Something in the world of floating have you stumped?
Show Highlights
This episode is chock full of tips and tricks to test the salty waters of the float industry and help you decide if there’s a good market in your area for a float center. Find out what kind of response you’re looking for and how to get the one you want.
Show Resources
FTS BLOG: TAM, SAM, SOM
FTS BLOG: Before your center has a location, get online
Find a tank at: Usedfloattanks.com
Listen to Just the Audio
Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)
Graham: We got a question for you today, which is, “My biggest question is whether or not there is a market for this in my area. Not really sure how to gauge the demand.” The old market demand gauge, as they call it in the business. That’s a tricky one.
Ashkahn: Yeah.
Graham: So fortunately there’s a lot of different ways to go about this, and the other good news is that so far, if you don’t already have float centers in your area, there’s probably gonna be a demand for it.
Ashkahn: Yeah, at least in a place like the U.S., Canada, Australia, things like that where there’s been a lot of press, there’s been a lot of float centers opening up in big cities, there’s been a decent raise in awareness in the last three to five years, something like that. At this point, the word about float tanks is starting to spread, and if you’re the first person in your area, there likely is some demand for it.
Graham: Yeah, and it turns out that they’re actually just really appealing, despite sounding weird and maybe kind of hard to market, a lot of the initial market tests that float centers do turn up really positive, and there are in fact a lot of people who say they’d be interested in trying something like that out. So what you might want to actually do, and it’s interesting, ’cause I guess the question, I’m not sure what city this is related to, but it differs a little bit if you’re in a small town versus a bigger city, and kind of everything in between as well, for what you even have access to to be able to test out your market. I would say one that’s really traditional is just checking for similar activities. Are there a lot of yoga studios around? Are there other forms of alternative wellness that are being practiced in your area? And not having as many around isn’t a deal breaker or anything like that, but the more things that you can point to, that’s like, “Hey, people have a disposable income, and they’re spending it on their health and forms of wellness,” is obviously a really good sign.
If you can’t find some, lots of times you can find information like that through your Chamber of Commerce. You can also look up some different websites. There’s one called City Data, and Facebook, actually, ends up being a really nice way to gauge the interests and different activities of people in your area, so just when you’re going to do ads, you can target different groups and through that process, you can see how many different people on Facebook in your area like or are groups with those kind of topics, which is kind of nice. It’s sort of a little hack on the ad audience side to be able to validate something.
Ashkahn: I suppose you could even run some ads for float tanks, see what sort of interest that actually garners without having to open up a center.
Graham: Yep, for sure. If there aren’t any float centers in your area already, then just taking out general ads, putting up a website, seeing what you can do, gauging interest like Ashkahn said is great. If there are other float centers, you can even do what we did at Float On when we were starting up, which is pair up with one of the existing centers and see if you can’t sell floats to their center yourself as kind of an indication that you’re able to market floating successfully and get people interested in it and actually get the people you’re talking to to not only say that they’d go float, but to actually bite the bullet and pay for one. Really, the philosophy here and why I think that’s such a good idea is you’re trying to get as far down the pipeline as you can go in actually getting people to spend money on floats, proving that that’s what they would do if you had a center that was up and running, without spending the money on a float center yourself. So as far as you can get them along that process today.
Ashkahn: Yeah, because there’s a big difference between someone saying they’ll do something and actually putting the cash down to do it.
Graham: Yeah. For sure. Just in general, too, it’s one of those, for some reason in a lot of business classes especially high school and undergraduate, they have you do market surveys and fill out these paper questionnaires you give around to people for your business ideas to assess interest in them, and just time and again in psychological studies, people’s answers to questionnaires like that, especially if you’re personally standing in front of them and they know they’re filling out a questionnaire about your business idea, are just gonna be skewed, right? People feel awkward. They don’t just want to say your idea’s crap, and even if they do think it’s an awesome idea, we’re just terrible at knowing ourselves, so if you’re filling out a questionnaire and it’s like, “Would you go float?” That means so much less than them actually giving you an email address to join a mailing list, or better than that, actually paying money for a float, just not at your center because you don’t have one yet.
Other ways to gauge demand in the area, this goes just a step further than doing that, selling float to someone else’s float center, but stops short of opening your own float center, which is get a float tank in your house, or in a friend’s house or in your mom’s basement or whatever.
Ashkahn: Or an enemy’s house, you know?
