How a Dying Arcade Brand Became a Nostalgia Machine

0:00Jason:When it comes to launching a business, we talk a lot about having the big idea, the vision. But you know, there's more to it than that. Like setting up your website, your phone number, managing public records, staying on top of compliance. It's the unglamorous stuff that can be a lot to manage. And that is where Northwest Registered Agent can help. You don't just form a business. You start with a complete foundation built for privacy, credibility, and growth. Northwest Registered Agent has been helping small business owners and entrepreneurs launch and grow businesses for nearly 30 years. They are the largest registered agent and LLC service in the U.S.

0:42Jason:with over 1 ,500 corporate guides who are real people who know your local laws and can help you and your business every step of the way. Don't pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for what you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com slash solversfree and start using free resources to build something amazing. Get more with Northwest Registered Agent at northwestregisteredagent.com slash solversfree. I love a clever solution to a problem, something smart and actionable, the kind you can plan for in advance. But problems that spiral out of control are usually the ones that you never saw coming.

1:26Jason:That's what makes today's sponsor, Horizon 3, so special. They use sophisticated AI tools to find vulnerabilities in your systems the same way that bad actors and hackers do. Only instead of exploiting your vulnerabilities and weaknesses, they flag them so you can fix them first. This isn't just a solution to a problem. It is a solution to finding the problem. Horizon 3's Node Zero is an autonomous AI hacker that continuously attacks your own environment at machine speed, the same way a real attacker would finding all the areas that are vulnerable. See exactly what an attacker would find in your environment before they do.

2:08Jason:Go to horizon3.ai slash problem solvers and request your free Node Zero demo. Again, horizon3.ai slash problem solvers. No commitment required. Results in hours, not weeks. We are the standard bearer of arcade basketball and kind of focus on that. We're the original. We kind of wanted to claim that. I think in our case too, just to say, promote the legacy of our brand. Again, we've got a lot of history. People know us. People say, oh, I played on that game or this game or, you know, my father bought this, whatever it is. So play on that. I think in our case, a lot of people who are now, you know, parents, they started, you know, playing on pop shots when they were kids.

2:50They now have parents and so on. So I think, you know, play up that legacy aspect.

2:56Jason:Running a business means solving problems. I tell you how the smartest entrepreneurs do it. Hi, I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and this is Problem Problem Solvers.

3:10Jason:A couple years ago, my parents bought a Papa Shot. It's in their basement. Papa Shot, you know Papa Shot. It is the classic arcade-style basketball thing, right? Not an actual basketball game with a screen. Like an actual basketball in a hoop and you'd shoot it and it bounces all over the place and you compete and it's so fun. Anyway, so they set this thing up in the basement and when I would visit with my family, I loved playing with it. My kids loved playing with it. And then we bought a house and we had a basement. And I thought, I got to get a Papa Shot myself. This thing's got to be crazy expensive, right?

3:45Jason:And I went onto Amazon. I was like, no, this is actually extremely reasonable. And so I ordered it and I put it together myself and now it's in the basement. And I say that it's for my kids, but it's not. It's for me. Papa Shot, which is a brand that's been around for a long time, has actually been executing a very smart market shift to appeal to people exactly like me. This is a story of a brand that understands the power of nostalgia, that is thinking about this as a very particular moment where a brand like Papa Shot can win. So what does that look like? What does it look like to reimagine a brand for now recognizing shifts in consumer behavior?

4:21Jason:Well, I am very excited that I've got Tony Stucker, who is the CEO of Papa Shot, on the show to talk with me about it. You might also notice that I sound like crap. It's not because I'm sick. It's actually because I went karaoke-ing with friends a couple of days ago, and I went a little too hard, like I go hard on Papa Shot, and this is the result. Anyway, Tony, welcome to Problem Solvers. I'm so happy to have you here. Thank you, Jason. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So, Tony, this is a brand that's been around for decades, and you came in 10 years ago acquiring this brand, right, and are then rethinking what this brand can be.

4:57Correct, yeah. Yeah, so Papa Shot was founded in 1981 by a former college basketball coach, Ken Cochran. And in the 80s and 90s, Papa Shot was it. That was the game, the company. They've got the trademark. They didn't have a patent on the game. So other brands came along and created other games. But in the last 10 years before we bought the company, sales had really slid. Again, a lot of competitors had come in. Amazon had come from non-existent to being a driving force. And the owner of the company, Coach Cochran, was in his 80s. His health wasn't real good. He hadn't really spent much time on product development, marketing, and things like that.

