Facebook ads for a sports training product

A hand-eye coordination trainer lost its ad buyer to a downturn and could not replace him. Sales now outrun the warehouse.

Josh, Sports training product. Recorded March 2021.

Josh invented a hand-eye coordination trainer — call a colour, throw it, the other person catches the colour you called. It started with a PVC pipe and plastic dip from a hardware store and took two and a half years of development to reach its final form in non-toxic foam.

The market turned out far wider than he designed for. It is used by athletes, coaches, trainers, teachers, doctors and medical practitioners, and by parents with their kids. Products with that many audiences are harder to advertise than narrow ones, because the message that lands for a strength coach is not the one that lands for a parent.

They had a good ad buyer until the political advertising season, when costs across Meta rose sharply and performance declined. That is an industry-wide squeeze rather than anyone’s failure, but when it lifted the account did not recover, and Josh’s own attempts to run it were not working.

Since the account was taken over, sales have grown to the point where fulfilment is the constraint. On the day we recorded, he had staff in the warehouse trying to catch up.

For a product with several distinct audiences, the work is separating them rather than averaging them — different creative and different angles for each, so the ad speaks to one person instead of vaguely to everyone.

Running out of stock is the good version of this problem. It means the demand is real and the only remaining question is supply.

In Josh’s words