Founder’s Story: The Ups & Downs Of Running Picklepedia For The First Year

There’s a field in San Diego where, if you listen carefully on a quiet morning, you can hear a sound that’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t heard it. A hollow, percussive pop. Rhythmic. Almost hypnotic. For months, Simon Lovell walked past that field every day with his King Charles Cavalier, Buddha, and never went in.

He was meditating in that field the morning he finally got curious.

That curiosity became Picklepedia. One year ago (May 15th 2025), it went live on Facebook. Since then, it has published over 300 articles, reached 2.5 to 3 million people every month on social media, pulled in almost a million article views in its first year, built an app, and grown a small but fiercely loyal donor community. It has also rejected partnership contracts, operated consistently in the red, and been run — for most of its existence — by one person and a small team of writers who care more about the work than the optics.

This is the story of that year. Unfiltered.

Before the field, there was a hospital bed.

In 2021, Simon was speaking at an event in Idlewild, California. He came home and within a few days he couldn’t walk.

Guillain-Barré syndrome is a rare neurological condition where the immune system attacks the nervous system. Treatment meant IVIG — an intravenous therapy that took weeks. Recovery meant something harder to name. After getting back on his feet physically, Simon found himself sitting by a pool in Florida with his family, blank. Months of just existing. A nervous system that worked again but a life that had gone quiet.

He had spent years helping personal trainers and entrepreneurs build businesses around things they loved. He had coached, consulted, worked in publishing. He had built a successful life after immigrating to the United States 10 years ago. And then, without warning, most of that was taken from him — not permanently, but long enough to change things.

Pickleball got me back. I still have remnants of the health issue. But what the sport gave me wasn’t fitness. It was a reason to leave the house. A community. It reminded me of who I was and what I was capable of. When you’re in a dark place, you don’t forget how to do things. You just need something to bring you back.”

The something, in his case, was the sound of a ball on a paddle through a chain-link fence.

Why a media platform and not a YouTube channel or a coaching business?

Because Simon had spent enough time in publishing to know what was missing.

He was frustrated by content that didn’t feel genuine — peppered with ads, affiliate links buried in recommendations, coverage that served brands before it served readers. He understood those models. He just didn’t want to build that himself.

If he was going to use the skills he’d built over decades, he wanted to find out if there was an audience for people who actually wanted to read. Who wanted depth. Who respected their own intelligence.

There was.

Picklepedia launched with a no-ads, no-sponsors, reader-funded model. No affiliate links. No brand deals. No compromises. When readers are surveyed on what they value most, they say the quality of the articles first, unbiased coverage second, and the ad-free experience third. The editorial was landing. The tone was different. The platform grew.

The branding nobody realises took that much thought.

The visual identity started with a decision to use a sketch identity instead of photographs. Early Picklepedia ran on black and white imagery — deliberate, editorial, unlike anything else in pickleball media. If you go back through the archive now, you can still spot the originals — a fossil record of where the platform started.

Then came the green. A single specific shade applied consistently across images without any other colour competing for attention. Readers noticed. The art became something people mentioned unprompted. It became part of what Picklepedia felt like.

“What makes it work is not just the articles. It’s the whole package. The images, the writing, the app, the mission — it all has to work together. That’s what I was building. Not just content.”

The trademark application is currently pending approval and due any day. The brand that started with a curious walk into a San Diego field is becoming something that exists on paper, legally, with its own protected identity. Year one.

What’s being built and where it’s going.

The app started as a way to give existing donors somewhere to gather. It evolved into something more deliberate — a platform built not to attract donors, but to reward them. There is a meaningful difference between those two things, and it shapes every decision about what gets built next.

One of the best decisions of year one — and it only became clear in hindsight — was the Pickleball IQ system. But its significance goes beyond what it does on the surface. When the website launched, the app didn’t exist. When the app launched, they were two separate things. The IQ system is what fused them together into a single experience — and that wasn’t planned. It happened because Simon wanted return readers to experience something unique that helped them to retain more of what they read. The pieces were good enough that connecting them made something genuinely new.

“Building a great experience  has always been the foundation of Picklepedia”.

Readers felt it before Simon could articulate it. Messages came in — unprompted — from people saying they loved it. Not the quizzes specifically. The feeling of the whole thing working together. A website that leads somewhere. An app that reflects what you’ve been reading. A score that means something because you earned it.

That connection turned out to be one of the most original things Picklepedia has built.

Every quiz taken, every article read, every report completed — it’s building a picture. Not of traffic. Of actual player development. What someone has studied, where they keep returning, and where they haven’t been yet. In year two, that picture becomes a tool.

