From solo dieting to competitive games

Our client wanted to build a web app that could be used as motivation for losing weight. After signing up, users can choose from a variety of games to take part in. These games are created and run by famous fitness influencers.

Each game is a challenge to lose a certain percentage of body mass in a specified amount of time (e.g. 4% in 30 days). To sign up for a game, players have to leave a "buy-in", a certain amount of money that they bet on successfully completing the game.

During a game, a player has to film themselves on a weight scale three times: at the beginning of the game, in the middle and before the end of the game. Authenticity of the videos is maintained by generating random codes which have to be written on a sheet of paper and shown in the video by the participant.

If a player reaches their goal, they split the betting pool with all of the other winners of the game.

The custom software development stage of this project took 1 month to finish.

As the business behind the project was in its infancy and did not have a lot of users, both the frontend and the backend of the application was built on Bubble.io. This kind of solution is not ideal for scalability, but keeps complexity down while the business idea itself is still being tested.

If a project shows high potential for attracting a big amount of users, we advise moving the backend to a dedicated platform such as Xano.

The fact that an administrator has to approve or disapprove users' videos manually also stands in the way of scalability, however, designing an algorithm to automate the process or delegating it to the influencers who create the games was deemed to be too early for this Minimum Marketable Product.

The platform also has automatic emails sent to users on certain events, such as registering an account, completing (winning) a game, getting sent prize money and more. These emails are sent via a Sendgrid API.