this is now 2005. Okay, so that's kind of interesting. So you're probably thinking, huh, okay. So what did you do next?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  I don't remember the timeframe, but through Googling and research, we did learn that Jeff had invented it.

• 20:09Guy Raz?

  And when you say "we," it was you and your brother and the Kennedy brothers?

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. And it's not like we were having formal meetings on this and saying, okay, guys, here's the plan. I think I said something along the lines of, guys, we've been talking about this for quite some time.

• 20:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  I'm going to reach out to an attorney and see what options we have, if any.

• 20:32Guy Raz?

  Right. And you located Jeff Kennurk? You found out where he lived?

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I think we found his email address somewhere.

• 20:41Guy Raz?

  And you reached out and you were like, hey, can we talk? And then what happened?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if I remember right, I think I sent the email saying, absolutely love the game. Me and my buddies do. We'd love to consider bringing it back to life. We'd love to chat. And I think his response was something along the lines of, hey, glad you love it. Got good news and bad news. Good news is, it's coming back. And it's most likely going to be in a bunch of stores next year.

• 21:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  But that said, bad news, Chris, is rights have been sold, so I guess you guys can't do it. But the attorney had told me, "Nobody owns anything, so you guys can do what you want." Per the attorney's advice, legally, we didn't need to reach out to Jeff. I felt he had invented it and I wanted to, like, "Yeah, maybe we can launch this thing together." So that's why I reached out and I wanted to do the right thing.

• 21:38Guy Raz?

  But the news you got was, "Hey, sorry, we're already moving on and working with somebody else."

• 21:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I didn't quite know what sort of the truth was or what was going on, but I think we maybe spoke on the phone once, maybe twice. We swapped emails a few more times over a few months. And I think he said, "Look, if we were to do something, there's some other guys that would need to be involved and these people would need to get, I don't know, like a royalty or something." But it was getting murkier and murkier and I was kind of like, "I don't understand a lot of what I'm hearing."

• 22:16Guy Raz?

  All right. So I want to pause here for a second and kind of drill down into this a bit more because Jeff Kerik, the guy who invented the game, we did reach out to him to find out his story. And what he told us was that the way it worked in the toy business was that trademarks and patents were expensive and most game designers and inventors didn't pursue them because they couldn't afford to do that. And what they would normally do is they'd find a manufacturer that would buy the rights to the game and then they would get a royalty agreement. And then the manufacturer would bear the expense of patenting or trademarking the game,

• 22:59Guy Raz?

  which clearly Tomy never did. Right? And so he says, in his view, even though it's perfectly legal, and this is going to be, I'm going to just say this caveat this year, it might be a little bit painful for you to hear it, but I just want to say what he said to us was that he still believes that it was unethical, that it's not the way things are done in the toy and game industry. And he may not be, I'm not saying he's right, but that's how he feels.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Especially back then, I did not know how the toy and game industry worked. And when I did reach out, I genuinely believed there was a decent chance we were going to launch this thing together. It's unfortunate that Jeff feels that way. I get it. I don't agree with it. And do believe that I did the right thing by reaching out. And he did email us saying, hey, see that you guys went ahead and launched? You seem to be taking the route that we probably should have, which is creating it as a legitimate sport and going after high school and college age, et cetera. And met him at a tournament a few years after that.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  From what I understand, he's still, he's running a tournament of his own and he's sponsoring some players today, so still trying to help grow the sport.

• 24:25Guy Raz?

  You know, I wonder if, I mean, to me, it seems like sometimes these kinds of tricky, uncomfortable situations are often resolved in a very simple way, which is just people just want to be acknowledged. And if you go to the Wikipedia entry, it says Jeff Knurik, he inspired the game.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And not that I do many podcasts or interviews, or if I'm talking to a college class or whatever, I almost open every single one with, I did not invent Spikeball.

• 25:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  I brought it back to life, and I'm crystal clear about that.

• 25:05Guy Raz?

  Okay, so now, once you knew that you could get the trademark, you could get this name, and you could manufacture this product, because there's no patent on it, how did you actually decide to pursue this? It was you, your brother Matt, and what, a couple other guys? Did you find people and say, hey, let's pool our money? How did you, what'd you do?

• 25:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. So before we pulled the money, once we knew we had a pretty strong chance at getting the trademark,

• 25:36Speaker 01

  I learned that somebody else owned the URL spikeball.com.

• 25:39Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  And I remember thinking, OK, if we can't get the URL, then we need to come up with an entirely different name because that is going to be absolutely critical. And I thought that the person that owned this, that owned the URL was one of those like domain companies that, you know, like kind of holds them hostage and you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the name. And so I spent a couple of months trying to come up with a better name and I came up with nothing. Eventually tracked down the owner of spikeball.com and, you know, did a, I think it's a who is search so you can see who owns what domains. And I called him, explained myself, said, you know, Chris Ruder, thinking about, you know, bringing Spikeball back to life, you know, I see you own spikeball.com. And I was kind of playing dumb. I was like, oh, do you like

• 26:20Speaker 01

  the game or whatever? And he's like, I didn't even know it was a game. I just thought it was a cool word. I thought my kids might want to make a website one day. And I'm like, oh, all right. Well, is there any chance you'd be interested in selling it? And he says, yeah, sure. How much you thinking? And I said, I don't know, a hundred bucks? He says, sure. So we got spikeball.com for a hundred dollars.

• 26:45Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 26:47Guy Raz?

