BigHoops – Topgolf for Basketball [video]
Hello, Hacker News community! We're the founding team of BigHoops : brothers Paul (CEO) and Dan Brown (CTO) and Brantley Beaird (Investor & Advisor). Dan and Paul have always been passionate about sports, particularly basketball. Over time, we noticed that while many people love watching Basketball, not all have access to or can easily engage in the sport with friends casually. That's why we created Bighoops - an experience that reimagines basketball for everyone, much like what Topgolf did for golf. Bighoops uses AI to adjust shots based on skill-level and performance and offers a variety…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hello, Hacker News community! We're the founding team of BigHoops : brothers Paul (CEO) and Dan Brown (CTO) and Brantley Beaird (Investor & Advisor). Dan and Paul have always been passionate about sports, particularly basketball. Over time, we noticed that while many people love watching Basketball, not all have access to or can easily engage in the sport with friends casually. That's why we created Bighoops - an experience that reimagines basketball for everyone, much like what Topgolf did for golf. Bighoops uses AI to adjust shots based on skill-level and performance and offers a variety of gameplay types, and we largely own this space given our early and broad patent. We believe it not only makes basketball more accessible and enjoyable (>90% positive reviews from 2,000+ paid experiences) but also introduces a fresh, exciting approach to the sport. Here are some additional reasons why we think Basketball entertainment dining will be as omni-present as bowling alleys and Topgolf in 5-10 years. * Size / Total Addressable Market (TAM) - Basketball is the ~2nd most popular sport in the US with what we think is >3x the TAM of golf entertainment dining. Topgolf was acquired for $2.7b in 2020. * Favorable real estate economics - Topgolf requires ~15 acres and ~$30m per venue, BigHoops fits in most malls and shopping centers at $5-$10m per venue, capitalizing on the commercial deals that have opened up since the pandemic and due to the general rise in e-commerce. * Accessibility - Not everyone can make solid contact with a golf ball, but just about everyone can and has shot a basket, and our patented AI skill-based adjustment along with regulation and larger than regulation hoops make it fun and competitive regardless of skill-level within a group. * Gameplay - BigHoops Original (medium exertion and pace), HORSE, Acceleration, Shot Clock, Staying Alive, Pong, Battleship, etc - these are just some of the gameplay types we currently have and are building. They span the spectrum of exertion, pace, and difficulty catering to both hardcore and casual players, families and birthdays, corporate events, etc. Note that we admire Topgolf and their successful model, and we plan to adapt their playbook to our unique context and needs in the Basketball entertainment dining industry. To date, we've raised a $450k seed round, have a patented AI-enabled machine that achieved a 90% fill rate @ $55/hr in our first beta Atlanta site, have built user stats and custom booking software online and at-venue, have a new and improved production-ready unit with additional experience-enhancing features (not shown in video), and have secured ~40% of funds for our Series A but are still looking for a lead investor. We're excited to bring Basketball entertainment dining to the world and are eager to hear what the HN community thinks. We would particularly appreciate feedback on fundraising and investor leads given that we’re more real estate and capex heavy vs the more typical pure-software HN startup, but any thoughts, feedback, and challenges to our assumptions are greatly appreciated. We are also open to potential collaborations and partnerships that could help us take Bighoops to the next level. Thanks, and we look forward to your insights! 1-min machine-in-action video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd9zH0UnAxQ&t=1s Visit us at https://www.bighoops.com/?utm_source=hackernews or feel free to reach out at [email protected]
Does the same job
all alternatives →
Smart People Should Build Things - Dave Finocchio, Co-Founder & CEO of Bleacher Report2016 · ▲98On giving sports fans what they want
Infinite Objects NBA TopShot Video Print2021 · ▲95Authenticated NFT video prints for NBA top shot collectors
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, July 2023
the whole month →
- WL
Hey everyone, I here is a small open-source project I've been working on lately. I'd love to hear your thoughts and improvement ideas :) GitHub: [github.com/Vincenius/workout-lol](https://github.com/Vincenius/workout-lol)
Dev tools · 2023 · workout.lol
- HN
I saw this [0] pretty cool thread by user revskill, and wanted a quicker way to search through it, but also to keep them all in one place so I can read them at my leisure whenever I get time. Right now is like 60 lines of Ruby using Nokogiri, but I will certainly look into it further down the line and improve the list. There's a cronjob checking the thread every 12 hours but I will eventually shut that down and it will become static after that. There are some really awesome blogs in there. I really recommend going through the list, it made my day. [0] "Could you share your personal blog…
Life & fun · 2023 · dm.hn
A safe space for your thoughts, private, local, p2p & open
Commerce · 2023 · anytype.io
