The application*, described in the case study and known to be a sport startup, is targeted on the fitness market in Thailand and Australia with a goal to go global later once the MVP proves its business idea and economic efficiency. Its main functions are to provide users with an opportunity to do sports and yoga exercises at home and to allow them joining challenges to share their achievements with each other. The main revenue channel is based on the subscription system to get access to the content of the application which can be edited by admin and editors. Our task was to build the MVP of the application with all the functions listed above and release it in both AppStore and Play Market so our client could test it in both countries to see if there was a demand meeting their goals.

• The project is under NDA so we can’t mention the name of the application

To make a sports tech startup from scratch, you need at least 2 phases — planning and development itself. As for the planning stage, our sales manager and system analyst gathered all the necessary requirements and provided the client with a set of user-story to estimate with a developer. We stick to the user-stories approach as it can represent all the necessary parts of the application for all the roles on the project and can be used either by a client to see if everything that they want is being considered or a developer to estimate the project and split it into milestones or iterations. We also discussed channels of communication, forms of reports and meetings so it all gets clear before getting further. Once it was all sorted out, we got ready to get to the development stage itself. During the development stage, we assigned an account manager to the project so our client could get regular updates regarding the progress and a person to communicate with if there were any questions. We use a range of tools for project management: for example, Redmine and Coda are our go-to choices for planning and task management, Slack, Skype and Zoom are great for regular calls for updates. For this project we used a custom template created on Coda and Zoom to have a call once in two weeks regarding the progress for each milestone. As for the technical part, the sport startup consisted of a mobile application for both iOS and Android users, written in React Native, and a Laravel back-end providing owners with all the necessary API endpoints for the application. We decided to go with this stack due to the product: those technologies allowed our client to build the application quite fast and were flexible in terms of changes in MVP if necessary, which is quite important when it comes to testing your business idea. We used Vimeo to store the video and the service interacted with the back-end via API. Those solutions allowed us to build an application that would both be efficient in terms of loading and working with a high number of users on the application. Back-end also allowed admin and editors to add and edit the content, manage users and their subscription status, set requirements for achievements in the challenges system and split the workout videos into routines so the user could easily navigate them. The application supported a custom player developed by us which allowed users to use routines for a better navigation mentioned above which could be managed by admin and editors either in admin panel or in Vimeo. We also integrated a language system to the back-end as the application supports two languages even in MVP.

As a result, we published the application on AppStore and Google Play so it could serve as a beta version and be tested by several thousands of users at the moment to make the sport startup go live. The case study is to be filled up once the application is over the beta testing phase and out on the market to add all the necessary metrics.