  When we come back, how Chris builds a following for Spikeball, literally one person, one email at a time, until he discovers the power of PE teachers and Christian youth groups. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 27:13Guy Raz?

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• 27:55Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale and people bring taste, judgment and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities. It's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 28:40Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems and lets you ask complex questions in plain language like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 29:25Guy Raz?

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• 29:44Speaker 02

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  Download the PrizePicks app today and use code WONDERY. That's code WONDERY to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePicks, run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.

• 30:45Guy Raz?

  One more thing before we get back to the show. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's around 2007, and Chris has the trademark for Spikeball and the URL. But of course, in order to revive the game, he needs money. So to start fundraising, he partners with his brother Matt and his childhood friends, Pat and Tim Kennedy.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  They were in, and we did cast a bit of a wider net to other friends, et cetera. And vast majority, they were cool about it, but it was kind of a thanks, but no thanks.

• 31:33Guy Raz?

  What did you think you needed? How much money did you think you needed to raise?

• 31:37Speaker 01

  We actually didn't set a number. We kind of just said, invest whatever you're comfortable losing because chances are very good that you're gonna lose it. Now, we're gonna have fun doing this, but I don't recall, because at that time, I had no idea how much it was gonna cost to manufacture. I had no idea how much to make a website. Back then, all websites were hand-coded, so they were really expensive to make: packaging, marketing, et cetera. So, we wound up raising, I think, a little over $100,000. So, it was roughly $10,000, $15,000 ahead. And yeah, I remember

• 32:19Speaker 01

  we met at this bar called Casey's Tavern in South Loop in Chicago, and that was sort of our, quote, "first official gathering," and where everybody said, "Yes, I'm in or I'm out." And yeah, once we had that, then yeah, everybody kind of started doing some research to see, "Okay, how can we actually make this thing happen?"

• 32:41Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, this is 2007, and just kind of a gut check, I imagine that there were some people who might have been a little skeptical of this, who were like, "Chris, you know, you got a good job, and like, do you think this is really gonna work? And by the way, you've never run a business before. What do you know about starting a business?"

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I wouldn't blame them, right? Not only have I not run a business, not that into sports, I have a degree in photojournalism. I talked my way out of anything close to finance in college. So, just looking at it on paper, like, I should be the last one running this. So, those that said no, I do not blame them one bit. But I think those that said yes saw the passion that I had, and... I think they also thought it'd be a fun project. And like, you know what, maybe they weren't in love with their day jobs either. And like, huh, this'll be fun. Like, do it with some friends and let's, you know, roll the dice and see what happens.

• 33:45Guy Raz?

  And by the way, I think around this time, you get a new job working for, I think for Xbox, for Microsoft Xbox.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:53Guy Raz?

  And doing like biz dev kind of stuff, business development?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Advertising sales. So it's kind of a cool job, the product that there were advertisements that actually showed up inside the game.

• 34:03Guy Raz?

  Oh, OK, I got you. All right. So that's your job. And this is a new job that you got to focus on. And meantime, you've got this side thing. But really, did you think that the Spikeball thing, did you see it initially as a side hustle, just as a side fun project? Or did you have a bigger vision for it?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  No, absolutely side job. And I remember talking with my brother, I don't know if it was '08, '09, whatever, but I remember saying, if this thing is, you know, success to me, is if this thing one day could like pay for a family vacation for me, me and my family. You know, quitting my day job and going full time. You know, because by that time, I had been in, you know, the corporate world for, I don't know, seven, eight years or something, you know, making pretty good money, you know, benefits, all that. And I'm like, there's no way this little rinky-dink Spikeball thing could come close to that. My brother was like, yeah, wouldn't it be cool if like, maybe one day, like in 20 years, the company's big enough to maybe one of our kids could work there? Meaning like, there would be one full-time employee at the company, it would be one of our children.

• 35:08Guy Raz?

  All right. So you've got this new job at Microsoft Xbox and also kind of, you know, the side project. And with $100,000, roughly $100,000, where did you start? Like, who did you go to to manufacture the Spikeball sets?

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I remember talking to Tim Kennedy. And at the time, he worked at Ronald McDonald House, which is, you know, the nonprofit arm of McDonald's.

• 35:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  And Tim knew somebody that worked for the company that makes all those little plastic toys that go in Happy Meals.

• 35:42Guy Raz?

  Uh huh.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  You know, with McDonald's being a Chicago company, of course, nearly all of their suppliers have offices in the area as well. So we got a meeting with those guys and they wound up being our first manufacturer.

• 35:54Guy Raz?

  So you basically brought it to this manufacturer, their office in Chicago. And you're like, well, this is it. We want to make these. And they're like, yeah, we can do that.

• 36:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, we took it to them and we said, we've got some ideas on how we want to make it better, make it stronger, change the design, et cetera. But that was, that was the prototype or sort of the base. And they were nice. But you know, as you can imagine, a company like that is used to making quantities of, I would assume, 20, 30 million units of something. And I think our first order was 1,000 units.

• 36:24Guy Raz?

  And they agreed to make them for you?

• 36:27Speaker 01

  They did. And if I remember right, I think it was about $40,000, maybe $50,000 for those first 1,000 sets.

• 36:37Guy Raz?

  All right. So you get the first 1,000 prototypes made. And meantime, you're doing your day job. But the idea was, and this is 2007, 2008, maybe 2008 by the time you get them made. E-commerce is still not really, I mean, it's still a couple of years before it starts to take off. But the idea was to sell it through a website, spikeball.com. That was the idea?