5:35So it was really a ripe opportunity to take this brand, this legacy brand that seemingly everyone knew and really kind of grow it. Yeah, so I'd love to know how you think about developing a brand like this.

5:50Jason:And actually, maybe even before you jump into that, tell us a little bit about your background and the experience that you bring into rethinking Papa Shot. And then we'll start talking about how you take that background and that lens and apply it to what you were seeing the opportunity to be. Sure. So, you know, in some ways, I have no background that really applies to Papa Shot and what we did. In other ways, you know, I think, you know, all of life's lessons and business experiences is applicable. So I'd been a journalism major in school, got an MBA later, worked in advertising, started a travel magazine years ago, then worked primarily in Silicon Valley.

6:30A lot of high tech startups, mostly in sales, business development. So there were some some avenues there. But with Pop-A-Shot, it was things that I'd never done before, like, you know, exporting products, sourcing products from China. I'd never done anything like that. I'd never sold anything on Amazon. So there was quite a growth curve there. I had some, obviously, some experience with online advertising, some things like that, but a lot of the nuts and bolts, the tangible aspects, how do you make the game in China and then get that all the way to the customer was all new to me.

7:05Jason:I love that. I mean, as a guy who has a journalism background himself and now is also very involved in startups marketing efforts. Yeah, I know that a lot of this stuff really comes down to storytelling, right? You can figure out the logistics or you can hire somebody to figure out the logistics, but it's really, do you have the sensibility of how to tell the story of and relate this brand to now and then understand what it is that people want and feel now and how it can connect? Yeah, so I'm sorry. So actually, when I bought the company, I did not know or when I first found the company, did not know that Papa Shot was an actual company.

7:44Same thing. I knew the brand. I knew the game. I knew all that. I did not know there was a Papa Shot. And so I think that was kind of one of the key things we discovered early on. One of my, you know, aha moments, if you will, when we're still going through the process of buying the company, went on Amazon, typed in Papa Shot. at that point the real Papa Shot was not selling anything no one else could call themselves Papa Shot but that's what everyone you know refers to the game as so people go searching for that and and so it's kind of you know one of these things that uh-huh you know and like you said it is a almost a generic term you know like Kleenex for tissue or band-aid for bandages and so it's kind of like well you know why what if we made a game as good as whatever the top seller is here and we are Papa shot just kind of made sense to me that people would, would gravitate to that, you know, to the brand name.

8:37And so that was kind of that, you know, again, it's not really a rocket science, but it was kind of a, you know, a key insight, I guess. So that's kind of where we started off.

8:47Jason:Yeah. And then what do you do to a brand like this? I mean, it's a really simple product. You set it up, you shoot baskets. How do you think differently or tell this story differently? Yeah. So we really started off, we rebranded. The branding had still been very much, you know, with the coach had started in the 80s. So I found a branding agency out of Indianapolis, really liked their work, went to work with them. And a couple of the key insights, we really wanted it to be kind of nostalgic, retro. Papa Shot's colors have always been red, white, and blue. Again, people think of it as, you know, basketball in the kind of, you know, 70s, ABA, 80s, NBA, you know, kind of older school.

9:25So we really wanted to capture that. And so we wanted the energy of the logo to kind of be, you know, popping. We also, a key element was we put the original on there, you know, so people knew that this was Papa Shot, that this wasn't, you know, anything else. We were the original Papa Shot. So that was kind of a key branding exercise early on. I think that worked out really well. And then beyond that, it was just, it was almost kind of proof of concept, again, because I didn't have any experience in any of this. the first fall, knowing the holiday season. And the holiday season is the huge part of our sales, really for our home products.

10:01It's primarily like yourself, yourself, your parents, you know, families with kids, grandkids, what have you, put the game in the basement. So the holiday season's really important for us. So that first holiday season, we came out with a couple thousand games. Again, I had no experience doing this. We made a couple thousand games, sold out during the holidays and that was really kind of a proof of concept. It's like, aha, there's something here. And again, you know, there's a market here for what we're doing. And then really the following year really amped it up quite a bit. Revamped the product, made it much better.

10:34To be honest, that first product was not that great. Really made the next product much better. It kind of came to me too that Popashar really is kind of the standard bearer of arcade basketball games. There's a lot of brands. You go on Amazon, you go to the arcades. There's other brands they call it Hoop Shot or Basketball Shoot or whatever it is. So there's a lot of others. But these were all companies that were doing multiple other things, too. They weren't just making basketball games. When it came to basketball games, again, we were kind of the standard bearer. So I thought it was kind of our opportunity to really grow that.

