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Comment by woeirua | Hacker News Reader

One of the most important parts of being a founder is recognizing when you are out of your element, and then finding someone else to help you round out that problematic area. For you this might be sales/marketing. You definitely should find someone to help you here.

On a side note, as a fellow climber, I think you're probably going to fail. Chalk is cheap relative to your product and your product doesn't offer any clear advantage aside from leaving less residue (which lets be honest most climbing areas already have a ton of chalk on them). Maybe a small minority of climbers care that much to use something that leaves less residue, but those people already probably brush the holds on the way down anyways.

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I'm not so sure I'd write off this startup as a failure.

I feel like many people who can afford $80/mo climbing gym memberships might look at $5 chalk and $12 environmentally friendly chalk with nice packaging/branding and buy the latter.

If OP manages to get listed in half the ~500 climbing gyms in the USA, and makes on average 2-3 sales per day in each, they could pull in single-digit millions per year in top line. Not sure what OP's goals are, but that's plenty successful for most.

If you need a VC-caliber story, you can always expand to other products (plenty of other climbing gear to sell now that you have the gym relationships), other sellers (eg. REI, MEC), or go international.

Our thinking is to focus on the new generation of climbers who tend to be more urban, more affluent & yes, more environmentally conscious.

It's completely antithetical to the environmentally conscious mission to build a product that is going to produce significantly more waste than chalk balls. Chalk residue is a short-term eyesore, but plastic waste lives for hundreds of years in landfills.

If you're going to target environmentally conscious customers then your packaging has to be eco-friendly too.

For environmentally friendly packaging (recycled alu tubes) to be viable at our small scale we need to produce a LOT more. In the meantime we try to improve our packaging and offset some of the damage we do by planting one tree per product sold, which is roughly a 20-30% hit on our margins. Personally I think it’s impossible to be sustainable. Working towards reaching sustainability IS possible. So that’s what we do.

How about wood / bamboo?

We looked into bio plastics and bamboo for both the tube and closing cap. It’s easy enough to find bamboo-based biodegradable tubes but the closing cap is pretty much always still normal plastic. Biodegradable plastic also has its controversies: it won’t degrade in clean ways outside of commercial composting facilities. There’s also a bamboo-based plastic controversy around toxicity of the product in e.g. bamboo-plastic cups.

I'm sorry, but what's better for the environment here? Not seeing chalk on holds, or producing tons of trash in the form of plastic bottles with aluminum foil inside of them along with the packaging. Chalk balls on the other hand are biodegradable, and the chalk within is a naturally occurring element. If people stopped climbing these spots the chalk would go away in years.

We're working on getting our products in recycled aluminium tubes. Chalk balls have been proven not to work in terms of reducing dust in gyms, link to the research is on our blog.

I'm not so sure it's a VC-scale business. Maybe if it's useful for weightlifting and other vertical markets. That being said I wouldn't be quick to write it off as a failure. Most of the climbers in the thread are chiming in as excited about the product.

It needs better positioning as I think it's more about being better for your hands than chalk (and a more pleasant experience to use) than it is about the environment.

But OP might be on to something here. Particularly if they want a lifestyle business.

It’s most definitely NOT a VC scale business. I’d feel bad if it were.

As a climber and marketer, this is how I feel. You may need some help on sales copy but this is a marketing problem--who is this for and through what channels can i reach them?

There are definitely places where chalk is frowned upon. Try calling the gyms near those crags and sending them some free bottles to give out to their employees and gym climbers. Without any real differentiation for a large segment of climbers, the best you can do is use this small group of people who need to care about chalk residue and the even smaller group of people who do care, but don't need to.

I do think you could define the problem more clearly and try low-cost test channels like Google Ads & Facebook Ads (show ads in the geo's where chalk on rock is frowned upon).

After I read about the feelings about chalk from non-climbers, I can certainly understand why people care about it. The issue is real. It's just not a problem that most people know enough about to care yet. The challenge there is that it's hard and expensive to try and sell people on a new problem they don't know they have. It's much easier to replace an existing pain point they feel right now.

As someone new to climbing I find regular chalk disgusting. I HATE the feel of it under my nails. An alternative is welcome.

That’s a new one! Interesting.

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