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And I kind of had a feeling like, even if we wanted to get into stores, I just didn't think we would be able to. Like, it's a weird looking trampoline. It's kind of complicated to explain how you play. And, you know, I still had that sort of dot com buzz from San Francisco and kind of this, in general, I love challenging the status quo. And I feel like the normal way a company would launch would be, yeah, the first thing you do is you call Dick's Sporting Goods and you try to get in there. And I'm like, you know what? We're going to actually do our own thing. Let's do spikeball.com and see if we can do it our own way.

• 37:40Guy Raz?

  So the idea was, we're going to sell through a website?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 37:43Guy Raz?

  And, and the site goes live in June of 2008. The Spikeball sets are available. You've got 1,000 for sale. They're $50, $49.99. Meantime, tell me how, how the operation is working, right? Because it's you, you've got your day job, your partners have their day job. And how did you guys divide and conquer? Who did what?

• 38:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was never very clear in hindsight. So we did a conference call, I believe, every other week. And on that conference call, each person would sort of identify what work they were going to do during those next two weeks. And I remember at times it felt like my role would kind of be like, you know, just nagging, just like, hey, this work didn't get done. What's going on? And like, it got fairly frustrating. And I remember talking to my brother a month or two later, and he said something along the lines of, Chris, I think what we're learning is, most of us, I think, want to be silent partners. We want to be involved.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  We're pumped that we invested, but the day-to-day work isn't really of interest. So we came up with a plan that said, okay, guys, I'm essentially going to do all the work, but I need to somehow be compensated for that. But the company really doesn't have any money to pay me. So I came up with, I think it was like a three-year plan, where if I hit certain sales numbers, I would earn stock from them. If I didn't hit the number, then I don't get anything. And some of the guys were cool with that, some were not. But, you know, I spoke with a couple of them, and I'm like, guys, look, I'm not trying

• 39:32Speaker 01

  to be greedy here, but if I'm staying up till 2:00 in the morning, working, and you're asleep in bed, or going to a movie, or hanging out with friends, then there needs to be, we somehow need to reconcile that. And eventually, everybody was on board, and I thankfully hit all three years of the sales numbers, and it wound up working out for everybody.

• 39:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So the site goes live, June 2008, spikeball.com. And, you know, you're not, I mean, it's just you and these guys, like your buddies in Chicago. It's not like you've got a big marketing budget. How did you even, who was going to find out about this? How were you going to even get any of these sold? What did you do to create awareness?

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Grassroots marketing is what it's officially called, but in our world, what that meant was going down to North Avenue Beach in Chicago. And yeah, we had like a Thursday night league that we'd play. So I like just started emailing a bunch of friends that lived in the area. And yeah, like and anytime I'd see somebody like stop their bike or stop running and just kind of look at us, I'd like walk up to them, introduce myself. Oh, I'm Chris Ruder, just started this company and we got a league here. If I can get your email address, you know, I'd love to add you to the newsletter. And I literally had a clipboard and a pencil. And that's how our email lists began. Other times I'd, you know, see people playing volleyball

• 41:02Speaker 01

  and I'd walk up to them with, with this weird trampoline looking thing and ask people if they wanted to play. And yeah.

• 41:10Guy Raz?

  Did they, did they catch on? Were they like, oh, this is awesome. Or were they like, oh, yeah. You know, not so much.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Walking up to them, I thought, I'm like, you know, because the rules of the games are nearly identical. So walking up to these players, I was pretty confident they're going to love it. And they played. And like anybody that plays those first five to 10 minutes, you, it's kind of awkward. You don't know how far the ball is going to go. You don't know if you should have a flat hand or kind of cup it a little bit. And, you know, these were also two on two volleyball players. So you know, you've got to be a pretty good athlete to play two on two. So they were used to being at the top of their game. They were used to looking pretty good when they play their sport. And they looked like absolute fools when they were using a spike ball.

• 41:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Cause it's, it's not a game that you can necessarily catch right away. Right? It takes a couple of tries.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Right. But once you have that first rally or that first spike, you're hooked. And that's where, you know, you can literally see the light bulb go off and that person like smiles a little bit more. Maybe they start talking some trash to their friends. But as long as they're willing to play for five to 10 minutes, they'll get it. But if they give up before then, our chances of keeping them are pretty low.

• 42:27Guy Raz?

  All right. So you, you launch and, and how were sales in that first, this first few weeks?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  If I remember right, in the month of June, we did about $4,000.

• 42:42Guy Raz?

  All right, so, you know, not bad.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought it was pretty good. And then I think in July, I think we did like $700. And I was like, oh, my God, what's happening?

• 42:53Guy Raz?

  Right, because, because most of those sales in the first month were probably people who knew you.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I consider nearly all of those pity sales, you know, people that didn't necessarily want the product. They're like, oh, Chris and these guys are starting this new company. We'll, we'll, we'll support them.

• 43:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  And, you know, I see all the orders come in and I knew nearly every single name in that month of June.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  But we finished that year at, I believe, $10,882.

• 43:19Guy Raz?

  $10,882, so that's, you're selling, what, about over 200 that year? And that means you're left with a little, a little less than 800 to go in your inventory.

• 43:35Guy Raz?