11:06What did you think about how to get this in front of consumers?

11:14Jason:There's a kind of general awareness of a product like this. I had always known it existed, but I didn't really think about it until my parents bought it. I don't know why they bought it. I've got to ask them how it even got on their radar. But how have you approached getting this in front of the right people, identifying who those people are, who are more likely to buy? Do you have a, at this point it's been 10 years, a kind of sophisticated way of identifying who a likely pop-a-shot buyer is? Yeah, I think pretty much our early thoughts have pretty much come to bear that it's primarily, again, our home games, ones we're talking about here, that's what we're really focused on.

11:54It is its families, its parents with kids, you know, 6 to 18 years old, more or less, you know, kids at home, primarily also in places where the weather is more extreme. so like the northeast or mid-Atlantic, Midwest, where people have basements. Again, you're the perfect example where you take a game and whether you've got a tripped out, fully redone basement or just bare bones, whatever, you put the game down there, the kids are down there all winter, what have you. So that's kind of was our thesis. In terms of finding the audience, we found that for the most part, most of the year, we kind of, again, I mentioned the holiday season there.

12:32Most of the year, our audience is primarily people who are looking for games for a birthday or something like that. And so they're going on, they're searching for arcade basketball games, whether that be on Amazon or on our site or Google, what have you, and they find it. Where we really grow is the holiday season. Again, that's where I think people, and I don't know you or your parents, but that's when people kind of expand the search. And now they're like, okay, we want to get something for the family. We want to get something for the basement. It may be a pool table, maybe ping pong, it may be shuffleboard, what have you.

13:03And that's where it really expands. And so that audience expands quite a bit. So that's why our sales are about 10 times larger on a daily basis during the holidays.

13:11Jason:Interesting. I hadn't thought about it as a holiday thing because that's just not how we bought it. What do you as a brand like Papa Shot think about your relationship to national basketball? Yeah. So really good. So we started the licensing first with colleges way back when we first started with a couple of college licenses, Kansas, Kentucky. We've grown our NCA license to about 30 colleges now. So you can buy custom games with the backboards of those schools. The NBA, we started approaching fairly early. We have now, we're actually finishing our sixth year working with them as official licensees.

13:49So you can now buy custom games with licensed backboards of all NBA teams. So that's been very good, very effective, and we've had a really good relationship. In Yes, you're right. They're our multi-billion dollar organization and most of their brands are spending a lot more than we could afford. But they've been very good to work with. They've taken a lot of our products and used them at different events. And we've worked with them too. A lot of their kids things, charities. This weekend actually started yesterday in Chicago, the WNBA All-Star Fan Fest at McCormick Place. We actually took our brand new Papa Shot trailer that we just built.

14:28This is the first time we've used it. It's a 20-foot trailer with six of our arcade games, pop open the sides and play it. I drove it up in McCormick Place last Monday. And it's there over the weekend at the Fan Fest. So I think, you know, the NBA, like I said, I think they've been very good. Again, they're, you know, they don't need Papa Shot as much as Papa Shot needs them. But they've been a great partner and, you know, just trying to bring these things to them. So, again, we're always talking to different organizations. They're doing things in arena, different events, things like that. So yeah, they'd be really good.

15:03Jason:What have you found out in the world in terms of marketing or promotions that have really moved the needle for you? I love the idea of the trailer. It makes so much sense. It's low budget. You can just kind of roll up. People get to experience it. Then it's on their minds. Then they're back home and they're like, oh, I should put this in my own basement. But what have you found? I'm sure in 10 years, you've done a lot of experimentation that really - Here's something worth thinking about. The businesses growing fastest right now aren't necessarily the ones with the best product. They're the ones that removed the friction between I want that and I bought that.

15:38Jason:That's it. That's the whole game in e-commerce today. BigCommerce helps entrepreneurs do exactly that with fast store setups, flexible payment options, and tools that scale from your first sale to your 5 ,000th. See how much friction you can remove with a free 15-day trial at bigcommerce.com slash podcast. That's bigcommerce.com slash podcast. Labor Day savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at$399. Plus, save up to an extra$1 ,000 and get free delivery on appliance purchases of$998 or more. Get a Whirlpool laundry tower featuring industry-first UV clean technology designed to reduce bacteria in the wash without fading fabrics.

