From a Gym Class, to a Backyard BBQ, to the Shelves of Dick’s Sporting Goods

From left to right — Ian, Kevin, Josh, and Buddy — the RampShot team.

RampShot is a four-player outdoor lawn game that accurately refers to itself as “cornhole on steroids.” To check out how it works, give this video a watch. The company was co-founded by Josh Bonventre (39) and Kevin Texeira (36) in 2014. The team added Ian Golembeski (26) and Buddy Hammon (25) in 2016 and is quickly growing in popularity. We were lucky enough to interview Josh, Kevin, and Ian to get the story of how RampShot went from a 5th-grade gym class, to a backyard BBQ, to the beaches of California, and now to the shelves of Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Be sure to check to the bottom of the article for an exclusive discount code for Hum readers.

Every entrepreneur can pinpoint the moment that idea stuck in their minds — the one they knew was going to work. Inspiration can strike anywhere, but often it comes in the places most familiar to us. For Josh Bonventre, that place was his 5th grade physical education class and the idea was RampShot.

“I had been a teacher for about 15 years, and I was teaching the 5th graders in my class about basic lawn games, anything from horseshoes to bocce. The idea was to show them how simple some games are that are a lot of fun and have been around for a long time. The following week, I had them create their own game.”

Josh divided his students into groups, gave them common gym class equipment, and allowed their creativity to take over. The students came up with everything from basic rules to scoring systems, fouls, boundaries, and time constraints. Inspired by his students, Josh got to thinking himself.

“This was probably the most fun I had teaching. It was such a fun week of watching them buy into it… On the way home Friday afternoon, I was thinking how much fun that was, and I just started brainstorming games that I could make up.”

Josh knew a few elements he wanted to include — he wanted a game in which you could catch for points and a game that involved more than one or two people at a time. His brain was spinning with ideas.

Just start

Josh got home that same day and went to work immediately. “I got home, went into the backyard, got some plywood and started putting some stuff together. It took several variations for it to work even remotely close to what I wanted in my head.”

Josh spent hours on hours messing with different angles, structures, and types of balls. After getting to an iteration he was happy with, he introduced the idea to a few friends and he realized he might really have something.

“I started showing it to a couple of friends and they would say ‘Oh, this is really cool!’ At that point I thought to myself, ‘There might be an actual game here.’”

“The first person I thought of…”

Once Josh realized he might have something he could sell, he knew he needed a partner to move RampShot forward.

“The first person I thought of was Kevin. Kevin and I had been friends for probably about 15 years. We are all about hanging out with friends and family, so the perfect day in our world is just hanging out in the backyard with a BBQ, friends, and family, and playing games… On top of that Kevin had a solid business background, which I don’t have. It was perfect.”

As Kevin recalls, “From the point John coerced me, he didn’t know that I had always, in the back of my mind, thought about not just starting a company but building a product. I wanted to build something for myself. The idea of a yard game was a no-brainer.”

With an intersection of their passions and complimentary skill sets, Josh and Kevin made the perfect pair.

“How much do you have in your bank account?”

Now teamed up, Josh and Kevin worked quickly to create prototypes and draft up rules for the game. They knew they were onto something but still weren’t quite ready to commit.

That’s when they invited a group of friends over to play RampShot to get some feedback. Little did they know that day would provide the moment of affirmation every entrepreneur needs.

“We managed to get 10 of our friends together, maybe more and had 2 or 3 sets out that we made from scrap wood and things we bought at Home Depot. We let them play and we just stood in the background once we explained the rules. People were running and diving, and just having a good old time. We got so much joy seeing other people have so much fun with something we had created together.”

In that moment, Josh and Kevin knew they had to take the leap.

“Literally, after everyone left, we both said, ‘How much do you have in your bank account?’ We looked at our retirement funds, dipped into that. We knew that it was going to be expensive, but obviously, we wouldn’t be here today if we didn’t really believe in the product and know that it was going to be successful.”