  And, but, but, but you had a day job. I mean, you were working for Microsoft. So I have to assume you weren't super stressed out about that.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and actually, I didn't know if $10,882 was good or bad. It was $10,882 more than we had the year prior, right? Because we hadn't even launched, but I was like-

• 43:54Guy Raz?

  But that wasn't even going to cover your costs, I mean-

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Right. But again, if the lens I'm looking at this through is it's a fun side job? And, okay, if we did 10,000 this year, if we can do, I don't know, 15,000 next year, that'd be amazing.

• 44:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  And so, and yes, even if sales went to zero, I still got the day job.

• 44:16Guy Raz?

  So, really, what, what was the plan? I mean, you do a little over 10,000 in year one. And then I think, year two, you did a little better, 18,000.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 44:29Guy Raz?

  But what were you relying on? I mean, how were people going to find out about it? I mean, you had your launch party, you had your Thursday night Spikeball meetups in Chicago. But aside from that, what were you doing to create awareness? What, what resources did you even have to do that?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  I had been gathering the email addresses, so I do like an email newsletter. I don't remember if it was once a week or two a week or something like that.

• 44:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  That was part of it. It's interesting to hear you say, what was the plan? Like, I remember Googling how to write a business plan. And I found a format, and it was like, I don't know, a 20-page document or something, and you could just basically start filling in the blanks.

• 45:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  And I think I made it to page three before I gave up. And I remember thinking, like, am I really going to get value from this? Oh, I should do it because business plans, that's what like, real businesses do. And I hope Spikeball one day would become that. But, you know, I was almost doing it almost as if I feel like obligated, like that's what you're supposed to do.

• 45:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Not because I was going to really get value from it. And I think, yeah, by the time I got to page three, I'm like, no, I actually need to work on a Facebook post, or an email newsletter, or trying to find some content, rather than, you know, I'll get back to this document. And I never did. To this day, you know, we don't have a formal business plan, but, um, yeah.

• 45:57Guy Raz?

  But even with the, I mean, your newsletter was going to people who'd already bought one. So how did new orders come in? What do you know about where people were finding out about it from?

• 46:07Speaker 01

  So nearly every customer that bought at spikeball.com would get a personal email from me. It was not automated.

• 46:15Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  But let's say it was somebody that lived in San Francisco, a guy named Mike.

• 46:21Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  And the order came through. I would send Mike an email saying, hey, Mike, thanks for the order. I'm actually going to head to the post office tonight and drop your box off, so it should arrive there, I don't know, Thursday. See you live in San Francisco. I used to live there. What an absolutely beautiful city. If you don't mind me asking, how did you hear about Spikeball?

• 46:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  That was the general format. And I wanted people to know that there's an actual human behind this business. And it wasn't this just kind of nameless, faceless thing. I think people, when they got that email, they were kind of confused. Like, wait, the CEO is emailing me saying that he's going to personally drive this box to the post office? Like, what is going on here? But I think a lot of people were intrigued by it.

• 47:04Guy Raz?

  So I'm curious about one order that you received, I think fairly early into this, you know, maybe two years in. And it was from somebody just outside of Nashville.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was Eve. And she works at Young Life.

• 47:21Guy Raz?

  Which is, I think, one of the largest Christian youth groups in the US, maybe in the world.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's massive. And I'd never heard of it. But yeah, I asked her the question, how'd you hear about it? And she said something along the lines of, oh, yeah, I work with Young Life and it's becoming very popular with our kids. And so I Googled Young Life. And yeah, like, I think there's like literally millions of high school kids that are a part of this all over the world. She explained to me that, I don't know if it's every week or every couple of weeks, the kids get together at somebody's house. So there may be like 50 kids in somebody's living room. And I believe it's like a two hour meeting. The first hour, I believe they're talking about their faith. And then the second hour is some sort of group activity.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  And the preferred activity, at least in suburban Nashville, was Spikeball.

• 48:14Guy Raz?

  Once you start to kind of hear about that, because that's, I mean, you're talking about Christian youth group. You're potentially able to expose this product to hundreds of thousands, millions of kids. So, once you found out about this, did you immediately think, okay, this is a huge opportunity? Or not quite yet?

• 48:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I thought I was on to something and I, you know, back then I was also reading a lot of Seth Godin books and I remember him talking about how you need to give away a ton of your product for free.

• 48:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  And if the product can't really travel on its own, it can't market itself, then you might not have that great of a product. So as I'm talking with Eve, I was like, oh, do you have any other Young Life friends that you think may be into some, some free sets? And she'd give me some names and I'd ship them. And I then stumbled on, went to the Young Life website and saw that there was a directory of like, I think they call them Young Life leaders, like a global directory open to the public.

• 49:15Guy Raz?

  And, and when you would send these out to some of these folks around Nashville and some of these Christian youth leaders, did that, did you start to see an impact? Like, would you see sales spike from Nashville on your, on your website or the Nashville area?

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'd see that. And then, yeah, as I, you know, again, it was only available on spikeball.com. So I'd see the emails come in and I'd start seeing more email addresses that ended with at Young Life. And I was like, okay, this is starting to, the fire is growing.

• 49:48Guy Raz?

  You also started to hear from ultimate frisbee players, which is interesting because that's also kind of a niche game, right? There is a group of people who play ultimate frisbee.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yep. And they would call it ultimate. I learned that. I used to think it was called ultimate frisbee, but they corrected me. And I think they were attracted to the sort of odd slash alternative slash niche nature of spikeball. And, um, yeah.

