Titans: Building the Perfect Shot with Noah CEO, John Carter

Inside the Episode

What I heard at Sloan [Conference] in 17′, not just from one or two guys, four or five NBA people said ‘John, what you’ve got here is terrific, this is going to go. You need to get ready. But what you need to come up with is some way to tag the data to the player without them having to wear anything. NBA players don’t like to wear sensors. You know when people come in at 10 o’clock at night to shoot… they don’t want to wear sensors. If you can come up with a way to tag the shots without anybody having to do anything, you’ve got a great product already, but this is going to be a slam dunk.'” – John Carter, CEO of Noah

In the third episode of our “Titans” series, exploring the best companies in basketball and beyond, we sat down with, John Carter, the CEO of the shot tracking and date company, Noah. Noah has become a staple in gyms from the NBA to high school levels and we dove deep into the history, growth, innovations, analytics, and future of the company that has change how a player’s shot is practiced, tracked, and taught.

Chapters

0:00 The Birth and Growth of Noah

4:14 Basketball Training System Evolution

11:29 Product Building and Basketball Data Analysis

19:11 Basketball Shooting Technique Importance

25:31 Analyzing Data for Coaching Decisions

29:36 Noah’s Impact on Player Development

Transcript

John Carter: 0:00

What I heard at Sloan in 17 is not just from one or two guys, four or five NBA people said “John, what you’ve got here is terrific, this is going to go. You need to get ready. But what you need to come up with is some way to tag the data to the player without them having to wear anything. Nba players don’t like to wear sensors. You know when people come in at 10 o’clock at night to shoot even if they do, they don’t want to wear sensors. If you can come up with a way to tag the shots without anybody having to do anything, you’ve got a great product already. But this is going to be a slam dunk.

Dan: 0:34

Welcome to Titans. A special series here at Slappin’ Glass exploring the stories, key decisions and innovations of the best companies in basketball and beyond. We’re pushing the game to new heights for coaches, players and fans. Today we’re excited to welcome John Carter, the CEO of the shot tracking and data company that has helped change how coaches and players perfect the game’s most important skill NOAA. From its early stages as a company, where John and associates literally drove all over the US to high school and college gyms attempting to sell the system one at a time, to NOAA now being a staple product of almost every NBA franchise, along with a ton of college and high school programs. Today’s episode dives into the risks, innovations and future of NOAA. Please enjoy our conversation with John Carter. To begin tracing the roots of NOAA, named after the biblical story of NOAA’s arc, we have to travel back almost two decades to a serendipitous meeting between successful entrepreneur and hoop junkie, john Carter, and venture capitalist Alan Marty. John had been given an article about a small shot tracking startup in the Bay area and happened to be in town for other business when he asked to meet up with Marty, hoping to buy one of the machines for his sons who love basketball. It’s here we’ll begin with the meeting between John and Alan that has ended up changing how shooting a basketball is tracked, studied and practiced forever.

John Carter: 2:08

It’s an interesting story. So way back when you know I don’t know 2003 or so I had started another company I’m a bit of an entrepreneur we had merged that company with another company. I became chairman at that point and wasn’t involved in the day to day anymore, and I was actually jobless for about 60 days, and that was about 60 days more than I could handle. I have to be busy all the time. So what happened was a friend of mine sent me this little blurb about this company that was doing some work. They had had a prototype product, the Mavericks had used it and it just so happened as a part of my merger. I was in the Bay area for that. So I reached out to them, met Alan Marty, who was the original founder, and we met at a gym. I got a little bit of a look at the product and what they had, and what I found was this company is very, very early. You know, they had formed a company, filed a couple of patents and built a prototype, and so it was really, really early. I actually went there with the intention of buying a system. I did not go there with hopes or plans to say, boy, maybe I could become CEO of this company. It was nothing like that at all. I have two sons. They’re 32 and 29 now, but they were teenagers then, or middle schoolers, and they love basketball. I love basketball Also just so you guys know, I’m an engineer. I’ve played and coached basketball most of my life and I am a true basketball nerd when it comes to basketball, and so I’ve been studying shooting forever. And then this just really resonated with me and so I met with Alan, went through all of this and checked the product out. We continued to communicate. I said, you know, I could potentially help them with distribution or something like that, and over time, the more we got to know each other, they wanted me to come on a CEO, and I did and kind of. The rest is history, but been at it for some time. I’m sure we’ll get into the details here, but it’s been a rocky ride at times.

