5,000 to 500K Units: Retail Demo Strategy That Scaled

0:00Andres Figueira:I worked for Apple for eight years and left Apple 2017 to start Nix. And Nix now built Nix Payground, an active play system for kids and families. You know, this is a device that, you know, will be sitting in the center of your living room, connect to the TV, use the camera, and detect your motion, and recreate active play experiences on the device. Basically, games that get the move, bring the family together.

0:22David Lee:Once you buy the hardware, you would just need to update the software every now and then to be getting new games that you guys create.

0:28Andres Figueira:So you buy the hardware and we have five games bundled with the hardware already. We have the rest of the library available as a subscription and you get game updates. You get new games for a whole year. For us, it's important to innovate. It's important to push boundaries and having a persistent relationship with our customer, meaning that our customer actually supporting us to innovate more for them.

0:55David Lee:Hey, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Andres Vieira, and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company. We're helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and global perspective to every role. And just for our listeners today, we're offering an exclusive 10 % discount on your first hire. So all you need to do is visit GlobalTalent.co, click Start Hiring, and mention the podcast listener discount when we get in touch.

1:30David Lee:And with me here today, I am speaking with David Lee, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder at Next, a company that is helping families reconnect with the joy of movement through fun, social, and interactive content that's accessible to all ages. So David, how's it going, man? It's a pleasure to have you on the show.

1:50Andres Figueira:Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

1:53David Lee:No problem at all. We're super excited to also have you be on this episode and really learn everything about what you've been doing, what Next is. So, David, in order to start putting the audience a bit more in context here, would you be able to give us a brief overview of your background and maybe in your own words, what Next is?

2:12Andres Figueira:so Nix is a company that my second startup I worked for Apple for 8 years and left Apple 2017 to start Nix and Nix now built Nix Payground an active play system for kids and families and we sell quite a lot of them already I think 350 ,000 units so far in the US and this is a device that you know, will be sitting in the center of your living room, connect to the TV, use a camera, and detect your motion, and we create active play experiences on the device. Basically, games get to the move, bring the family together, and we're excited about what we have delivered for the customer so far, and excited about what we're going to deliver to the customer in the future.

3:04Andres Figueira:So that's a high level of what we are.

3:07David Lee:And okay, I would love to know, David, is then what was your kind of like aha moment when you noticed that there was this opportunity in the market to create next playground and what specifically um i mean like brought you to to actually do this endeavor of creating this this i want to say video game but i feel it's not technically a video game so it's kind of like a way to play with the tv yeah so um a living room

3:35Andres Figueira:and actually a space that brings people together. And I want to tell you a little bit about how we get started. When we get started with Next, the first thing you do is not Next Playground or motion games or acupade experiences. We start with a mobile app called Home Court, which gets people to play better basketball. So it's a basketball training app. So if you search for basketball app today, home court probably still will be your very first hit. So we're the first company. We just use Compatite Vision to, you can set up a phone on a tripod, you're pointing at a passable court. So shoot, you count your make-miss, you check your angle, you track how fast you move, how high you jump in real time.

4:25Andres Figueira:And it's a wonderful tool for basketball players to horn their shots. And this is the original of the company. It spent like 18 months building it up. And it's now still tracking over 150 ,000 shots a day. It's a pretty incredible piece of software that you, a very specific task, track basketball shot. So some of my investors told me that while for a thousand companies that would start with building a basketball training app, probably only one company would end up having like a game console type hardware. So the journey is like very atypical. So what happened is that, you know, we get started, we built a great tool, NBA, invested in the company.

5:12Andres Figueira:We thought, wow, we can basically take this basketball training app to globally. But we went through a pandemic. In the pandemic, like, oh, would people still pay basketball in the pandemic? Like get together? Kind of hard to imagine that. But HomeCourt app actually ran viral. But what ran viral is not the soft tracking capabilities, but we have a small, a lot of like mini interactive training games in it. The games that train your reaction, the game that train your ball handling, those are the things that ran viral. So in a pandemic, like, you know, we take those things out, we create another app called Active Arcade.

5:53Andres Figueira:Active Arcade ran viral again. Apparently there's a, people really want something like this in their life, something that basically is get them to move, make it fun, and we look into how the user has been using the Active Arcade app, we find that the bigger the screen, the better the engagement, the better the retention. And the bigger screen is the TV. So you compare retention of people who use Active Arcade on the phone versus on the TV. It's 10x. is quickly tell, oh, we are actually building for the wrong platform. And I've been, you know, go around, do they want to search for like a 65-inch iPad?

6:39Andres Figueira:Can I find it? Eventually, we build ourselves, build one ourselves, and that's Next Playground. And we keep building games, keep making it better, and hit like a pretty massive plot of market fit with Next Playground.

