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Hey there,
Last week I launched Outbid for padel.
Here's where it stands 6 days later.
264 UK padel businesses are listed for free. 15 of them have paid to move up. That's £493 in bids so far on BidPadel.com
Two of those bids were three figures, and both came in within 24 hours of each other. CourtReserve, a club software company based in Florida, bid £100. Their VP of Marketing replied to my email with "Cool idea! Put a bid in." Then PadelFast went to £110 and took the top spot.
Nobody got a sales call or a media kit. They got one email telling them they were listed, with a link.
That email is the whole engine. Every ten minutes I send one to a business on the board saying "X is now live on BidPadel". Most people ignore it. Some reply to fix their category. A few bid.
The replies are the best part. The Pressure Pod bid to take number one in Brands, then asked about working together more closely. Build & Padel put £30 into the courts category and wants to meet up.
£493 won't change my life. But it's a week old, it costs me nothing to run, and the board gets more valuable with every bid, because the next business has someone to beat.
So I'm doing it again.
In 2012 I started Snowbistro to help the UK ski trade with its marketing. This summer I was ready to let it go.
Instead it's now a leaderboard at snowbistro.com. Suppliers to UK ski operators can bid from £10 to rank in their category. The categories are ski rental, instructors, transfers, software, hospitality, marketing, recruitment and insurance.
This time there's a twist. Next to the supplier board, I've ranked 50 UK ski operators by organic search traffic, Domain Rating, ATOL capacity, number of resorts and years trading. Operators can't pay to move up. Suppliers can.
That's the part I'm most pleased with. The operators are the people the suppliers want to reach. If I give the operators something useful to look at, the suppliers have a reason to bid.
The data threw up some fun results. Scott Dunn is only 13th on ATOL capacity, but it gets an estimated 158,400 organic visits a month, second only to Crystal. WeSki is second on capacity and gets around 19,100.
The first ski bid came in before I'd even sent the launch email. Alpy.com's CMO put in £10 of his own money, just to see what would happen.
I've also brought back the old ski newsletter to go with it. It's a weekly briefing on the business of UK skiing, sent to people I've crossed paths with in the trade over the last 14 years. It’s at ski.beehiiv.com and the beehiiv <—> Claude MCP does all the work.
If there's a lesson here, it's that the mechanic travels. Find a small market where lots of suppliers chase the same few buyers. Build those buyers something worth looking at. Then let the suppliers pay to be seen.
Padel when there's no snow. Ski when there is.
Cheers,
Richard
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