Dan: 3:55

I’d love to just stick on the early meeting in the Bay Area. What were the things that you maybe saw about this newer company that really made you believe it’s something that you could not just invest your money in To buy a product, but invest your life, work, in a sense, since then into it. What were the things you saw in it?

John Carter: 4:14

Let me back up just a little bit more, if you don’t mind, how this whole thing came up with Alan. Alan’s a former physics teacher. He’s a VC. He’s a recently retired VC. He’s been a managing member at a VC for a long time. And our managing partner should say I mean, just a great guy loves basketball and he had a middle school daughter that he was working with in the driveway and she was shooting too flat, and so he starts trying to figure out how to get her to change that. And so we joked. The very first NOAA system was a rake attached to a ladder and so he had done these calculations, got the rake just right for her to shoot right over the rake, and of course it didn’t work very well and it was probably embarrassing for Carly I would guess you know to have the crazy dad out there in the rake and ladder and her trying to shoot over and all this stuff. But the idea was, man, wouldn’t it be great if there was some way to give a rake a little bit of a rake, To give a player feedback without them having to wear anything or having to shoot over anything or use a special ball, anything like that? You can just shoot and get this feedback because you can’t really see and that was the thing that really registered to me the most when I first met Allen is I got feedback on something I had never gotten in my life and that was feedback on the trajectory of my shot. You know, a player can’t see their own shot and the vast majority of the experts will tell you to lock in on the target, to lock in on the rim. But even if you tried to follow the ball with your eyes, that’s generally a problem. There’s a few people that glance up and do it and can look down. I’ve seen stuff do it, I’ve seen other players do it sometimes, but generally you want to be locked in on a target so you don’t really have a reference how high you shot it or not. And so that was a real difference maker to me is that immediate verbal feedback not using a special ball, not wearing anything, not shooting over anything, just practicing like normal. That was a really big thing for me.

Dan: 5:58

John Hoppin back on the timeline 2003. Ish, you hop in and join Noah and you mentioned there’s been some rocky parts of the ride. 20 years later here I’d love to go back, maybe when you do decide to take the jump and you take over a CEO, what some of the early maybe strategic plans were to help it grow from a product that was really cool then to what it is now and will take stops along the way here, but if you can remember back what you thought needed to be done during that time, One of the first things when I looked at it the prototype we had to change the way the product was set up.

John Carter: 6:34

We had to get it running cheaper on cheaper hardware, all of those type things, and that was the goal amount right out of the gate. We got to get this running on a laptop. It’s not sellable today. We did, we went to work on that, figured that out. We got it working really well. And then one of the very first things I did, I got with a buddy of mine here who was a retired coach, high school coach and a waltz did about 100 demos. He helped me because he knew everybody within 100 miles, 150 miles of here that coached basketball. And so I mean some days we’d do three, four demos in a day. We’d show up at a school in Birmingham that morning, be at another school in Birmingham late that morning, then catch the school on the way home back to North Alabama and I wanted to see what these coaches were thinking. I knew in my mind what they needed. I needed to hear what they said they needed, and so that was one of the very first things. I didn’t want to go see those guys when we had this really big monstrosity of a system that had basically a server type computer you’re carrying around. Took a long time to set it up, but I think that was super important and we learned a lot in those early days by demonstrating and talking to coaches of what they felt like the product needed to be, what would work for them.

Dan: 7:41

And what were some of those things early on, that you were getting the feedback from coaches to help better the product.