Graham: Install a float tank horribly in your enemy’s house, just wait for it to be destroyed by salt. But if you have a float tank that you’re using for personal use that you can bring people into, possibly even start charging a little bit of money for people who you don’t know quite as well to come in, that’s a great way, paid or unpaid actually, getting people in the tank, measuring their responses, again, great way to judge the market.
Ashkahn: It helps for a lot of stuff too, I mean it helps you get a handle on operations and get a good sense for what running a float tank is actually going to be like, and it allows your friends and family and all these people who want to support you to try it out, and then be able to go spread the word not just as a, “Oh yeah, my cousin’s doing this crazy thing,” or “I tried it and it was really interesting.” So there’s a lot of benefits to getting a float tank in your house, startup model.
Graham: Yeah. Another one is just that the used tank market right now is pretty good. If you’re trying to sell a used tank, there’s more people out there looking for used float tanks than there are used float tanks on the market. So if you do get a float tank in your house, you decide eventually this isn’t for you, you don’t want to open up a center, you can always resell it and get a pretty good value on it. Although the cost is high, it’s much less than starting a center and there’s actually a good chance that you recoup that even if you don’t push forward with your plans.
Other ways to gauge, this sounds silly and it’s along the lines of a survey or something, but in a very informal sense, just talking to people and getting a sense for how excited they get. If you’re talking to someone and they’re like, “Oh, that sounds interesting,” call that a loss. That’s not the kind of interest that I’m talking about, but if you start talking to someone and they’re like, “Oh my God, where’s the nearest one? Three hours away? Great. What do you want to do next weekend? We should go out there.” If people are actually just getting thrilled about the idea of floating from their conversations with you, that’s a pretty informal piece of data but it’s a really good sign and you can kinda gauge that just as you’re going around. That was another way that at Float On we definitely tested before opening.
All right, anything else to add? I’m trying to gauge your excitement for this question right now. Cool, no I think all of those are good. The biggest thing is just don’t trust something that someone blindly puts down. Try to get some kind of commitment whether it’s having them put their name down saying they will float once you open up, giving you their email address to join a mailing list, or in an ideal situation, actually having money exchange hands for them getting a float and having that be the proof of concept that you are able to do.
If you have any more questions for us, go to floattanksolutions.com/podcast. All right, talk to you guys later. Bye.
Recent Podcast Episodes
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The truth is… not much. As it turns out, monthly expenses for float centers don’t have huge variations unlike businesses that rely on retail, for example. Graham and Ashkahn explain they developed a sense for what’s within reason.
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Latest Blog Posts
The Basics of Float Tank Sanitation
Some of the most common questions you’ll get as a float center operator involve the cleanliness of the tanks. This post will be an introduction to some of the most commonplace sanitation methods used in float tanks. These are generally either chemicals that go in the water or devices that attach to your filtration system. We’ll be discussing chlorine, bromine, ozone, UV, and hydrogen peroxide, which accounts for the sanitation methods used on nearly every float tank on the market.
Testing and Maintaining Float Tank Water Quality
Editors Note: This is a revision of a past blog post, updated to reflect the most current sanitation methods and standards
In a perfect world, you could just pour water and salt into a float tank and it would stay pure and clean and fresh and salty forever. In the real world, conditions in the water are constantly changing, so keeping your water safe and clean takes a fair amount of vigilance.
This post covers how we maintain basic water quality in the float tank, except for sanitization methods, which will be covered in their own beastly sanitation blog post. Stay tuned for that coming out next week!
Floating, mental health, and wellness
This post will explore the intersection of floating with the concepts, beliefs, and experiences related to mental health and wellness, with a focus on anxiety and depression. I’ll explore my own story as it relates to floating before diving into the current intersections of floating and mental health, with a look at past, current, and potential opportunities for research and personal growth.
Massage, Acupuncture, and Float Tanks… A Chat with Sandra Calm
We’ve seen lots of float centers that aren’t just float centers.
Many have massage, some offer counseling, some have yoga classes next door. Lots of people start out either by incorporating float tanks into a larger business, or with float tanks only being one of many modalities at their center. Being specialists in floating, Float On has not mastered anything else.
So, to help gain insight into this growing aspect of the industry, we contacted our old friend, Sandra Calm. She started up The Float Shoppe here in Portland with her husband and podcast sensation, Dylan Calm, back in 2011. When they first opened, they had just two float tanks, and slowly added acupuncture, massage, counseling, along with two more tanks. Talk about expansion!
She was more than happy to take some time for the industry to help us understand just what it’s like to run a center with multiple services by answering some questions.
