The Stories of Our Starts
When there’s a will, there’s a way.
Anything with real impact is almost always a multiyear effort. The beginning feels like jumping off a cliff and climbing a steep mountain — liberating and terrifying at the same time.
Some say it takes a certain kind of person. But in my experience, the first obstacle you need to overcome is, more often than not, yourself.
Here are three “starts” from Nex. I hope they encourage the next one — big or small, inside or outside of Nex.
HomeCourt
Before HomeCourt, we hadn’t built a native app — and knew very little about AI.
The problem we set out to solve: Can we teach a phone to truly understand basketball?
We dove into computer vision — both traditional and emerging techniques — and explored how to use AI to recognize objects and keypoints.
We drove around taking photos of hoops and courts to train our models. We cold-emailed every high school and college basketball coach in the area, asking to attend practices and capture footage. We spent months catching tens of thousands of rebounds for student-athletes. We worked through pages of math to solve for camera projection — turning 2D footage into 3D scene understanding.
It took us 12 months of iteration to reach something usable, and another 3 years to hone the full experience.
Today, HomeCourt still tracks over 150,000 basketball shots a day. It became widely recognized as the #1 basketball training app — but during the pandemic, we saw something unexpected: millions were downloading HomeCourt not to train, but simply to play its interactive mini-games — many of them not even basketball players.
Active Arcade
Before Active Arcade, we had never built games as a business.
Our goal: Can we turn our tech into a game development toolkit — and build games people love?
Every engineer, senior or junior, rolled up their sleeves and learned Unity. We adapted our technology to tackle challenges unique to gaming — solving latency, leveraging hardware acceleration, and interpreting motion and gesture in real time.
We started from scratch and learned what it takes to make physical activities fun.
Active Arcade was loved by millions and became the mother of many Nex games that followed. But we noticed something: the users who loved it most kept connecting their phones and tablets to TVs. That’s when we realized — we’d been building for the wrong platform.
Nex Playground
Before Nex Playground, we had never built hardware, an OS, or a content ecosystem.
Everyone we talked to warned us: “Hardware is hard.”
But the problem we needed to solve was clear: How can we deliver the best possible experience for our games — on the big screen?
That meant the right SoC, the right camera, and the right user experience — all in one affordable, efficient package.
We spoke to nearly every major player in the TV and set-top box space — Samsung, Sony, LG, TCL, Apple, Google, Comcast — and came back empty-handed. We reached out to every SoC vendor: Amlogic, MediaTek, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Realtek, Synaptics.
We cared so deeply about getting it right that we ended up building our own hardware. It wasn’t an easy decision, but it was the right one.
We partnered with Amlogic and Skyworth to build our first batch of 5,000 units. We also built an operating system, a content management system to distribute games, and launched with a library of 19 titles — all in an 18-month, all-hands-on-deck effort.
The stakes were clear: if Nex Playground failed, Nex would fail.
Today, Nex Playground has sold over 200,000 units. It’s carried by Amazon, Walmart, Target, and Best Buy, and averages 4.7 stars in user ratings across all major retailers.
That’s Nex
The optimism and courage behind these starts — that’s what Nex is all about. These were the big ones. But there are countless small ones, too.
Starting something new, stepping out of your comfort zone — it’s never easy.
But the rewards and the learnings, whether it ends in success or failure, are always worth it.
What’s the start you’ve been putting off? Maybe today’s the day.