Keep TopspinPro genuinely close to its customers and partners across products, sports and markets — then turn what you learn into practical action the team acts on.
TopspinPro is a tennis business at its core. Moving into pickleball meant little more than changing the ball on our established product, and it sold. The SpinPro for pickleball, launched in 2024, went differently: once the initial push faded, so did our focus, and we lost visibility into who was using it and how. We’re now bringing the SpinPro for tennis to our core market, and a repeat of that outcome would be costly. The risk is greater with a leaner team, and greater still as we move into padel. This role exists to keep our decisions grounded in customer evidence, so a smaller team can still grow the business.
SpinPro Tennis, then SpinPro Padel, alongside the bread-and-butter TopspinPro Tennis and Pickleball range. More products means our attention is spread thinner — and the easy mistake is to launch, move on, and lose sight of who’s actually using what.
After a tough 18 months we’re a smaller team with less cash than we used to have. That makes guessing expensive. Customer evidence is how we point our limited time and money at the decisions most likely to drive growth and business health.
These are all business objectives — what the company is working toward. The cards below are your contributions to them: the customer evidence and insight that moves each one forward, from the near-term work in front of you to the longer-term destinations it builds toward.
The two live launches — SpinPro Tennis (~2–3 weeks away) and SpinPro Padel (end of July, with The Padel School) — are your listening and learning phase. Capture the early language, questions, friction and praise as customers meet these products for the first time. What you learn shapes the whole ecosystem around them: education content, smooth customer service, and the first batch of product iteration at the factory. Padel is a converted product with no in-house expertise, so lean on The Padel School and listen harder than you lead.
Everything below flows from the launches
We’ve always built the new-customer journey on hunches. Replace them with evidence: is 21 days overwhelming or about right? What can customers realistically do in week one? Why do people stop training — and what would keep them going? This is the single home for everything about the welcome series and the first-21-days journey.
Be the first to understand it deeply when something goes wrong. An early SpinPro Tennis customer damaged their racket — and the video showed they were hitting the ball incorrectly. So is it a product problem or an education problem? Interview the customer, watch the footage, and get to the real story: do customers expect to hit the ball hard, and will they be frustrated by that limitation? If we offer education, are people actually watching it — or would a warning label they’re forced to read and remove work better? And is it a big enough problem to fix in the next production run?
Gather the real motivations, frustrations and exact phrasing customers use, and hand Doug a first batch of customer-language for the website and ads.
SpinPro could be a natural fit for clubs and coaches — its size and price point potentially suit that setting better than the recreational market — so it’s vital we genuinely understand this segment. Get to know the club and coach world for the first time: their objections, their incentives, and where the real value is for them. This is the groundwork a coach-led flywheel would be built on, so we can finally strategise it rather than “try something and see.” Warm intros come via Brian.
Beyond the serve course already in production, identify an education gap for SpinPro that solves a real, evidenced customer need. Mine the live classes for this too — watch the replays and questions, spot recurring confusion.
The goal is to rewrite our website and ads in real customer language end to end — built on evidence, not instinct. JTBD can uncover customers’ true motivations, and therefore their language. Public Nectar (our paid media agency) have little or no understanding of the sports, and that’s proven problematic in the past. Even with Doug’s intervention introducing sport-specific language, he’s still guessing at the true underlying “jobs to be done.”
Coaches influence everyone around them — their players, their club, their wider network. The longer-term opportunity is turning that influence into a self-reinforcing growth loop: coaches who advocate, recommend and bring others in. Your clubs & coaches research is the groundwork.
One early objective: understand how much appetite coaches have for promoting products to their typical clients, and whether there’s a particular type of coach who does this. What matters to a coach when they recommend something — do they see it as an extension of their own reputation? And, within this, really get to know the kind of coach who likes working with training aids: we’d love to know everything about them.
The priority is growth and engagement — getting more customers into the Academy and keeping them active. This is our deepest moat: better onboarding, high-touch care and exceptional value that a device on its own can never replicate. That moat matters most as we combat the wave of Chinese copycats — they can clone the hardware, but not the education, insight and experience wrapped around it. Membership is a longer-term possibility — the strongest live classes and experiences could eventually sit behind it — but it’s not the main driver; growth and engagement are.
The near-term first-21-days work is specific to SpinPro Tennis. The longer-term goal is an evidenced onboarding journey for the rest of the range — TopspinPro for tennis, TopspinPro for pickleball and SpinPro for pickleball — replacing hunches with real evidence of what a new customer can do in week one and what keeps them training.
We want to understand the appetite for customers wanting to share their journey and connect with each other. If so, there’s an opportunity to build a community around the products — peer support, shared progress and a sense of belonging — that deepens engagement and keeps people training.
Too many TopspinPro Tennis units end up packed away — at clubs and with recreational players. Uncover why: is it end-of-usefulness (could we unlock secondary uses — fitness, footwork, returning from injury), or a physical / mental barrier once it’s in the cupboard? Watch the momentum-breakers too — breakages, missing parts and warranty friction all interrupt a habit before it forms.
In the past, what we learned tended to live in scattered, one-off conversations and surveys — and the things that mattered were too easily lost once the moment passed. Systemising it is how we hold on to what counts and turn it into clarity, rather than relying on whoever happened to be in the room.
Reviews (website + Amazon), public and social chatter, CS tickets, return reasons, pre-sale questions, warranty and spares signals, the post-purchase and incentivised surveys, Klaviyo welcome-flow engagement, JTBD interviews, The Padel School partner insight, Academy questions and live-class replays.
Build a knowledge repository — a structured sheet tagged by theme, source and sport/product. Quotes, complaints, return reasons, content gaps, use cases, objections and open questions, all in one searchable place.
The patterns that matter go back to the team as evidence → recommendation items the owners pick up, and anything actionable becomes a tracked task. Two lightweight rhythms keep customer learning visible without heavy process.
Once-a-month all-hands segment.
Dedicated deep-dive into insights from the quarter.
Where your evidence lands, who owns the decision, and what you hand them. For anything cross-functional you bring a one-page evidence → recommendation; the named owner green-lights.
A few books and articles I’ve found useful along the way.
