The client
Hintsa is the world’s leading, evidence-based coaching company, helping top athletes and business professionals achieve sustainable success. Driven by science and guided by people, our methods are road tested in the world’s most challenging business and sports environments.
Formula 1 Champions, Fortune 500 CXOs, leading management consultancies, non-profit crisis workers, surgeons, and power plant workers all trust Hintsa to help them live better and perform better.
The Hintsa app offers digital coaching plans created by the best coaches in the world. Their approach is holistic, science-based and focused on measurable outcomes.
How did it start
It is great to have ideas and dream about them becoming reality. But this transformation requires putting together a structure, a certain organization, and most importantly a team which are proven to make things happen.
Our way of working is pretty much centered around the idea that the team must live by and believe in the product's idea and the way it solves a particular problem.
Although the project was not fundamentally different from other projects we have worked on, the challenges started from the early beginning as the team was new, tech stack was new, as well as the domain, specifically Hintsa’s unique coaching methodology which the team needed to make sense of before establishing ways of working for this project.. We at Looming Tech love challenges and dove deep into the product vision and development including the entire tech team at a very early stage.
The scope (MVP features)
Login with pre-created account (B2B)
One full coaching plan with options to read, give feedback and customise your experience
Ability to add more coaching plans in a very short period of time through flexibility and fast content upload
Video and audio content
Journal to keep track of what have been completed and what achievements have been accomplished
The team
Agile Product/Project leader who kept the focus, answering the what and when questions
UX Specialist conducting target user research and designing the UI prototype
Tech Lead Full Stack engineer
2 x Regular React Native engineers
Regular Backend engineer
AWS Devops engineer
Automation QA to make sure we are covered against regression.
How we did it
We hit the ground running from the very beginning and started defining the coaching plan in a structured way which can be customized. This massively helped afterwards as a plan has about 70% integral part and therefore the tech team can easily place the business logic into the code base.
After the first couple of iterations we decided that we can now move to the next step of the project and start discussing with the client what would be the best version of MVP so that we can hit the market ASAP. In the end we came up with a solution that allows users early access to the mobile app and at the same time experience almost 50-60% of the entire product. This was a bold move but turned out to be the best one as it allowed us to get a lot of customer feedback in just the space of 1 week and adjust to user needs accordingly. We don’t want to spoil it and go into much detail but if you imagine that one coaching will usually take 21 days, we released the first 7 days as our MVP, got the feedback from customers and managed to apply the feedback for the rest of the 14 days.
We are now close to completing the second coaching plan and plan to move on to the next one at the end of this year as we also managed to optimise the way we upload content into the app so that we don’t have to do it manually which allowed us to decrease new plan creation by 3x.
About the tech
NodeJS - React Native - AWS
Our brilliant tech team picked (as usual) a well known stack so that they won’t hit any surprises halfway through the project. React Native, TypeScript for the mobile app as it runs amazingly well and allows for quick development (Checkout our Tech Blog). NodeJS, TypeScript, Express, TypeORM for the REST API backend as it is quick and easy to ramp up a fully functional backend all that run on AWS including a custom built Kubernetes cluster to allow for proper scale of the dockerised services. For the database PostgreSQL seemed like the best choice and it totally paid off.
All in all, the MVP is built in an auto scalable way so that customer doesn’t pay if there is no usage (no users in) but at the same time to be able to scale “indefinitely” (to the capacity of AWS) and accommodate traffic coming from potentially tens of thousands of users at the same time.
We always involve automation testing when building products, this approach protects us from regression and gives our team the ability to add new features quickly without worrying if previously built functions are broken. We did extensive mobile app level tests (UI integration) using our proprietary framework (check our Tech Blog), the backend was covered with unit tests and the API was additionally protected with load tests (via K6) so that we are sure the assumptions about scalability are actually true.
MVP Gallery
End.
Do you want our team to build your next mobile product, in record time without sacrificing quality and while having fun? Reach out to us at blooming@looming.tech