Unlocking new business opportunities amidst a pandemic and major company pivot
The pandemic saw us all adapting to a new way of living. It kept us all indoors, leaving people looking for ways to be active at home. We saw a massive spike in organic growth coming to HomeCourt—a basketball training app. But the engagement we were seeing from users were overwhelmingly for non-basketball use cases. HomeCourt included sport-agnostic conditioning and agility drills, which made up a small percentage (about 10%) of all the activities available on the platform. We were seeing 60% of all usage was in non-basketball activities during Q2 of 2020.
+716%
New users per day (Year over year)
5.9M
Non-basketball sessions (Q2 2020)
775K
New user registrations (Q2 2020)
62K
Non-basketball sessions per day (Q2 2020)
The team rapidly responded to the signal we were receiving, sensing that the market was trying to tell us something by way of their use of Homecourt. As a means of identifying an opportunity to serve a new and much larger market segment with our existing technology, we explored a variety of paths, both within HomeCourt and outside of it.
Nex’s patented motion-tracking was brought to a much broader audience—physical fitness.
A entirely new app, Active Arcade, took all of the conditioning and agility training drills out of HomeCourt, creating a new destination for users that was unencumbered by the heavy basketball focus of HomeCourt. We also used this as an opportunity to experiment with rapid prototypes of activities that were more graphically rich—a signal of what was to come couple of years later. The investigations ran wide, from casual to serious, to youth to adult.
In HomeCourt, we added three new general athletic activities. They garnered 7x faster adoption than previous activities and users logged 1.1M sessions in 2 months. We also added ten new soccer activities to determine if there was more interest in having access to training for multiple sports within one app. Those activities accrued 100K sessions in 2 months, and 2X faster adoption than our next most popular activity.
Lastly, we looked deeply into the at-home fitness space, trying to uncover any possibilities of business growth by releasing a PE-focused program for getting kids to log their physical activity at home and a virtual-treadmill and leaderboard—both only required a camera-enabled device with a screen in order to participate.
Improving the quality, retention, and engagement on HomeCourt with Nike and a surge of new users
Leading our partnership with a highly-coveted brand
During the pandemic, we had a unique opportunity to partner with Nike on co-branded content. The goal was to capitalize on the surge of usage we were experiencing, experiment with branded content for additional revenue stream business opportunities on-platform, exchange digitally-tracked physical activity for rewards in physical goods, and convert users into Nike members. I took this opportunity to push our team to lean into the quality of our output as I felt it was important for us to align closely with the customers’ expectation of the Nike brand’s aesthetic quality. Achieving these goals was challenging due to restrictive technical constraints, disparate cross-functional needs, and internal API access limitations. Leading this effort was a challenging but rewarding experience, particularly after seeing how the team pulled through with eye-opening results.
The impact of the Nike brand on Homecourt content was immediate and impressive
Using all-new activities that featured premier Nike athletes, we improved organic growth where 34% of users successfully shared content with other users, compared to 24% prior to the partnership. Throughout the run, D30 retention for Nike activities totaled 9.7% where our generic, non-Nike activities garnered 8.6%. Conversions that led consumers to the Nike.com store from HomeCourt surpassed initial expectations by 110% (26% average conversion rate), marking the overall proof of concept as a success.
We launched an in-store activation at Nike the Grove in LA to coincide with the Space Jam 2 movie launch, using custom content developed for HomeCourt.
30-day retention
⇡12.5%
41%
sign-ups for Nike memberships; goal: 10%
26%
conversions to visit Nike.com store; 110% more than our goal
