Are Your Customers ‘Aging Out’?

Why do you rarely see adults start skateboarding and become good at it?

It’s because skateboarding demands things adults no longer have in abundance:

• Time to practice for hours every day
• A high tolerance for failure (and pain)
• Fast recovery and low injury consequences
• Friends who are also skating all day
• Low risk aversion
• Skateboarding is perfectly designed for kids, not for adults.

As adults, we have jobs and families, we heal slower, we calculate risk differently, our social circles evolve beyond one shared obsession…

So most adults don’t “quit” skateboarding, they naturally age out of it.

This is actually true in a lot of categories (clothing / apparel, music, sports, food & beverage (tastes change), technology, media, etc.).

Herein lies an important business lesson, which is your product may have a customer lifespan.

This is why it’s important to understand:

Who your product is ideal for

When it fits into their life

Why it eventually stops fitting

So you may not have a growth problem, you have a leaky bucket.