John Carter: 7:46

So we did learn a lot. Coaches told us what they wanted. We built what they wanted and we found out it really wasn’t what they wanted. Okay, though that the original product. They said I want to be able to take it from gym to gym. I want to be able to throw it in the back of my car and take it to this gym down the street, to the middle school to use it here and there. And what we found over time? There’s a lot of coaches that did that, but most coaches, you know it’s just too inconvenient. I got to get it out, I got to roll it out, I got to turn it on. Didn’t take five minutes, but it still was a little bit of an issue. After a few years I don’t know the exact time, but as hardware got smaller and sensors got better, we took the approach. I said look, I want no one to have to do anything. They walk in the gym, it’s on it’s tracking. And so we went to a 24 hour a day type system that’s always on and coaches could walk over and turn the feedback on whenever they want it, completely passive, or they could just go shoot and then go sign into a laptop and see all the shot data seeing where players are. But so early on, just so you guys know that you may know this from your research, but the first 11, 12 years we had a two dimensional product so you could basically shoot free throws or straight ahead, three pointers, anything straight ahead and get pretty accurate entry angle feedback and shot depth feedback. But we didn’t have left right at that point, and that was always our plan, but we just didn’t have the sensors available to do that. And so when the depth sensors started becoming more common you guys remember the Microsoft connect, you know the video game, that sensor for that first game was the big breakthrough for us we started putting that sensor in the ceiling and now we could track everything in 3D. So now we’re not just getting shots from straight ahead, now we’re getting shots from all over the floor in 3D. And not only do we have the arc and the depth, now we also have the left right position as it relates to where that player shot the ball. So now we’re seeing left right spray patterns, we’re seeing depth spray patterns, trajectory spray patterns. We’ve got make mess that’s 100% accurate from anywhere on the floor. That was the product we wanted to build in 04, you know 03, but the technology really wasn’t there at that point. Well, let me back to affordable. Technology was not there at that point. I’ve jumped way ahead here. But basically early on, the product was limited. We had a lot of success helping people make more free throws and the ones that would really use it from the top of the key. It would follow them around, but what they really wanted was track every shot, every day. I don’t have to do anything, it’s just there and it works.

Patrick: 10:14

I think that’s really interesting as you begin to get feedback, work with the product and you start to discover really where the product needs to go, but you’re handicapped by the limits of technology at the given time. If we go back in those moments where you can’t get the left right camera because, like you said, maybe it’s just way too expensive, and then you won’t be able to sell it to anyone because the price point is going to be crazy, what are the decisions or conversations as you look at your product and realize, well, this is what we have now. We want to continue to get it better, but technology, this is what we have. How do you try to assess this and find success with what you have, but also waiting for when, being ready to strike when the technology kind of catches up to where your idea of the product should be?

John Carter: 10:52

You’ve heard the term MVP or minimum viable product. Our 2D system was kind of an MVP product and it worked and people had a lot of success with it. What we did which is really hard there’s not many entrepreneurs or investors or any of those type things that have that kind of patience, but we did. We sold that product for a decade or so knowing that’s all we had. We obviously kept a really close eye on everything else that was going on from a text standpoint and from a sensor standpoint to see when we could possibly transition to the product that we always wanted, so to speak. I always tell people we sold enough of those systems to keep the lights on all those years with a pretty slim staff it was really just me and another guy, 34 of us early on there for several years. One guy kind of built the product to ship it and then I got him. Rick Turk and I were out on the road selling, doing high school clinics. I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of high school shooting clinics. Rick has to. I mean I’m not talking just a few, I mean hundreds all over the country and about half of those schools that we did those clinics for would buy the system. We would tell them to invite their boosters, invite everyone there. There will be people listen to your podcast that I know will say, yeah, I remember that guy, missouri, and then you know wherever did that clinic for us and we bought the system where we didn’t buy it or whatever. That’s how we got the lights on all those years. And another thing that we did that was really smart is we continued writing patents and so you know we now today have 35 or 37. I can’t remember somewhere in the mid to upper thirties as far as issued patents in the US and China. So we got just a really good intellectual property portfolio that we built over a number of years and that’s paid off well for us. But it was again back to being patient. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that what we were doing and where we were going was going to work. I never for one minute doubted it. Now there was times I wondered was it going to happen in my lifetime? I was just going to take another 25 years. But obviously things had come together. Like I said, that was the challenging part was being patient. Like I said, if we’d have taken venture money or something like that, no one would have had the patience for us to say, ok, we’re going to roll along here, do what we’re doing, and we’ll make the product better at some point.

Dan: 13:11

You mentioned. You jokingly said there’s times you weren’t sure if it was ever going to be you know your lifetime that you would see it kind of turn a corner. And obviously it has now, which is great. When did the things start to change to where you guys have gone now? It?

