BigHoops
By: Chris Quirk | Categories: Alumni Achievements
Brown, who worked in consulting and finance for 14 years, is combining his expertise and love of good-natured rivalry in his first entrepreneurial venture, BigHoops.
BigHoops is an active basketball game created for a pub or arcade. Instead of the typical bar game where players lob free throws, BigHoops is engineered to level the playing field and provide a little whiz-bang through technology. Players can set their own skill levels, and BigHoops adjusts accordingly to equalize the challenge. The basket moves, requiring players to hit shots from 8 to 21 feet away, the height of the basket varies, and the signature big hoop—which deploys for lesser-skilled players—is 23 inches in diameter, as opposed to a standard 18-inch rim. In addition, the setup has large video screens that mimic a basketball arena, or players can choose themed displays for birthdays or a futuristic look. There’s nothing else out there quite like it, Brown says. “There are some basketball machines that move back and forth, but nothing that does it with any intelligence and has the flexibility that ours has,” he says.
BigHoops is part of a new hybrid activity niche that Brown calls “competitive socializing,” a little something for people for whom watching a basketball game while partaking of onion rings and an IPA isn’t enough. “If you look at basketball, there’s around 150 million combined current players, previous players, and fans. That’s darned near half the country,” says Brown, explaining that these fans don’t have a lively game to take part in, such as Topgolf. “We call that ‘orphaned interest.’ They might go to Dave & Buster’s to play some small ball, but there’s no real social interaction around it.”
While the goal is entertainment, Brown is a seasoned management consultant, and he performed extensive due diligence and research to test the viability of his idea, including finding ways to knock down barriers to entry as part of the process. Many of the performance levelers—like using an algorithm to decrease or increase difficulty for players during their turns—are meant to keep players involved. “If you start to miss something like four or five times, you’re going to lose interest,” he says.
Brown tested BigHoops by installing the homemade prototype at the Second Self Beer Company—another company founded by Georgia Tech grads—in August of 2022. “I literally cut the metal and welded it, and my brother did the coding.” Once BigHoops was up and running, Brown reports that traffic at the brewery doubled, with BigHoops booked up to two weeks in advance. “We saw a certain pattern and called it the conversion. Someone might be unwilling to play, but once they made a few shots, they’d get that dopamine reward and they’d light up or start joking or trash-talking,” Brown says.
The BigHoops venture was years in the making, with Brown working weekends on the project before taking it live, and despite the high failure rate for startups, Brown is quietly confident. “It’s a simple concept. We know people like basketball. We’ve developed a tested solution, and we know that people go out and they pay for entertainment, food, and beverages.” He credits the drive he developed studying at Georgia Tech as being a catalyst to take the entrepreneurial leap. “You have to achieve there. It’s not a negotiation,” he says. “That instills this little engine in you to look for progress and see how you can make an impact.”
Brown is now working to build a large space with 10 BigHoops units in Atlanta. “Our demographic is age 8 to 88. You could have a birthday party in there during the day, and we’ll lower the lights in the evening to create a lounge vibe for the nightlife scene.” The potential opening is November 2024.