6:50David Lee:Wow, that is so cool because like I am a video game enthusiast, so I really like everything that has to do with tech and gaming and then now hearing what you've created with this next playground it's just so interesting and then once you buy the hardware you would just need to update the software every now and then to be getting new games that you guys create or then just seeing what else is

7:12Andres Figueira:is available for next playground yep so we keep things very simple so you buy the hardware and we have five games bundled with the hardware already so you buy it you can you can play it right away, five games included. We have the rest of the library available as a subscription. So just one simple, sustainable business model and help us basically offer all the content we create and we'll create in the future for you. The subscription costs$89 a year and the access to everything that we create and add to the playground. So it does not require you to buy individual games. All the games would come with the subscription services.

7:55Andres Figueira:and you get game updates, you get new games for the whole year. And we hope that we can like serve your family really well so we can earn an idea of your business for the next year. So that's how we think about business. Keep it very simple. We want to kind of serve our customers with our best and keep it simple and easy to understand.

8:13David Lee:I love that. I love that. And especially with something like a moment that you're creating for family time, you want to produce the less friction as possible just so that you can make sure they enjoy the moment the most and not have to be worrying about other stuff that might just affect the afternoon that they want to spend or their Sunday morning or something like that. So I totally understand that, David.

8:36Andres Figueira:Yeah, for us, it's important to innovate, important to push boundary and having a persistent relationship with our customer, meaning our customer actually supporting us to innovate more for them. If I open it up for many different games, and we may not be as curated. We have a curated experience. Oh, we have some new ideas there. We can invest in resources into those new ideas. So keep it innovative. Keep it very customer oriented. We are serving a group of customers already who is on a subscription plan with us. We learn them. We know about them better. We want to serve them better with every update, every new games.

9:16David Lee:And David, now moving on to a bit more on the marketing aspect of Next and specifically Next Playground. How was it when you finalized like creating the hardware and when you had the idea totally set up, then in order to market that, what was your angle? Because I feel you are also competing with a lot of legacy brands and there's a lot of static in the gaming industry. So how are you able to set yourselves apart? Is it by making it and making the consumer understand that it's for the family and it's to spend a better time, which is something that I feel video games aren't too aligned with. It's more of like the independent, solitary person playing in their room.

9:57David Lee:So I'm not sure how you went about that.

10:00Andres Figueira:Yeah, so I can share a little bit about our journey. We first have our, like, you know, as a hardware company, we always need to be able to find that initial audience. serve them really well, and grow from there. So what happened is in 2023, we only create 5 ,000 units. That's all we can create. We create 5 ,000 units. We have our pre-order campaign. We sold through all 5 ,000 units before Thanksgiving. So way before Thanksgiving, 2023, we sold through all of them. And our goal, at that time, I remember I bring the whole company together. And we only have one goal and one goal only to make sure there's 5 ,000 people who got our first generation hardware really happy with what we created.

10:56Andres Figueira:The hardware, the OS, the games on it, make sure that they're really, really happy. And they are. And into 2024, we make a pretty bold move. We send samples to Walmart, Target, and Best Buy. Wow. People said that it would take us two years to get into retail. And the great news we had then last year is that everyone come back and want to carry a product in the second year of existence. So we were at 1 ,000 stores last year, 2024. And with that, that is more like building our ecosystem together that is with the retail partners, with our IP partners, our internal game studios, our studio partners, keep building this ecosystem, keep building a distribution.

11:52Andres Figueira:And in 2025, we expanded 1 ,000 stores to now over 5 ,000 stores. And in over 4 ,000 of them, we actually have retail demo. So it would say like, because we are doing a product that is a physical component, meaning that like you when you see other people oh dancing and playing foot ninja or rolling a bowling ball you oh i you you understand what this product do so we put a pretty quick emphasis on our retail demo and want to make sure that hey people can get a try of the product you know in a store as a way to you know consider like you know whether this product should be going into their lives um so that's a little bit more journey like how we go from 5 000 150 000 last year this year we forecast to probably at least two half a million units no that that is crazy david and and

12:52David Lee:honestly i just love how organic the growth was because it was just making sure that the 5 000 people you sent or you sold the product you were very happy um but i love as and as you mentioned there i love the boldness of the move of sending a uh what's it called a sample samples walmart uh target and and what was the third one you mentioned best buy that was when you mentioned the physical demo in the place i imagined myself in best buy i remember the last time i went to the states i got to try out one of those new vrs the meta quest 3 or something like that but it's the best way to get the consumer to want your product without being too pushy and leaving them to decide like, oh, this is cool.

13:31David Lee:I could see this in my house. So I love that. I love that. And in terms then of marketing, have you really had to do much of it to make sure that you stay relevant or with being on the retailer shelves and just being present in those stores that people go about every day? Have you felt that the growth has been more natural without needing to actually invest in social media campaigns and user generated content and all that?

13:56Andres Figueira:Well, we have a full funnel marketing mix. So we actually do a lot outside of that as well. And we have an omni-channel approach that we want to meet customer where they are. We want to amplify the story that customers share. And I think it all rooted from that we want to build a great product that the customer would talk about. and we share with their friends, and would leave us really good reviews. I think all begin with having a good product first, and then obviously then we would selectively pick channels to amplify those stories, to amplify we have a new game coming, and we have a new game with Barbie, we have a new game with Kung Fu Panda, we have a new game with Bluey, and we keep doing this as we bring more really amazing franchises on board of our system.

