Hooper App - Goated Guild Audit
Overview
This business audit offers an in-depth analysis of the Hooper app, exploring its current market position, competitive landscape, product opportunities, and strategic growth avenues. The analysis covers potential product improvements, growth tactics, community engagement, and scalable opportunities to create a sustainable competitive advantage.
A full report includes detailed data analysis, customer interviews, suggested introductions to key industry players, and UX/UI screenshots with recommendations for improvement. This is a pared down version for public consumption.
If you're interested in getting a business audit done for your company, you can learn more and purchase one here.
1. App Description
Hooper (http://hooper.gg) is a social network for pickup basketball players. The mobile app helps casual basketball players track their stats and highlights by analyzing game footage of their sessions without external hardware. The AI detects made/missed shots, three-point lines, and individual players, creating shot charts, statistics, and video compilations. Users can follow and connect with friends, tag players in games, and view highlights globally.
Magic Moment: Seeing your first highlights from a game made automatically.
People at the gym now hound me for coming in late to record.
2. Market Analysis
Industry Overview:
Basketball is the U.S.'s #1 participatory sport, with over 27.1 million people playing at least once in 2021—11 million more than baseball, the second most popular sport.
Core basketball players (those who play at least 13 times a year) total 16.1 million.
Pickup basketball culture makes it easy to play anywhere, which gives it an advantage over other sports that require more resources or coordination. You can start with a trash can and crumpled piece of paper.
Target Market:
U.S. Core Basketball Players ages 13-45: 10.1 million.
Focus: Players who play weekly and want to track their top moments and progress.
3. Competitor Analysis
Direct Competitors:
HomeCourt: A real-time stat tracking app. Raised $37M. Parent company Nex has 80+ employees and other unrelated apps. The app is an NBA partner and is aimed at kids improving their skills (Steve Nash / Sue Bird invested). Paid membership options are available.
SportsVisio: Aimed at teams and leagues. Has a team of 37 and raised $3M seed funding. SportsVisio’s pricing makes it better suited for organized leagues rather than individual players.
Spiideo: Focuses on installing 4K cameras in gyms and training facilities. Has 108 employees and recently raised $20M.
Indirect Competitors:
Overtime: A basketball league and media company focused on high school basketball. While not a direct competitor, it has the potential to enter the social app space.
Greenfly: B2B company that helps leagues convert long-form video into short-form content.
DribbleUp: A smart basketball with a connected skills app, mainly for dribbling practice.
Veo: Camera company that works with teams in more professional settings, doing well into 8 figures.
4. Product Functionality
What the Product Does:
Feed: A feed of highlights from your friends with a toggle to see global content.
Friends: Find and connect with people you play with.
Record: Record a game or shootaround, with instructions on how the game is set up.
Game Log: A list of past games with detailed stats and player tagging.
Profile: A personal profile with mixtapes and past stats.
Who the Product Is For:
Improver Kid (12-25 years old): Actively training to become a better basketball player.
Old Head (25-45 years old): Playing basketball for health/fun, interested in sharing clips on social media.
Casual: Plays occasionally and enjoys watching basketball clips.
Questions To Ask:
How can you incentivize people to record games they typically wouldn't record?
How can you gamify the app on the stats side like a fitness app would? Can you show progress over time?
How can you build a data moat?
Why People Want to Use the Product:
Ego: Showcase personal skills and highlights.
Analytics: Measure and record sessions to improve.
Boredom: Enjoy watching basketball clips.
Exploration: Find new places to play basketball.
5. Product Development
Prioritized List of Product Updates:
Must Ship:
Tag Interface Overhaul: Streamline the tagging process to make it more intuitive. Tagging is the most crucial element to virality in the app, so this is the top priority. More on this in UX section.
Share Button: For easy sharing of clips. The feed must have a share button. Feedback - Litty (Sharing)
Clip Creator: Allow users to select times to clip, choose tag names, and select who to follow for their own clips. This allows users to create data that can be trained for future automated categorization of common stats like assists, rebounds, and steals, as well as unique stats like crossovers and night-night celebrations per 48.
Decrease Time to First Clip: Chop off the first 2 minutes of video and try to get a highlight out of it (ideally upload video while recording).
Start Button: It simply does not work sometimes, when a game is about to start. That pressure is too much when I have to quit the app and restart.
Medium Priority:
Push for Photos in Profiles: Enhance user identity in an in-person network where people may not know each other well. Encourage users to upload real face pictures, which can help with tagging when automated.
Watermarking or End of Clip Callout: Add a Hooper.gg watermark or audio tag at the end of clips, with a 2-second video featuring the username and a call to action to add the app.
