Product case study · São Paulo · 2026
Testing whether tennis players in São Paulo would pay to try a BRL 2,000 racket for a week before buying it — without buying a single racket first.
A serious amateur player in Brazil buying a new frame is making a BRL 1,500–2,500 decision with almost nothing to go on.
Shops let you hold the racket. Holding a racket tells you nothing about how it plays. The things that actually decide whether a frame suits you — string pattern, swing weight, balance, how it behaves in the third hour when your timing goes — only surface across several sessions on a real court.
Demo programmes solve this in the US and Europe. In São Paulo they are rare and informal, usually limited to whatever one shop happens to stock. So players decide on brand loyalty, a coach's opinion, or which pro endorses the frame.
I play tennis. I have watched this happen to people, and I have done it myself. That is where the idea came from — not from a market report.
Vague hypotheses produce vague results. Splitting the idea into four claims meant each one could be probed — or shown to be untestable by this experiment, which turned out to matter just as much.
Players feel racket choice as money at risk, not as a performance or injury problem. So the page leads with the cost of being wrong.
A one-week, delivered, court-ready trial is legible enough that people will raise their hand for it without explanation.
Around 12% of the purchase price is acceptable to buy down the risk — and tiering pushes people toward comparing several frames.
Someone searching for a specific racket review is already inside the decision window and can be reached affordably.
A single landing page presenting Primeiro Saque as an operating service: four real rackets with real specs, real prices, and a reservation flow that ends in a spreadsheet row.
The last two fields are the ones that make this an experiment rather than a lead form. Urgency is the only available proxy for real purchase intent — it separates someone mid-decision from someone browsing. Neighbourhood decides whether the business is even physically possible: delivery and pickup are included in the price, so if requests scatter across São Paulo instead of clustering, the logistics eat the ticket.
Everything the page could have promised and didn't is deliberate. No contact window. No named channel. No "only 3 spots left". The button says request, not book, because nothing is being booked.
A working version of this business needs inventory, stringing, city-wide logistics, payments, deposits against damage, and someone to run it. Call it BRL 15,000–30,000 and a few months — all committed against an assumption nobody had tested.
So none of this got built:
The constraint that drove every technical decision: nothing may make a copy change slower. During validation you rewrite headlines, not architecture. Total running cost, five months in: a domain.
GA4 runs alongside, recording traffic and a conversion event carrying the value of each request. It never touches the contact data — traffic analytics and lead data stay in separate systems with no shared identifier.
A fake door tests whether people will walk toward it — it does not entitle you to leave them standing there. Real people submitted real contact details expecting eventual contact. The success message was written to be literally true, and no timeframe or channel was ever promised. That is mitigation, not absolution, and closing this loop is the first job of the next experiment.
The result · 14 April – September 2026
Nobody was driven to this page. No campaign ran, no ads were bought, no lists were emailed. People searching for rackets found it, read it, and asked for something that does not exist yet — at prices they could see before they asked.
This is the part where product work usually goes wrong. A number that flatters you is the easiest thing in the world to over-read.
That is the most useful thing this project taught me, and it is a methodological failure, not a win. Any bar written now would be reverse-engineered from a number I already know. The next experiment defines its criteria before the first call is made.
The fake door has given everything it can. Every remaining question needs someone to reach for their wallet.
Hypothesis: a meaningful minority of the people who requested a trial will pay BRL 250 up front for a real one.
Small on purpose. Two to four frames from the most-requested models, one neighbourhood cluster, four to six weeks. Inventory bought only after money arrives — low thousands of BRL, recoverable by resale.
If they say no at BRL 250, the honest reading is that this measured curiosity rather than demand — and that is a genuinely valuable finding, bought for the price of a few rackets instead of a business.