• 50:18Guy Raz?

  And, uh, and, and then PE teachers too, which, which makes sense to me because, you know, you've got mixed gender groups and different levels of athleticism, but this was a game that you could basically put a bunch of kids in. And volleyball's can be hard, especially for short kids. I remember being, when I was, when I was little, I was short. But you could get, you know, boys and girls around the net and yeah, that makes, and so you started to hear from PE teachers.

• 50:44Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah, they'd tell us like, you know, we're always looking for cool, new, innovative games. One thing we did hear from them, which I loved, they're like, you know, of a group of, let's say, a class of 25 kids, there's usually three to four that are pretty difficult to engage. You know, they may not want to participate and do what everybody else is doing. But when we bring out the Spikeball nets, those are the kids that are most wanting to engage and they're most into it. So that was one draw of it. We've heard from, you know, teachers that have, you know, students in wheelchairs and stuff. And I've seen countless videos of four kids in wheelchairs playing and they absolutely love it.

• 51:26Guy Raz?

  There's one, one story I read about another, because you had, I mean, initially, the sub, kind of subcultures were like PE teachers and ultimate players and Christian youth groups, but apparently also like Amish and Mennonite communities. Did you know about this? That it was like, super popular in, among Mennonites and the Amish?

• 51:48Speaker 01

  I did not initially. I knew it was very popular in central Pennsylvania, especially Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And we got an email from a reporter at the Wall Street Journal saying, Chris, I'd love to interview you about the Amish and Mennonite influence or participation and Spikeball. And I was like, holy smokes. You know, what a dream to get a note like that from the Wall Street Journal. But not in a million years did I think that would be the topic.

• 52:22Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  And I had seen some pictures on social media before of people in what I would consider traditional Amish clothing or Mennonite clothing, playing. And yeah, we wound up getting a front page story on the Wall Street Journal on that topic.

• 52:41Guy Raz?

  Amazing. I mean, you had, you know, I think year three, you're doing about $45,000 in revenue for that whole year, which is obviously promising, still. You know, a small, not a whole lot of money, but was that also financing the, I mean, how are you manufacturing more product with such little revenue coming in?

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I believe the initial raise we did to start the company was maybe 100, right around 100,000. And then I think it was in year three, I think we raised another 20,000 from the same guys. And that is what got us through.

• 53:23Guy Raz?

  You weren't making a salary at all?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was getting literally zero. And we were spending next to nothing on advertising.

• 53:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  So yeah, manufacturing the sets was by far the biggest expense we had.

• 53:37Guy Raz?

  Right. All right, so was it still manageable? I mean, because it was still just you? You didn't have anybody helping you out?

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Still just me. And I forget what year that we kind of outgrew my basement, but got a larger self-storage unit in my hometown in Kankakee, about an hour away. So whenever my basement would start running low on inventory, I'd drive down there, bring those back to my house in Chicago, put them in the basement. That inventory may last a couple of weeks. And then, you know, depending on the time of year,

• 54:15Speaker 01

  go back to Kankakee, reload the car, et cetera. And yeah.

• 54:20Guy Raz?

  So I think it's around 2013, like five or six years after you launch the business, that you hit a big milestone, a million dollars in revenue. And you, at this point, you still had your day job. I guess you'd moved on from Microsoft. At this point, I think you were working for Live Nation.

• 54:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 54:39Guy Raz?

  But anyway, I mean, at this point, I guess you decide you can quit, right? You can quit your day job to focus on Spikeball for like full time, right?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we had a million dollars with zero full-time employees in 2013. And that's when my wife and I agreed it was safe to quit the day job.

• 54:57Guy Raz?

  And maybe hire somebody to help.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. That's when Scott Palmer, our current COO, joined.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  And yeah, it was about a year later that when Dick's Sporting Goods actually reached out to us and said, hey, we'd love to carry your product.

• 55:13Guy Raz?

  They reached out to you?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:16Guy Raz?

  How did they find out about you?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  I was floored. I was like, wait, what?

• 55:21Speaker 01

  I'm not sure how. You know, people were playing in very high, visible areas. So Harvard was one of the first colleges to really take off with this. And they're playing in Harvard Yard where, you know, tons of tourists, international tourists, um, Sheep's Meadow and Central Park, tons of people playing. So I would imagine some employee at Dick's kind of stumbled on it and was like, huh, this is kind of cool. Let's take a peek.

• 55:47Guy Raz?

  And when they called you, did they say, we're going to put you in every Dick's store? And or were they going to start at, you know, just a couple of locations at the beginning?

• 55:57Speaker 01

  They emailed us. And when I saw it, I was like shocked. I was like, wow, like, I thought if we were ever to go into Dick's Sporting Goods, we'd have to call them and beg and plead.

• 56:06Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  But I remember my initial response was, I didn't say this to them, but I remember thinking like, I'm not sure I really want to go into Dick's Sporting Goods because, you know, that's, that's a big box store and we're Spikeball. We're this like cool cult underground brand where, you know, we're kind of too cool for that sort of thing. And I remember talking to a friend of mine and I said this to him and he kind of smirked and I forget exactly what he said, but he essentially said, Chris, get over yourself. This is Dick's Sporting Goods. Like, are you kidding me? You know, that's exactly what I needed to hear. So, um, Dick's did want to go in all stores. I was nervous because I was like, wait, if we go into all stores and we fail,

• 56:53Speaker 01

  they're not going to give us a second shot. So I said, all right, how about this, guys? Let's start with maybe 25 or 50 stores. And if we do well, maybe we add another 100 or 200, but we'll eventually get to all stores. But the risk to go in all of them on day one, that's just too much for me. And they said, yeah, we'll go whatever speed you want to, Chris. So that's how we got in.