John Carter: 13:25

was in 2017, very specifically point to the time In the 15, 16 time frame we started. We felt like we could build the product we wanted to build. One of the sensors we needed was available, so we went to work on that. We actually worked with Professor at Carnegie Mellon University on that initially, and then we got some product out in the field beta test early on with some NBA teams like the Mavs and the Heat University of Virginia. That was another one. It was an early beta customer. The Clippers was an early beta customer and we got some really good data pardon the product, so to speak. And then that next spring of 17, so this is 16, when we installed these beta customers in the spring of 16, we showed up at the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference at MIT for the first time. I’d never been there. We entered their research competition. We ended up winning the research poster competition. You know again an all in the family thing. We didn’t have a data scientist at that time. We do today but Alan Marty’s daughter, rachel Marty, who has a PhD in bioinformatics. She did some part-time work for us to put together a study from the data we had collected in 16 at these beta customers and presented that at the Sloan Conference and it ended up winning the research poster competition. We also entered their startup competition even though we had been in business for a while, but we really were kind of at a startup stage and we ended up winning that competition as well, and out of nowhere. I had obviously built some relationships with some NBA teams, but nothing like we have today, and so, out of nowhere, we suddenly had a large chunk of NBA teams wanting to talk to Noah. As soon as that event was over, I was all over the country demonstrating the product to a bunch of NBA teams and they started coming on board and the same thing, you know, back to okay, where did we go next from there? And this initial product, back to ball. But someone had to go over to a touchscreen and tap their name and click, start shooting to tag the data. And so what I heard at Sloan in 17 is not just one or two guys, four or five NBA people said John, what you’ve got here is terrific. This is going to go. You need to get ready, but what you need to come up with is some way to tag the data to the player without them having to wear anything. Nba players don’t like to wear sensors. You know, when people come in at 10 o’clock at night to shoot, even if they do, they don’t want to wear sensors. If you can come up with a way to tag the shots without anybody having to do anything, you got a great product already. But this is going to be a slam dunk, you know. Immediately went to cranking on that and started talking to our developers. We decided in that environment, with a limited number of players, that we were confident we could do facial recognition even though it was pretty early, and so we installed the very first customer in the summer of 18 with facial recognition and now we have 26 NBA customers. 23 of the 26 have a facial recognition solution and the other three are at some level of process of upgrading Sons. Just talking to them recently, they may become in of how they love NOAA. For a number of different reasons, but number one is it’s so passive. Nobody has to do anything. Go in, do their work. We send emails to everyone with what happened today, who got up, what shots, all those type things, what they need to work on, all the above.

Patrick: 16:30

Aaron, you talk a little about data. You know, when you’re at this Sloan conference, this is an all-encompassing question, as far as from start to where you are now. You made the cameras, you started tracking the shots and, like you said, it was built out of the idea shooting over the broom. So you understand the importance of the shot, the arc and tracking it. But when you started to really collect the data, what revelations did you guys start to find out when you actually had the hard data and what it meant.