14:54Andres Figueira:and we certainly want to create a great social media presence as well. So I would say, I think of our marketing as free steps in how I think about it, of how we think about our marketing. And we have places where when you heard about the product from a friend, you would want to come in and have a conversation with us. like it's like our website is our like retail presence is the retail demo is our um uh you know the product description page on on on amazon and walmart and target and best buy and sam's club our social media presence so when people oh i heard about this company i want to hear more about us and want to kind of visit one of our properties like we want to have those um you know those those places we have like you know communicate the product to you and want to make sure that you have good experience getting into one of those touch points with us so that's number one second would be hey we do performance marketing too and basically bring you back to the conversation that you have started a little bit more like like how i think about it is bring you back to the conversation you have started we have new things we have new games you know and and now you know we can continue the conversation with us understand us better to facilitate our purchase decisions we are selling like a 249 product is our conceded purchase is not an impulse purchase so as we go through the journey certainly we want to kind of in in every single instances we want to can build trust we also want to kind of serve our customer existing customer really well so that you know

16:37David Lee:you hear from them how they love it they're still paying a monthly subscription right your your existing customers they need to pay every single month to keep on being able to access the full possibilities of Next Playground, right?

16:51Andres Figueira:Yep. So we are on, we only offer a quarterly plan or an annual plan at the moment. So we are not doing a monthly plan yet. And the reason why is that we want to build a deeper, longer relationship with our customers because we are building game. We like that. Hey, give us a chance to serve you for a year. For the year, last year we shipped close to 20 games. and many more game updates. And next year, we also want to kind of do even more content for our customer into the next year. But we'll maybe shift more focus onto updating the games because we know which game people like. And some of the game, I think we would be more like a live ops approach for the game.

17:35Andres Figueira:And so that people who love the game get the content they want. And this is the process of building. So we talk about the performance marketing help us continue the conversation and the brand marketing, you know, is really about like how to kind of start more conversation with more people by basically clearly defining them like who we are, what we are doing and if you like, you know, what we're doing or if you'd like to look like, you know, one of our customers. So this like we amplify authentic customer story with our marketing engine to bring more people into the mix to, you know, go through that journey with us And, you know, hopefully at some point they make up their mind to, you know, start the relationship, a real formal customer relationship with PIX.

18:22Andres Figueira:So that's how we think about our marketing strategy.

18:25David Lee:And I feel that it sounds totally logical in the way of how you would approach this from the type of company and the industry that you're within. You need to create this type of trust and bring them back to the conversation. because buying a, like I was going to say a console, which is pretty much what I feel it is that you put on your living room. It's always a contemplated purchase, as you mentioned. So I totally agree with that. And David, is the marketing you guys create, and I feel I know the answer to this, but is it more tailored to the kids or the parents of the family when you're asking them and showing them all the features, different games, new updates?

19:04David Lee:I'm just wondering if you're tailoring it towards the young ones in the family or to the ones who actually have the money to buy the...

19:14Andres Figueira:Next playground is for design for kids and families. And yes, our audience of the family will have young kids, like kids 3 to 12 years old would be like our core demographic at the moment. We serve the kids. We also serve the parents. When kids go to school, we have fitness experience, all the parents. And we have something for the grandparents as well. So we also want to have sports experience, which really the best sports games would be on playground because I can actually holding a real baseball bat to play our baseball game. And we can have our bowling experiences because it's so easy to just track your hand movement, how you spin it, how you roll it.

19:55Andres Figueira:We can have like 90 years old playing our bowling game. And it's like people share like one new thing that they do for us. obviously the buyer most likely the parents sometimes the grandparents so the messaging is like you know would be a little more like oh our customer have a playground would look like this and using that as a messaging you know to and they're active they're happily they're playing games like kiss and family bonding time siblings and you know they're active they're happy they're sweating um so that's that's kind of master call messaging that we want to kind of you know how having our next playground in a home make you feel um and obviously that is for the for the you know i would say that you know for kids as well hey do you want to like do like this um do you want to do you want to have like you know these play with these characters that you know um and yeah so that's that's when you when you're uh if your kids like love Bruy?

21:05Andres Figueira:And do you want to be like play like the Bruy's family? And that's kind of the view that we want to you know, share with our audience.

21:16David Lee:I like that because of the fact that it really does, what's it called? The appeal isn't to the kids or the parents, it's just to the family in general and I feel that family is a feeling that a lot of people can empathize with and if they don't have that feeling that it's something they crave and next playground can be something that helps them understand that hey it's achievable it's achievable to have a nice time while resting on a sunday morning and not just all of us be watching tv silently and not doing anything or something like that um but i love it i love it and in terms of of of you guys is like the software that you're using with necks and how it's able to read so well how you move your hand for bowling or batting with the bat, is that yours and proprietary only to Next per se, David?

22:04David Lee:Like, did you patent this? Or is it something that is like a normal resource in gaming? I'm not even sure how to describe it because it's very techie, but it's me out of genuine curiosity just wanting to know.