• 57:20Guy Raz?

  So, once you got into Dick's, I mean, that doesn't necessarily guarantee success, right? I mean, there are thousands of products in a sporting goods store like that. You still, you know, people still have to notice it.

• 57:37Guy Raz?

  Well, did that, did that change the equation for you guys quickly? Did it make a difference?

• 57:42Speaker 01

  It did. I remember, I think the product had been on the store shelf for literally four or five days or something like that. And Dick's reached out and said, guys, sales data's off the charts. We're ready to go all in when you are, but we'll, we'll go at whatever pace you want. So they, you know, the first couple of days were incredible. And then we eventually added, I think, maybe another 50 and then 100. And I think they have north of 700 stores now or 800, something like that. And the tricky part, though, was wildly different cash cycle when selling to Dick's Sporting Goods than selling on spikeball.com.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  You know, when you sell on spikeball.com, you literally get that money in your bank 24 to 48 hours after the person buys it.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  When you're dealing with a retailer, especially the larger ones, you don't get paid sometimes two, three months after you ship it, or sometimes after when they receive it.

• 58:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  And I almost got in some trouble in the early days not recognizing that. I was a member of this group called the Hunto Institute, who's like an entrepreneurial group. And we all had to show up with our finances, balance sheet, P and L, et cetera, cash flow forecasts. And I remember showing it to the instructor and he said, Chris, you realize you're going to go out of business and run out of cash here in a couple of months.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  And I was like, you're crazy. We're growing like crazy. We just got to exporting goods. Like, what are you talking about? And he said, Chris, sometimes companies die from growing too fast. You know, I think the line is you die from indigestion, not necessarily starvation. And what he showed me in very clear terms was, yeah, Chris, you're shifting from this e-commerce business where you get your money in one to two days to a wholesale one where you're going to have to wait a couple of months and you're going to need to figure out how to do that transition. It terrified me.

• 59:50Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, why Chris walks away from a half million dollar deal he's offered on Shark Tank, and why he decides to embrace the idea that Spike Ball needs a new name. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

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• 1:00:48Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. So it's around 2013 and Chris manages to avert a big potential cash flow problem by taking out a line of credit at the bank. Meanwhile, around the same time, he decides he could raise even more money by applying to be on Shark Tank.

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  So yeah, the way it works is you, of course, fill out an application like a paper application, but then they want you to send in a video and it's super low budget, just a selfie video of you telling your story. And you send in version one and then the producers give you some tips and they say, okay, like, why don't you tighten this up or tell us more about this, or maybe go outside where you've got better lighting. And I felt like I went through maybe three or four versions of each video becoming better and better. And yeah, eventually made it to the point where they said, all right, Chris, here's the dates we're going to film, so come on out.

• 1:01:45Guy Raz?

  So, all right, I've heard we've had some of the Sharks on the show as guests and it's interesting because in every case, they're very nice. Mark Cuban's been on the show a few times and he's really nice. And on the show, he can be a real jerk, too. And what I've realized is that they are acting, they are, they are, they're sort of, you know, caricatures of themselves in some way. And part of that is because that gives them more airtime. Like if there's a zinger, like a one liner, they get more airtime.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:20Guy Raz?

  And I've seen your appearance on Shark Tank. And was your experience actually in the studio similar to what viewers ultimately saw when it was cut down and edited?

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Sharks were all super nice. And I do think when, whether it's Mark Cuban or the other Sharks, I think if you see them taking some jabs at the entrepreneur, I think it's usually because the entrepreneur didn't come prepared. Or one thing that I also have noticed when watching the show is if they get a feeling that the person is there just to get exposure and they don't actually want to get a deal, they really don't like that.

• 1:02:57Guy Raz?

  And you wanted a deal. You were really looking for a deal.

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:03:01Guy Raz?

  And you did get an offer from Damon John for half a million dollars for 20% of the company, which you agreed to.

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:03:08Guy Raz?

  But the deal actually fell through because they need to actually negotiate it after off air. What happened? Why didn't it go through?

• 1:03:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we filmed in, I think it was September of 2014. And I think I spoke with him maybe like a month or two after we filmed. That was the first time I spoke with him since filming. And he was nice. He said, "Look, Chris, we can do the deal at what we agreed to on the show, or we can throw that deal out, and if you want to do something different, I'm open to that." And when we talked about sort of what direction it would be, or what do we want to do, his main interest lied in licensing. So I think he said something along the lines of, "You know, Chris, I've got friends at Marvel Comics. Let's maybe explore like a Spider-Man branded set," or something along those lines.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  And while that sounds kind of cool, it kind of felt like we're treating it like it was a toy. And you know, I consider ourselves like a sporting goods business. I want this to become a legitimate sport. And that didn't quite align with how I wanted to take the business. And when I expressed some discomfort with that, he said, "Okay, how about we license it?" You know, he's like, "I've got some friends at the NHL. Let's make some NHL team sets." And I was like, "Licensing in general, at least at this stage for our business, doesn't feel right. I want to build our own brand."

• 1:04:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, we never officially called the deal off, but as some relationships go, you just kind of stop calling each other.