John Carter: 16:54

We had a lot of hints as to light of a word. I don’t know what’s somewhere between hint and certainty, but we had enough data from the 2D system, even though this is pre-Cloud days. We would have to get data from customers and all that type of stuff because it would be stored on that laptop. But it was pretty obvious. And we also had another guy, dr Tom Edwards, who’s a NASA and literally a rocket scientist guy, helped us with some modeling and things like that. We did some other research projects. We did one with Oliver and we did some work with Stanford. We were pretty certain around 45 degrees, 43 to 47 degrees, was going to be the optimal entry arc. The thing that I guess that will be the biggest surprise, maybe to you or to the listeners is players miss short way too much at every level of the game. There are players even at the NBA level that miss short two to five times more often than they miss long. At the high school level. That is sometimes as much as eight or 10 to one, just absolutely not given the ball a chance. It’s the equivalent of the short putt. Yeah, they never go in, they just never go in. I’ll never forget doing a demo for Coach B-Line at West Virginia. He told me later when he was at Michigan. Of course he got to Michigan. He bought our system. When I demoed for him at West Virginia it was his last year there and it was in the season they were going to buy our stuff. After the season he ends up taking the Michigan job. But he told me later he said I’m telling you the stuff that you told me in my office and on the gym floor we used all that stuff that year and it helped us. I can only imagine what it would have done for us if we would have had the system and had the feedback. And that’s the reason he wanted that. At Michigan and we’ve had a great story on a Michigan player went from bottom of the pack to being one of the top three point shooters in the league from his freshman to sophomore year at Michigan. The point was getting the concept of understanding of getting the ball deep in the basket and making more shots. So let me explain something here real quick because this is really key. So there’s two types of guaranteed scores. How many times when we were all playing basketball growing up, what do we want to do? We wanted to swish, nothing but net shot, and that’s a great shot. That’s one type of guaranteed score. The second one is what we call a bread shot, which stands for back rimming down. Think about that for a second. So if the ball comes in and I know everybody can’t see my hands here, but as the ball comes in if the top half of the ball hits the back of the rim, what’s it going to do? It’s going to score. Not tell people and no one has ever called me back and said you were wrong on that I say, hey, watch a basketball game tonight. Just sit over there with a little running tab of what percentage of the made shots hit the back of the rim. You will be shocked. You’ll be very surprised how often so the bullseye is not the center of the basket. The bullseye is two inches past the center of the basket. It’s not the center of the rim because you’ve got that guaranteed. We call it the guaranteed make zone and so you’ve got the swish area plus the brat area. We can’t share graphics here, but I could show you a graphic. You could see it just so clearly. But that’s getting the ball two inches past center is a huge deal at the high school level. For example, from a three point line they shoot eight point two inches deep in the basket and so they’re right at three inches too short. On average NBA level they shoot about three quarters of an inch too short. My basket, a bunch of NBA players, one of you guys. It never hurts anybody’s feelings to miss short. I used to make my kids run when they miss short and I would make fun of them and just all kinds of things. But it doesn’t bother a player. Now you let them miss one long, especially that proverbial brick that hits that back plate. Just right, people don’t like that shot, but anyway it’s interesting. But you know, the perfect shot, the absolute perfect shot, is the shot that comes in at 45 degrees. It goes 11 inches deep in the basket and of course it’s dead straight. And if the ball’s coming in at 11 inches it will just maybe just barely nick the back of the rim. You can’t even hardly tell it, but that’s kind of the true bullseye. It’s great. Now, as I go around to NBA facilities or wherever and I see someone working a player out, I remember being at the Clippers one time and a guy was working out a player. He was making every shot and the coach was all over him because he wouldn’t get in the ball. The back of the rim Like we’ve made some progress here so he was like not going to go in in the game. It’s got to be short and so you don’t want to try to hit the back of the rim every time. But in general, if you’re not getting the back of the rim at least one out of three you’re not shooting the ball deep enough in the basket, and that’s something anybody can do, whether they have no or not, to understand that Now what you’ll see also. This stuff is also woven together. If a player shoots flat, that’s about the only way they can score. It is back rimming down because it’s coming in so flat. They can do a switch, but they got to wedge it in. So also, if a player is shooting 80, 90 percent Brad shots, they’re shooting too flat almost always. There’s a lot of things in there that, as we kind of looked at this picture, we know the answers. Now that’s what I tell people all the time. They get tired of me saying we know the answers to the test. There were some things we weren’t sure about early on, but we know today with certainty. I mean we’ve got over a half a billion shots of data.

Dan: 21:47

John, I think Pat and I would really like to come back on this conversation and sort of the future and the tech Before we do. I’d love to just go back for a quick second here because from 2003 to 2017, when you kind of have the Eureka breakthrough Sloan, you did mention like some rocky times I would just love to know if there’s any specific dates where you weren’t sure know what was going to survive or if you could do it any longer or struggle moments in that timeframe as well.

John Carter: 22:13

We never had one of those, or I never had one of those moments where we’re wasting our time here. I never got to the point of we’re not charging forward here, but some of the rocky part, of the frustration part would be. As an example, I have done demos before where if I wasn’t a nice guy I would have gotten in an argument with a coach. That would have been a real problem. I’ve had coaches insult me. I’ve had coaches insult our technology and say what we’re doing is a waste of time. There’s no way that a player can shoot the ball too high. I can’t believe you’d come in here and tell me that. And some of these are big names that would be truly embarrassed if I said their names. I’m not going to do that. Those are times that make you question okay, maybe I’ve got something here, but then when you would do a demo like that and have them like that, then you would turn around and you’d go see a Tony Bennett or someone like that that says, no, we’re on the right track here. This guy doesn’t get it. Come around and I’ll tell you another thing. That’s happened, guys, so early on, even when I got that opportunity to go to Miami Heat early on when they had Shaq. That’s a whole bit of a longer story, but it’s kind of an interesting story. Some people just aren’t early adopters on anything and so when you go back to that time in 05, that generation didn’t really grow up with a lot of tech and a lot of the coaches were very old school at that time I can’t even put into words the difference in reception we get today versus what we got in 0506. We sold our first commercial product in late 05. We had some prototype sales early before that, but today we’re welcome with open arms and people love to see us come in. They love to talk about data, they love to talk about all those things. About 15 years ago, at the highest level at least, we got some good response and it was generally hey, I’ve got a player that shoots too flat, yeah, this might really help him. But it wasn’t viewed as this is something we’re going to have. We need to stay on every player every day where. That’s where we are today, and a lot of that is that it’s tech. It’s this generation of players going up with cell phones in their pocket. And here’s the most common quote I’ve gotten from coaches over the years. I think you’ll like this. I’ve gotten this from middle school coaches to NBA coaches. They say you know what? These players will not argue with that computer. I can tell them that they shoot too flat. Yeah, I’m not sure. Maybe they believe me, maybe they don’t, but I don’t think they probably do. But if that computer tells them their arc is 38 degrees, they believe it. And if they see that the best player on their team, the best shooter, shoots 45, now suddenly things are a little bit different. They want to shoot 45. It just kind of almost shifted overnight. It was really interesting and also it certainly didn’t hurt us that the game has become. I mean, today’s game is about shooting and you can look at any stat out there and the team that shoots the best tends to win the most. That’s right.

