Years ago when I was a teenager, around 2017, a basketball coach I knew hired me to design a brand book for his new app, a basketball training app based on cameras and motion sensors. I was very excited, it sounded very promising and I had made the most beautiful designs for him, truly innovative stuff for the time. He said basketball will only be the beginning, we can use this tech to create training apps for all kinds of stuff. But despite securing major partners, I quickly found out the coach prefers to waste money by buying two maxed-out Mac Pros, a huge training facility, and incredibly expensive equipment for the videos, without having a single line of code for the algorithm. He asked me to design a UI (with stocks, not money), without having anything but a basic shell and a lot of videos. This is where we parted ways, and of course it all went down the drain.
Soon after I discovered a very similar new app: HomeCourt. I realized this idea was indeed great and achievable, and if he didn't act like he had it all figured out before he had anything at all, maybe he could get there first and win the category. Years after, when I was looking for cardio apps, I tried an app called Active Arcade. It wasn't great in my opinion, but I liked their design very much and they got really successful. I forgot all about these two apps. Until now.
I wanted to understand who is this new kid that managed to overthrow Xbox. So I started reading about Nex Playground. And I was shocked. The company started as an app, called HomeCourt. A basketball training app, of all things. Later on they expanded into, you got that right, cardio, with Active Arcade. And a few years after, Nex Playground, based on the same tech. Connecting these dots was shocking. To me, this is a remarkable story of pivoting, starting out as something so niche but really good, and then in less than a decade overthrowing Microsoft after three decades of a trinity in the console field. And at the same time, it's also a lesson on how far you can go if you play it smart and don't throw money on being a wannabe. The thought of what could've been with this one, is just crazy. Well done, Nex. Fascinating tech story.
Years ago when I was a teenager, around 2017, a basketball coach I knew hired me to design a brand book for his new app, a basketball training app based on cameras and motion sensors. I was very excited, it sounded very promising and I had made the most beautiful designs for him, truly innovative stuff for the time. He said basketball will only be the beginning, we can use this tech to create training apps for all kinds of stuff. But despite securing major partners, I quickly found out the coach prefers to waste money by buying two maxed-out Mac Pros, a huge training facility, and incredibly expensive equipment for the videos, without having a single line of code for the algorithm. He asked me to design a UI (with stocks, not money), without having anything but a basic shell and a lot of videos. This is where we parted ways, and of course it all went down the drain.
Soon after I discovered a very similar new app: HomeCourt. I realized this idea was indeed great and achievable, and if he didn't act like he had it all figured out before he had anything at all, maybe he could get there first and win the category. Years after, when I was looking for cardio apps, I tried an app called Active Arcade. It wasn't great in my opinion, but I liked their design very much and they got really successful. I forgot all about these two apps. Until now.
I wanted to understand who is this new kid that managed to overthrow Xbox. So I started reading about Nex Playground. And I was shocked. The company started as an app, called HomeCourt. A basketball training app, of all things. Later on they expanded into, you got that right, cardio, with Active Arcade. And a few years after, Nex Playground, based on the same tech. Connecting these dots was shocking. To me, this is a remarkable story of pivoting, starting out as something so niche but really good, and then in less than a decade overthrowing Microsoft after three decades of a trinity in the console field. And at the same time, it's also a lesson on how far you can go if you play it smart and don't throw money on being a wannabe. The thought of what could've been with this one, is just crazy. Well done, Nex. Fascinating tech story.
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