• 1:04:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  And that's kind of how it went.

• 1:04:42Guy Raz?

  All right, that's filmed in the fall of 2014, and it's aired in May of 2015. What did that do to sales? Did it have, I have to assume it had a significant impact, because millions of people are going to watch that episode.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was massive. It was the final segment of the season finale. So yeah, we had a massive party at our office. Huge sales on Spikeball.com that weekend and in the weeks to follow. But the real lift was we started getting tons of inbound requests from retailers, primarily like smaller mom and pop sporting goods stores, toy stores, et cetera. And yeah, the thing I didn't plan for or think about was reruns. So we got that initial pop, which was amazing. And also, it was a big pop, but a lot of people also DVR'd it. So they'd watch it a few weeks later. And reruns are still running to this day. So it's this gift that just keeps giving.

• 1:05:41Guy Raz?

  All right, now you've been on national TV. And by the way, I mean, Spikeball is... So we're talking about this game called Spikeball, or this... But Spikeball is a brand, and it's very intentionally a brand because you made a conscious decision to decouple Spikeball from the game and to encourage people to use the name Roundnet. Can you explain the reasoning behind that?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So Spikeball is a company that makes equipment for the sport of Roundnet. And I got to know a woman named Mary Horwath. She's the former chief marketing officer of Rollerblade. And she was there back in the 90s when it absolutely exploded.

• 1:06:28Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  And back then, people were using the name Rollerblade. A lot of people were using it in a generic fashion. "Let's go play Rollerblade hockey. Let's go rollerblading," et cetera. And she realized that if people kept using it that way, that they could potentially lose their trademark and Rollerblade would become a generic term. So she is the one that coined the phrase or the term inline skates. So that's why at the X Games, there is no competition, no Rollerblade competition. There's an inline skating competition. And she saw how we were using the name Spikeball as the name of the sport, and in, you know, sometimes in a generic fashion. And she and some other folks I spoke with said, "Yeah, you need a name for the actual

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  sport. Similar to baseball, basketball, football. You know, those are all generic terms that nobody owns the rights to." And I remember thinking like, "Okay, what makes our product unique?" Well, the biggest thing, I believe, is it's a round net. Like, I can't think of a single other sport that has a round net in it. It's a super boring word when you think about it, round net. But if you take away everything you know about the name basketball, or football, or baseball, those are all pretty boring names as well. But what you know about the sport, all the brands, the athletes, et cetera, that's why you get excited when you hear those names.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  And, you know, when I did come up with the word Roundnet, part of me, I'd say 10% of me was like, "Don't do it." Because I, of course, want the whole world saying the word Spikeball. But 90% of me was like, look, if you are that controlling, this thing will probably never get, the sport definitely will not get to the size that I think it can be.

• 1:08:19Guy Raz?

  And so you basically decided to create this like a governing body for a sport called RoundNet?

• 1:08:28Speaker 01

  I came up with the name RoundNet, but as tournaments started becoming more and more of a thing, different leaders within the community started speaking up saying, hey, I like this rule or I don't like that one. And yeah, it sort of emerged that governing bodies started coming around and it's pretty well-developed right now. You know, there's the International RoundNet Federation, that's sort of the global governing body. And then I think it's 37 countries also have governing bodies and they all report up and into the I R F.

• 1:09:02Guy Raz?

  We've seen this with pickleball. I mean, pickleball's been around since I think the 60s, but now it just exploded in the last like five years. It's absolutely everywhere and I wouldn't be surprised if it was an Olympic sport in 10 years. But tell me about your ambitions with RoundNet. What do you imagine RoundNet to be in like 20 years from now? An Olympic sport? I mean, professional leagues? Tell me, what do you think?

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I absolutely think we will be recognized by the Olympics. I think there will be professional RoundNet players and we will be considered a legitimate sport. The one thing that is a bit unique about us is that this is all being driven by the players, by the community. So, you know, I didn't sit in a conference room with some other Spikeball employees and say, huh, we should start doing tournaments. Groups of friends were getting together with like a clipboard and drawing up some brackets and the competitive juices were flowing.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Same with the Olympic recognition, the I R F formed and their tagline is paving the pathway to the Olympics. They are the ones studying what is needed, what's required. And I think you need, I don't know, 60 or 70 countries to have governing bodies. We've already got 37. That's a pretty darn good start.

• 1:10:19Guy Raz?

  And, and do you go to, have you, are you planning on going to any of these international tournaments or competitions?

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was at first ever world championship in Belgium last fall.

• 1:10:32Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  And I was just having this like out of body experience, like I can't believe I'm standing in a field in Belgium, watching a group of Japanese people play a group of Mexican people round net. You know, nothing more gratifying than to see that this is what millions of people are choosing to do.

• 1:10:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So now you've created this name Roundnet and there are tournaments around the world. And let me ask you about the marketplace for Roundnet, because if you go to Amazon and you type in Spikeball, understandably, there's going to be a bunch of competitors and they look pretty similar, you know, and, and they're, some of them are, you know, significantly less expensive, but that's, they're allowed to do that, right? This is not a patented product. Anybody can make it.

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, we do have, we've got some patents that have been filed for, some that have been accepted, but yeah, the, the general concept, yeah, is not protected. And I remember when, I think the first one showed up in 2014 or 15.

• 1:11:37Guy Raz?

  Who was that? Who did it?