Patrick: 24:57

Can you just speak on a little bit? You have the idea that technology is advancing enough for you to put this idea of fruition. Then you have a generation that’s growing up with this technology and is receptive to it, is willing to listen to it, like you said, maybe more so over a human or a coach in their life and understanding, like how you make your own breaks to build success with any business.

John Carter: 25:19

I believe you’ve got to have just a dogged determination. I had an old coach of mine. He used to say you have to have a lot of glue in your butt to stick with something. I don’t know what that means, but that’s what he said. But today I feel like there’s a lot of people and the generation that doesn’t stick with things very well. Coach doesn’t like me, I’m going to quit, I’m going to transfer. I’m not saying there’s, I want to go down that rabbit hole. But you guys know we tend to check out on things pretty quick. Today, my boss doesn’t like me, I’m going to change job. My wife doesn’t like me, I’m going to change wives. It’s just a quick mentality today with younger people and I really think you know number one. In our case, you probably already can tell this. I mean, I believed in this 110% and I knew it was coming. We just had to keep fighting and we had to work smart. Maybe we could have worked smarter and got there faster, I don’t know. As I look back, I don’t have any regrets and I don’t see that we completely missed in some area. I think it was just as technology evolved, as people changed their outlook on data. We just got in a much better place. But it’s tough. It’s tough starting out Now. We were in the fortunate position with our patent position that we didn’t have three other competitors come along and say, oh, while these guys are wandering around in the wilderness here, we’re going to add $10 million here and we had really solid patent position and credit to Alan Marty for making that happen and continue it. They even know Alan doesn’t work for the company at all Never really has, doesn’t visit customers, anything like that but he’s still heavily involved in our intellectual property portfolio.

Dan: 26:50

John, as we look at the future and you talked a little bit about the technology and what it’s done now the facial recognition and all that anything else, as Noah now heads into 2023 and beyond, what you all are looking at innovation wise to continue to grow what you’ve already built.

John Carter: 27:10

When we did the facial recognition and put the extra cameras in, we began with the end in mind. There we primarily wanted to tag the players. I can demo the product to you and you could see we record for our top end product, the facial recognition product. We record a three second video clip of every shot that’s taken three, three and a half seconds and so now someone can go in and say, okay, I only want to see short misses. Everybody generally tends to have a tendency when a player has an egregious miss, it might be short and to the right, and so you can filter and only look at those shots and see if you can look and figure out what’s happening to cause those things. But that was early on was record the video. Let’s figure out who the player is, and we’re going to continue to use those videos for other things. So now we’re using those same videos to determine what’s the shot on the move or was it stationary and we’re doing that automatically using deep learning models and the stuff we are also doing. Did they receive the pass from the left? Did they receive it from the right? Did they receive it from the post? Your basketball guys, you know what a difference that makes Some players are just as good off the dribble as they are off the catch, but some are not and some make more shots when they receive it from the post. Well, almost all of them make more shots when they receive it from the post, but when they receive it from the left versus the right. There’s quite a few things like that that we are going down the path now of making that type of information just getting more and more granular and more and more auto tagging, so that there’s just no guesswork. In the future, we will write a subscription based on our data, based on the models, based on what that player needs to be working on to maximize their shooting percentage. That’s really the goal Around here we’re constantly thinking of how do we make this more and more granular.

Patrick: 28:49

On that note, outside of maybe helping a player with his shot, how does that data help coaching decisions with all this data they’re receiving?

