Building a world-class fitness platform

The Instructrr is a startup in the online fitness space. They had an idea of a web-based fitness platform where fitness instructors would directly sell their learning materials and services to the customers. A user can watch fitness streams, study materials about exercises, communicate with fitness instructors, and buy services.

The company already operated in the market of fitness services before they contacted ABCloudz. However, they provided most of their services offline, while communication with customers primarily ran via email or telephone. Because of various communication inconsistencies and a strong reliance on offline interactions, the customer’s product was very inefficient. This prevented the product from further enhancements. Therefore, the client decided to build a user-friendly fitness app for selling its services on an ad hoc basis. The customer wanted to launch a unique full featured fitness platform with robust integrations of 3rd party services.

The Instructrr founding team  was looking for a reliable technology partner capable of solving these problems and implementing a world-class fitness app according to their vision. The customer relied on a business partner who had an excellent experience of working with ABCloudz and recommended our team. From the very start, we lived up to the expectations when our team showed significant technology experience, and deep involvement in the project. The customer was impressed with the level of technical expertise and a business understanding shown by the ABCloudz team. As a result, we were chosen as a perfect technology partner capable of bringing Intructrr to the top league of online fitness apps.

Preliminary analysis

The ABCloudz team has a lot of experience in building high-quality software products. The team quickly analyzed the customer’s business logic, provided an architectural review, and suggested a path for product implementation. As a result, we determined which components had to be included in their app.

The customer appreciated an in-depth analysis provided by our team. We took into account Instructrr’s business logic and technical implications to come up with an idea of designing a brand new app that unites all the client’s services. The customer agreed to this decision but set a rather strict deadline of around 4 months for the project.

Building a user-friendly fitness platform from scratch

Before contacting us, the client handled most of their client interactions offline, while email, Facebook messenger, and telephone were the main channels for communication and file exchange with clients. We united numerous third-party services in a single software platform. In particular, our team integrated the app with Facebook for quick authorization and log-in. Twilio became our solution for organizing online classes. We also integrated the app with Mandrill for notifications. Finally, Stripe integration became our solution for fast and secure payments.

One of the biggest challenges of the project was meeting tight deadlines while maintaining high technical standards. To enable that, the ABCloudz web team utilized a microservices architecture developed in the App Development Practice. Using standard microservices for a backend of the web project, we were able to speed up development by 20-30%. The architecture included a MySQL database and RabbitMQ message broker for communication between services.

Another interesting thing we implemented to the client’s app was a user-friendly video-sharing logic. Many users of the client’s platform had issues with a non-automated exchange of learning materials. Fitness instructors had to send links to learning materials via email. Such emails were often missed, which made training very inefficient. To solve this problem we developed an app logic in which each instructor gets one’s own VOD (video on demand) cloud location with a 50 GB of space. The instructor can upload learning materials to the cloud, while subscribers get automatic notification on such updates and can view them on demand.

A productive fitness platform for excellent user experience

The ABCloudz team built a fitness app that unites the client’s services from scratch. As for more tangible results, our team:

• Increased the client’s business efficiency by up to 50% by uniting services in a single place and automating such processes as payments, messaging, and file sharing.
• Provided the client with a world-class gym app in less than 4 months.
• Enhanced the development and the implementation of new services by up to 30% with microservices architecture.
• Got a user-friendly VOD cloud logic that ensures a convenient user experience with sharing learning materials.

Take advantage of our expertise

The ABCloudz team has extensive expertise and custom practices for web platform development and post-release upgrade of the existing platforms. Our practices can be tailored to any industry, including the domain of fitness and wellness. We are ready to come up with solutions that perfectly fit your business needs and can be delivered in a very short time. Contact us if you want to give a new life to your software idea!