• 1:11:39Speaker 01

  Franklin Sports, I believe it was Spiderball.

• 1:11:43Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow. That's a big company. And it was exactly like what you guys were doing.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Lower end, you know, the same shape in general, same concept.

• 1:11:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 01

  And I was at the toy fair in New York when I first saw it. So I was absolutely terrified. I'm like, there's absolutely no way we can compete.

• 1:12:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  I was like, I can't, I've got three kids at home. My 100% of my income now is from Spikeball and I cannot believe I just quit a cushy corporate job. I'm toast.

• 1:12:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  And then a year or so went by and didn't really feel anything. We kept growing and then another one showed up and then another one and. I think there's like over 40 now, or something like that.

• 1:12:29Guy Raz?

  Right. But when you go to like the USA Roundnet website, or the International Roundnet website, it's fairly clear, everybody's playing on Spikeball net. So I mean, you have managed to position this strongly, but essentially, at these international Roundnet tournaments, Spikeball tends to be the main sponsor.

• 1:12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And even if we're not the sponsor, they are choosing our product.

• 1:12:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah. The last numbers I saw were from 2021, where you report about over $20 million in revenue, and probably by now, higher than that. But I want to ask you about, I mean, the business is still growing. Obviously, you've had an impact. I mean, you see Spikeball, I see them every time I go to a beach or a park, everywhere. But I have to imagine that from a business perspective, you have to think about diversification strategy, right? Because the tournaments are definitely going to promote the sport, and more people will buy the product. But generally, people are going to buy the Spikeball set once,

• 1:13:38Guy Raz?

  twice, and that's it, right? And so, tell me about, because I know you guys acquired this software company called Fuego, back in 2021. And I have to imagine that that's part of your strategy to grow. Tell me about what that does and how that will grow the business.

• 1:13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm very, very excited about Fuego. Fuego is a platform that makes running tournaments much, much easier. So, created for Roundnet, and this gentleman, Alex Tuzel, he was running Roundnet tournaments. And I think he, like most others, I think it was like a Google Doc, or something that they were using to run the event. And it was very clunky. So, he designed it, and started using it. And then other tournament directors started asking him about it. And he's like, "Yeah, you can use it. Go ahead." And everybody fell in love with it. And we became friends with Alex and said, hey, Alex, would you be up for selling your

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  business? Like, we'll buy it and you join us as a full-time employee, but you keep doing what you've been doing. You'll just have some more resources. And the exciting part we've been seeing the last few months is there's fairly significant interest from the pickleball world.

• 1:14:53Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:14:54Speaker 01

  We are hearing from pickleball tournament directors saying, this is a heck of a lot better than what we've got, and it makes life a lot easier. And yeah, I see tremendous potential there. And we've seen people using it for like, board game tournaments, volleyball tournaments, lacrosse tournaments. Like, it's so very excited about its potential, and it's still very, very early.

• 1:15:16Guy Raz?

  So how, I mean, how much in terms of like, looking at the future of the business, what percentage of the business do you hope Fuego to be in 10 years from now versus the product line?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  I think it can become a significant profit driver. If you think of consumer products where you're making a physical product, margins aren't that great, right? You have to make a thing.

• 1:15:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 01

  You have to ship it, and there's all sorts of stuff involved.

• 1:15:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  If you think of software businesses, you make the thing once, and if a million people use it, you don't have to make it a million more times.

• 1:15:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  So, yeah, I'd love to see it. And I don't think it'll be able to be, you know, with Round Knott, the sport being the size it is today, it's not going to be a major moneymaker. So in order for Fuego to become a significant driver to our bottom line, it needs to become a player in some other sports. And, you know, if it's pickleball, it happens to say, yeah, we like this, then, okay, we're going to start working on some features. So if you like it today, you're going to love it tomorrow.

• 1:16:20Guy Raz?

  When you, I mean, you know, when you think about the journey you took, and here you are, and you've got, you know, a great, sustainable business, and it's growing, you know, how much of where you are, do you think has to do with the work you put in, and the time and the effort? And how much do you think has to do with just luck and the serendipity of this game catching on?

• 1:16:40Speaker 01

  I think I'd probably put Serendipity at number one. You know, had the Kennedys never purchased that set years ago, I never would have seen it.

• 1:16:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Luck is right up there as well. And I think another one is, you know, actually took that first step. So I'm grateful that I did take that first step and had a group of friends and family that took that step with me and completely recognized that I'm very privileged in that, you know, had friends and family that were able to write sizable checks. And not everybody has that.

• 1:17:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah. I have to say, you're, you're pretty good at the game now.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  I used to be. Now, if I stumble on some rookies on the beach, like maybe they're 22 years old and, you know, in general, way better athletes than me, but if this is the first time they've been playing, yes, I will beat them. But if I go to a tournament, I get absolutely smoked.

• 1:17:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Speaker 01

  It's depressing.

• 1:17:42Guy Raz?

  That's Chris Ruder of Spikeball. By the way, Jeff Knurek, the original inventor of Spikeball, turns out he's now the cartoonist and co-creator behind Jumble, the word puzzle that's syndicated in hundreds of newspapers around the world. And he still sponsors Spikeball teams and promotes the sport through his own club and website. It's called Club Spike. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show, and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Chris Messini and edited by Neva Grant, with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Our production team also includes J.C.

• 1:18:25Guy Raz?

  Howard, Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Alex Chung, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, and Carla Estevez. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.