John Carter: 28:58

Depending on the level, but certainly we break it down for you by sponsor. On the floor you will oddly find some players that are just not good from the left corner but they’re really good from the right corner. Well, if I know that, I’m going to work to get that player shots in the right corner If they’re really good from this spot on the floor and there’s a certain spot that they’re just really really good at. We all have spots we like, so we point those out. Our interface when someone logs in, they can see the data. They can see exactly where players are good from where they’re not. We break it down from all parts of the court and they can just dig in at any level they want. I think from a coaching decision, just a general decision, those type things are really important. Also, just a giving idea from an NBA standpoint. We had a team recently tell us which I thought was pretty cool and he said we could pay for you guys for the next 25 years and never get one ounce of improvement the next 25 years and the NOAA system would still have paid for itself. And where he was going with that is they had a particular player that made substantial improvement and they traded that player and the value they got for that trader because of he was now considered a shooter versus when they drafted him was substantial. As you can imagine. They feel like they got him there just because of NOAA and the feedback and him seeing the data. That young man was really into it and just made a huge difference. So from that standpoint, the coach created a real asset for his team that he traded to get another asset that really made an impact. I joke and tell people all the time this is hilarious. I used to actually have the list here, but I don’t keep on anymore but there’s a list of people that owe me money, that owe no money that will never pay us. There are people that have made their game better. They’ve made a lot of money doing it and that’s terrific. That’s what we want to do and ultimately, we want every player to reach their full potential.

Patrick: 30:44

At the end of the day, Is NOAA tracking in-game shots and how can it help maybe in-game decisions or a coach during the game?

John Carter: 30:52

We certainly have the ability to track in-game and we have a lot of teams that do that. All the NBA stuff that we talk about is practice gym data, so we track everything in their practice gym. We do not track the in-game stuff. We do have an app set up where people can like a lot of our high-sku teams, some of our college teams. They actually track their games, so we’ve got an app that they’ll come in. Like we don’t do facial recognition in the arena, there’s all kinds of other noise and we don’t have enough data to train the other team. We tag that manually. But as an example, we did the entire Big Three season last summer, all high-premade games. It was 11 weeks and we provided graphic elements back to CBS that was used during the broadcast. That was a lot of fun and that’s something that’s still part of our business plan is just to collect data in-game so that people do have and coaches do have the game data to make decisions from Now. A lot of our high-sku customers, because they install their systems in their competition gyms and so they can do it and they’ll have shot charts after the game they’ll have. You still got this rules issue a bit, where you can’t have tech on the bench, and some of those rules have been suspended and are more lax than they used to be, but it’s always interesting to know if I’ve got a player that’s missing, short or missing to the left. That’s another thing that coaches use our stuff for, and player developments to use our stuff for as heppen players come back from injuries to really know and understand okay, when before he had this shoulder injury, this is what his data looked like. Here’s where it is today. You know he’s not quite back, so there’s a lot of things like that that come into play as well.

Dan: 32:17

John, partnerships, growth from here, I know that Noah’s had some key partnerships. You know you got Nick Nurse on the board with you guys. I know you’ve done stuff with like shoot 360, and these other great products out there and can you talk a little bit about, instead of you going to every high school gym in Alabama anymore, the way forward now with Noah and the growth side of things? Sure?