16:23Plus, with great prices at the Home Depot, you can save on select appliances designed to make laundry day easier. Shop Labor Day savings at the Home Depot today. Offer valid August 27th through September 16th. Do us only see store online for details.

16:34Jason:Lose the needle. Yeah, it's interesting. We've seen some different things, some different, you know, PR type things. everything from podcasts to, you know, appearances, different sites we go to. You know, I think for the most part, it's I still feel like for the most part, people are looking at us. It's more kind of an awareness play. I think that someone, you know, it's not necessarily moving the needle right then and there. But we've, you know, whether it's working with celebrities or players or giving games or donating games, we did something with Today Show years ago or donated games to Boys and Girls Club.

17:10And I think all of these things are very cumulative. It's not necessarily, we haven't seen anything that, you know, there hasn't been a quote viral moment where, you know, something happens and you get that spike immediately. I think it's been kind of a slow build. We hear from people who have seen us over time.

17:26Jason:I got to tell you this random story. I don't know how this is going to relate, but I'm sure you'll say something smart. So the trailer reminded me of many, many years ago, I was talking to someone at Sabra Hummus. This was, I mean, more than a decade ago. And they were telling me that, you know, the challenge for Sabra Hummus is that Sabra owns, I presume they probably still do. There's more competitors now than there were 10 years ago. But anyway, they like own the American hummus market or just like dominate the American hummus market. Their problem isn't owning the market. Their problem is that the market is too small, that many Americans don't know what hummus is.

18:06Jason:And so they realized that they needed to shift some of their energy away from promoting Sabra hummus and instead just get hummus in front of people, just introduce the very concept of hummus. and so one of the things they did was they set up this trailer and they would take it around the country to areas that just weren't all that familiar with hummus right it's like leave new york city everyone knows hummus and you go out to to suburban utah and um and park it in front of a mall and then just hand out hummus and a little pamphlet about what what to dip in it and then a bevy of snacks you know what do you want to dip into chips pretzels whatever and uh and then stand around like chat with people as they tried it so i went out and i hung out at that trailer and it It was a really fun experience.

18:46Jason:And, you know, when you said trailer, I thought, oh, well, this is interesting because actually it's a somewhat different problem than Sabra, but not entirely if you squint at it. Because Papa Shot has broad brand recognition, or at least the broad phrase recognition, right? You may not know that it's a brand, but you know the term. but it's also possible that you become a parent and you got kids and maybe you have a basement and you just kind of forgot about this thing. You knew about it. You played with it at some point. Your touch point is maybe at an arcade, but the ones at arcades are now larger and more involved.

19:28Jason:There's big screens and it just seems like I couldn't have that in my basement. It's too much. So to just go out there and remind people, this exists in the marketplace. This is really fun. It's also really simple, probably just embeds in their head that, oh, yeah, I forgot about this as a category of thing. And then PopperShot becomes the natural solution to that new desire. Is that something that you're seeing or thinking about? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So a key part we haven't really touched on much. So really the first about eight, nine years that we've owned the business, we focused on the home market.

20:04So, again, the Amazon sales and like you and your parents buying. last year we introduced what we call our elite game that is a coin operated that's the thing you would see in arcade pop a shot that's where pop shot started they hadn't made one in over 25 years so anything you would go to a bar arcade dave and busters whatever if you saw a quote pop a shot it almost 99 wasn't a pop a shot it was another brand um so we that was kind of all as our goal was to come back in it's a different market from the home market it's obviously much weren't B2B. It's a lot different. There's some dominant players in there.

20:39So it wasn't the same thing. But what we've really tried to do is grow that market and really with competitions. It's been a key part of it. So in terms of promotions and things like that. So in two weeks, I guess it is, I think it's two weeks from today, we're doing our third national championship on ESPN 8, the Ocho. Oh, so fun.

20:58Jason:Just to market, we're talking on July 24th. So two weeks from that, which would be kind of in mid-August of 2020. Yes, yes, August 7th. So it'll be our third year doing the ESPN Ocho National Championship. We'll bring 12 competitors down to Orlando. They'll play. So we have qualifiers throughout the year. Some of those have been broadcast on ESPN. We have a Boston qualifier broadcast on ESPN. Chicago will be broadcast. And so that's really been a touch point too. So I've talked to people at some of our qualifying events. They say they'll be at home. They know they pop a shot name. They'll see the competition.