Grab Social Media Info: Collect social media info to build out profiles and better understand users, identifying those with the potential to push content to viral outlets.
Low Priority:
Future Game Feature: Allow users to check if others are attending, making tagging easier.
Suggested Friends: Analyze the network to suggest connections based on in-person interactions. Soft-link users even without officially “friending” each other, which can help with content sharing.
Multiple Tags: Enable clips to be tagged by multiple people.
Introduce Faster Playback Options: Offer 1.5x and 2x playback options for easier clipping.
Leaderboard For Stats: I would like to get an award for the most STOCKS per 36 in Bergen County pickup basketball history
Tag Location To A Particular Venue: Helps for discovery later
6. User Experience (UX) & Interface Design
Current UX Review:
Website teardown here
The current tagging process is confusing and could be improved by showing one picture per individual player identified with distinct tagging options in a vertical scroll. You can always show the full clip list elsewhere. Currently users are not being tagged because of the UX of the top of the tagging mechanism not being shown after you scroll. As you can see in the video, the user expects to be able to long press on themselves and tag. Feedback - Michael , Feedback - Ralph
Tagging happens after a video is uploaded and processed, which takes too long. It would be ideal to tag who was on each team and the outcome of the game during upload, making the tagging process easier later (alerts to the players that there is video of them. Like a dating app telling you someone likes you)
7. Growth Strategies
Product-Led Growth:
Invite Players to Tag Themselves: Send a text invitation to new users to tag themselves in a game.
Incentivize Recording: Encourage recording by offering financial rewards or free access to stats for those who record and tag multiple games a week.
Hooper.gg Watermark: Add a branded watermark to videos to promote the app.
Sharing Editor: Allow users to add their stats overlaid onto images for sharing.
Game Planner: Create a feature for planning games and ensuring enough attendance, making it easier to auto-tag participants afterward and find new games when traveling.
Community Growth Tactics:
Branded Tripods: Distribute branded tripods to encourage high-quality recordings and market the product.
Stickers on Courts: Use stickers to promote the app at local basketball courts.
Hooper T-Shirts: Design t-shirts with slogans and the website tag on the nape of the neck (e.g., "He’s with us," "You can’t guard me," "Shooter," "Casual").
Social Channel for Best Clips: Create a social media channel showcasing the best clips from the app. Use collected social account info to create collab reels for reach.
Community Recorders: Offer free tripods and app access to dedicated recorders.
Partnerships:
Gym Collaborations: Partner with gyms to encourage staff and members to record games, highlighting what non-members are missing. For example, 24 Hour Fitness has a member spotlight where you can be featured in the community.
Brand Collaborations: Work with brands to provide free products to top users or sell ads targeting the Hooper audience. Leverage data to identify key real-life influencers who can drive brand awareness.
8. Monetization Strategy
Revenue Opportunities:
Freemium Model: Offer basic features for free with advanced features available for a fee, focusing on paid features like stats and better analytics.
Merchandise: Custom basketballs / clothing / stickers with Hooper branding. This is what I do.
Creator Monetization: Curating the best clips and serving them up to monetized social channels
9. Opportunities at Scale
Long-Term Strategies:
Paid Tournaments: Pay users to attend tournaments and create high-quality clips.
Data Training: Use user-generated data to train models for better video tagging and analysis.
Additional Revenue Streams: Explore ads, premium features, and partnerships for future growth.
10. Customer Feedback/Quotes
(A full report includes detailed customer quotes but I’m tired bruv. For now, I’ll just share the videos from users.)
Analysis Summary
Hooper is an app with great potential to be the leading social network for pickup basketball. It has innovative technology that helps surface clips that are typically either locked away deep in someone’s camera roll or thought to be too difficult and time-consuming to capture. The focus needs to be on developing the social aspect of the app and using AI as a tool to engage people in a community.
AI can solve many problems, but take a page out of Peter Thiel’s (yeah, I know) book and apply the 80/20 rule with your technology: PayPal and Palantir share the philosophy of using technology to get 80% of the way there, then using people to sift through the remaining 20%. At PayPal, it was fraud detection; at Palantir, it’s whatever they’re doing for the government. The point is that many founders try hard to automate everything, but the reality is that to automate everything, you have to understand everything—and that’s near impossible without some human input.
Use AI to tag people and make clips, but then let users come up with their own ways of creating clips. You don’t need to have a list of everything they would clip—let the crowd create new things that aren’t defined anywhere else.
Overall, I believe with some tweaks, this app will be ready to fully launch soon and become the leading social network for pickup basketball.