For the next 2 years, Josh and Kevin worked on RampShot as they worked full-time. Josh, being a teacher, had summers free — RampShot’s busy season — and Kevin, in sales, had a flexible schedule that made spending a lot of time on the business feasible.

But as the company grew, they were able to realistically assess their own limitations, both in terms of time and skill set, and knew they needed to expand the team to take RampShot to the next level.

“The team was meant to be.”

“Kevin and I, for the first two years, continued the hustle and the grind to get it done. It’s hard because you’re continuing to work the 9–5. There’s only so many hours in a day. We needed, and we prayed we could find someone, who could come in and do the things that we couldn’t do.”

Enter Ian.

Ian Golembeski was one of the first ambassadors for the now immensely-popular Spikeball and even served as Regional Tournament Director for the East. He recalls the first time he met Kevin at a trade show in MA.

“I was representing Spikeball at the time. I had probably 3 years of experience doing part time work for them, doing a bunch of trade shows… Kevin happened to be right across from me at the show. I went over, introduced myself, started playing, and I had trouble going back over to my own booth.

I was having so much fun with this new game that reminded me so much of a lot of games that I’ve always loved. The hand-eye coordination, the shooting aspect — I loved it.”

“The timing was remarkable,” recalls Ian, recounting that he was planning to move to the west coast. “I was flirting with the idea of moving… I finished school, was briefly out of a relationship, was kind of addicted to traveling, so I didn’t want to stay in MA.” Ian’s move out west was the exact advantage RampShot needed as he quickly spread the game up and down Southern California’s beaches.

In many ways, Ian (and his friend Buddy who also joined the team) were a perfect fit. They are younger than Kevin and Josh, able to travel, experienced with promotion and social media, and had massive experience in the competitive lawn/beach game space with Spikeball. For the 4 of them, everyone felt it was a match made in heaven.

As Kevin recalls, “From a company standpoint, it was an unbelievable thing. It can be hard to let people in, but (Ian and Buddy’s) experience was phenomenal. It was just an unbelievable opportunity. The team was meant to be. It was perfect to get them on board and get them passionate and help us grow to the next level.”

The value of great people

It is obvious how much the RampShot team values one another. The team’s success is built on the strength of its people and their ability to recognize their own weaknesses. At the beginning, Josh knew he wasn’t a business person and immediately found the complementary skill set he needed in Kevin.

Moving forward, it would have been easy for Kevin and Josh to hang on to their baby for themselves. As Josh admits, there was an initial hesitancy, “I think there is definitely a hesitation because for so long it was just Kevin and I. It was our baby. And as an entrepreneur, you know that you’re building your brand, and you want to represent your brand in the best possible light.”

They were able to overcome that hesitancy, recognize their weaknesses as a team, and that Ian and Buddy’s strengths directly covered those weaknesses. They found great people and did not let them go.

An eye on the future

Now, RampShot is played across the country — particularly up and down the beaches on the east and west coasts where Ian and Buddy host official tournaments, resulting in country-wide player rankings. They are launching a college ambassador program and growing their social media presence.

The product recently landed in Modell’s and Dick’s Sporting Goods and the team could not be more thrilled. “Early on we said that we were going to make it into Dick’s Sporting Goods and this year we actually got into Dick’s. That was a huge moment for the company. We kind of freaked out. Thinking of our product sitting on those shelves, it’s always something exciting for a young company.”

It is hard to believe RampShot started back in that 5th-grade gym class. Josh recalls, “In my mind, I just wanted to give kids an opportunity to go back to the days of picking up a rock or kicking a can and having fun… The goal was to let them use their imagination.”

By allowing his students to unlock their imagination, Josh was able to tap into his own and create something from nothing. Now, he and the RampShot team are building a success story even he couldn’t have imagined when he got started with some plywood at a backyard BBQ.

We cannot thank the team at RampShot enough for taking the time to interview with us and for giving us the chance to tell their amazing story.

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