What Happened To Hustle Paintball: The Truth

What Happened To Hustle Paintball: The Truth. Hustle Paintball was a revolutionary, up-and-coming paintball company that had a meteoric rise, and then just as quickly fell. In this article, I’ll explain exactly what happened to Hustle Paintball and the lessons we can learn from it.

 

The history of Hustle Paintball – What Happened To Hustle Paintball

Hustle Paintball, a paintball shop in Sydney, Australia, was opened by my friend Haydn in 2006. It started as a small shop in the basement of a restaurant and expanded to three stores in total. Haydn’s business was doing well, but he wasn’t able to spend time with his family.

Roughly six months later after he got some time off, he looked up “paintball” on the internet and found a paintball player website (he actually has two people on staff). Within a year of launching the website, he qualified for the ATA (Australian Tourism Alliance) set for rock bands.

Hey, in Australia, you couldn’t really afford to be one of the top brands. They had to get you on TV!

Why does this really happen? Haydn had previously established himself as a paintball evangelist, but he hadn’t really spent a lot of quality time with his customers. As you can probably guess, his customers were really hungry for paintball supplies, and they had a lot of options. While he was quite busy, he didn’t really have the time to focus on custom requests.

Just by being on TV, he picked up a lot of demand. As he started getting customers to come in, people started dropping him an email with paintball questions, some business cards, and a bunch of paintball supplies. In addition to these customers, he also started getting paintball ideas from his Twitter followers. Way back in 2006 he had a Twitter username of “Public01”, but it didn’t really take off for a long time. Along with those email requests, he started setting up in-store paint ball clinics, giving away some of his product, and referring customers to him.

Pretty remarkable stuff!

Fast forward to 2017, now nearly two years. On top of these amazing brand building tactics, the website experienced another redesign and brand lift, so now it’s showing around 13,000 website visitors a month. Even though search volume has never been much higher, the overall traffic growth is through the roof.

 

What went wrong at Hustle Paintball? – What Happened To Hustle Paintball

Hustle Paintball was a paintball company that wanted to make paintball more accessible to the average person. We did this by renting paintball guns and filling them with paintballs so that anyone could play without having to buy everything separately. Our business model was based on advertisements.

The more people who saw our advertising, the more likely they would be to give us a try. We were so successful that we bought a paintball company so that we could expand our business into supplying paint and renting equipment. In 2012 The Hustle Paintball Company went bankrupt and sold off all of its assets.

The business idea behind The Hustle Paintball Company was to give anyone with a basic paintball gun a chance to be a professional paintball player. The company hired out the equipment and filled every paintball market with players that were never able to afford paintball.

One of our clients sold us a paintball company for over a million dollars. Good thing it was a backup plan! This was a great idea, but the execution was subpar. We wanted to have a website built up so that people would be able to call or email us with any questions.

We had an idea to let people subscribe to our blog on the website and be notified by email when the blog was updated, but the only way to get these kinds of subscribers was to gain mass exposure. As it turned out, there are no mass averages to reach with a blog that is updated once per day.

Six years later, I am still in the paintball business as a coach and consultant. Today, I have a brick-and-mortar paintball business based in Arkansas called The Professional Paintball Company. I have not seen a scalable way to be able to reach audiences like The Hustle originally did; however, we still focus on high-quality service. We can handle all of the marketing efforts, which will help to ensure that we fill every niche possible.