Coach IQ is coming. An AI-powered system that analyses a reader’s activity across the five core areas of the game and is honest with them about the gaps. Not cheerleading. Not generic advice. A real read on where their understanding is strong and where it’s thin, with a clear path forward. The only reason this is possible now is because year one happened first. You can’t build something like this without the articles, without the usage, without the patience to let the data accumulate before you act on it.

Inside the app today, there is more available than most readers realise. The challenges, the IQ system, the leaderboard, the research series — and the app is updated monthly. Monthly supporters consistently say they are surprised by the depth of it. The app is in a different place than it was even a few weeks ago, and it keeps moving.

The Science of Pickleball remains the donor centrepiece — thirty original research reports, one published every week, each going deep into the science behind how players actually move, think, and improve.

The Coaches Council is the other piece — built to fill a gap that Simon has watched go unfilled for years. The tools, business skills, and support that coaches need to grow, attract more players, and have real impact on the game.

One thing Simon hasn’t been able to give enough time to is the community inside the app. Not because it doesn’t matter — it matters more than most things — but because building everything else leaves little room for it. The vision is simple: a place where players post questions, share their own tips, and build something that belongs to them, not to Picklepedia. If there’s one thing he’d ask of readers, it’s that. Show up in there.

The part most founders leave out.

Picklepedia reaches millions of people every month. Almost a million articles were read in the first year. The email list has thousands of subscribers opening at rates most media companies would envy.

None of that is free to produce.

The articles, the app, the research series, the design, the infrastructure that makes it all run quietly in the background — every piece of it costs time and money that doesn’t come from ads, affiliates, or sponsors. There is no brand deal subsidising the editorial. There is no investor absorbing the shortfall. What you see is funded by readers who chose to support it, and right now that community is smaller than the platform it’s sustaining.

Simon has turned down partnerships with significant companies because their contracts didn’t align with Picklepedia’s editorial independence. He is not paying himself. The gap between how many people are reading and how many people are supporting is the central tension of everything.

“What I’m trying to do is keep this alive and adding value for years to come. The hardest ongoing decision isn’t whether to run ads or take a sponsor. It’s the quieter one — what to give away free and what to hold back for donors. Give too much for free and there’s no reason to donate. Lock too much away and you break the trust the whole thing is built on.”

Simon also opened up about his ongoing health challenges while building: “GBS really hit me hard and I’m a lot better now, but on some days the fatigue still hits me hard and I have to be very conscious about how I manage my energy.”

One-off donations were what made year one real. Readers putting their hand up early, before any of this was proven, saying they believed in it. That mattered more than the money. But as Picklepedia moves into year two, what it needs most has changed — not the generosity, which has always been there, but the shape of it.

Monthly donors are a different thing. Not more valued, but differently valuable. They’re what allows decisions to get made based on what the platform actually needs rather than what came in that week. To put that in perspective: at the time of writing, the monthly cost of developing and maintaining the app alone exceeds what the current recurring donations bring in. That’s before the writing, the research series, the design, or anything else.

The most requested feature since Picklepedia launched has been video. It’s never happened — not from lack of want, but because Picklepedia video done right isn’t someone on a court with an iPhone. The same care that goes into the writing, the imagery, the branding — readers would expect that in video too, and they’d be right to. That’s not the next step. But it’s on the map, and getting there starts with crossing the line the bar represents.

What a bad week looks like. And a good one.

Bad weeks are late nights and broken technology and the particular exhaustion of caring deeply about something most people will never fully see. They are the accumulation of small things — a feature that won’t work, a piece that took twenty hours to produce, the invisible infrastructure of running a platform that looks effortless from the outside.

“People see what’s there. They don’t see what is happening behind the scenes. What makes something feel really good to a reader is not one thing. It’s everything working together. And how much that takes — in time, in energy, in effort — that’s what a small team carries.”

Good weeks are different. And the best measure of them isn’t traffic or numbers — it’s the people on the other end.

One reader wrote in to say that pickleball had saved their life — physically and mentally. Retired, on limited means, they donated anyway, wanting to give something back to a community that had given them so much. Another runs a weekly session for eight players in their neighbourhood — not a certified instructor, doesn’t charge a penny — and uses Picklepedia articles as the foundation for every session.

These are the people Picklepedia is built for. Not the algorithm. Not the advertisers. Them.

And monthly donations. Not because of what they unlock, but because of what they mean.

“The donations aren’t just about keeping this going. It’s about a little voice that rings in my head saying, keep doing what you’re doing. We believe in you. That’s what it is.”

One year in.

Over 300 articles. Almost a million readers. A research series unlike anything else in the sport. An app that keeps getting better. A trademark pending. A brand built from scratch with nothing but time, care, and a refusal to compromise.

Picklepedia content is now read in over 100 countries. That started with a man who couldn’t walk, a dog named Buddha, and a sound through a fence he’d walked past a hundred times before.