John Carter: 32:38

We love working with other like-minded partners. We do have integrations with multiple companies where we can integrate our data with other companies’ data. For example, we don’t do motion capture stuff but we partner with companies that do that. We don’t have a wearable product and that’s not our expertise, but we partner with people that have wearable products so that we can integrate that data together. You know we’ll continue to do that and make our platform open for working with other partners and, honestly, that only comes into play at the top of the game. You know, at the NBA and the division one college level Husker coach is never going to have the resources to integrate all that data together and make game decisions from it. He’s got a different set of challenges and limited resources. As you guys know, our goal is to we won’t have our product, our feedback. We want it to be available on every loop. Now that’s a challenge. As you know, we have a consumer app today that, if you go back to the original product we talked about, that’s 2D. That gives arc and depth feedback from straight ahead. We now have an app. You can do that from your iPhone. Anybody can download it and use it for free If you want some of the advanced features. You can pay a few bucks a month and have access to that. That app also allows you to play virtually against the three of us. Even Pat in Germany and you in California, me in Alabama we could play a virtual game together of quickest 25 made three pointers, a buzzer beater game that we have. We’re just rolling that out and you probably hadn’t even heard that much about it. We’ve had a few hundred thousand downloads, but we’ve not put a lot of advertising behind it or anything like that. But we’re really pleased with where that product is and that can, again, any gym anywhere. It works in your driveway, so it doesn’t have to be indoors. We’re super excited about that. We’ve obviously got the top part of the market pretty locked up the MBA level. We have the biggest college funnel we’ve ever had in our existence. Right now. You’re going to see a lot more. We have nine NCAA teams that have the MBA level product with the facial recognition and all that. Currently. That number is going to go up substantially this year, just based on the funnel, because we had a little bit of a lull here with college because they lost the football revenue in 20 and a lot of the basketball revenue, and so 2021 and even 22,. There were some budget restrictions for teams, but we’re seeing that come back and we already have pretty long lists of teams that are coming on board with the facial recognition product this year. So we’re going to have a lot more data there, which we’re excited about. The other thing is filling in the gap. We believe our install is a little bit too heavy for a lot of high school teams. We’re really going to work to try to make that simpler so the install is easier. That’s one thing that’s on our plate and we think there’s some things we can do there to really help and make that easier, which would help our high school penetration quite a bit. And then the other thing is, like you mentioned, shoot 360. Shoot 360 has 30 facilities open 31, I think and they’re planned open about somewhere near that number in 2023. Rific facilities our stuff is core to all the shooting stuff. Our tracking engine handles all the shooting games and everything else that they do. So if you think about that, we’ve got started at the top of the game NBA, ncaa, high school making that product easier to install and less costly. And then you’ve got we’re addressing that guy that lives out in the middle of nowhere, like I do, that has a consumer out that he can get some feedback to see where he is, and then you’ve got the shoot 360 facilities, the brick and mortar places that a kid can go for a reasonable fee, for a monthly membership fee, and get up all the shots he wants. So we’re making progress toward that end of having this feedback available. Guys, there’s people today that never reach their potential as a shooter. If you go back and look at some of the stories that are out there, you look at a Brooke Lopez who shot good enough late in his career that they started letting him shoot threes as the game changed. But you know he’s a career 34% or so three point shooter. There’s a great article in the athletic a really, really deep dive about him this past summer. But you know now he’s shooting 38% from three this year for the first time in his career and for the big part of the year this year he was over 40 for them, you know hadn’t even scared that level before, and so there’s a ton of guys like that that had this kind of potential. But maybe they had a flat trajectory, maybe they had a tendency that they didn’t even know about that the naked eye couldn’t see, but we can see, diagnose it. It’s almost like a really deep dive MRI. That wasn’t available, the technology to do that particular image just wasn’t available, and now it is. That’s exciting for us, that’s our goal, that’s what we’ve been working toward, and so we haven’t made it. We’re not all over the place and in every gym, but we’re definitely making a lot of progress in that direction.

Patrick: 37:10

John, at the very beginning you mentioned you know you were an entrepreneur and you had some successful ventures for joining Noah. I just would be really curious to hear your thoughts on risk. With any sort of success, there’s always going to be risk involved, and I’d also love to hear how you view risk or maybe assess risk when deciding to start a company or get involved with a company.

John Carter: 37:30

That’s where there’s a parting between many entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of people in the world that are risk averse and they just can’t handle it. I’ve had people ask a similar question many times. If you can’t handle the stress of worrying about next month’s payroll probably not a good thing for you to do, because anybody that’s been an entrepreneur has been through those type struggles at different times there’s risk involved. You could lose everything, so to speak. One thing I think bothers a lot of people potentially is that you could lose face in the community where people yeah, john tried that or whoever tried that and they failed. That hurts as well. But the biggest thing is you’ve got to be willing to take that risk and many people are not and you’ve got to be able to handle the stress that comes along with it, and that’s not for everyone. I’ve had in my career I don’t know 35 years or so in business. I’ve worked with some super smart people that thought they wanted to start a company and found out they really didn’t. So it’s not for everyone.

Dan: 38:25

This has been great. Thank you very much for coming on today and sharing the history, the story you know, the future, all the stuff with Noah. I want to end with a question that we ask all the guests who come on the show here, and the question is what’s the best investment that you’ve made in your career?

John Carter: 38:41

I think for me, you know, the big thing was being willing to take risk. I had an opportunity early on in my career. I had an opportunity to take a job making more money that was more stable, versus a job that was going to have an opportunity at some ownership. It was going to require a lot more hard work and grinding. I’m so glad I made that investment to go down the ladder path that led to the career that I’ve had. You know, I think the opportunities, making the right choices early on was really big for me.