WIZARD.FIT

Re-inventing Digital Fitness Through Mobile Telepresence Innovation

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Wizard.fit is a platform that give trainers endless opportunities to connect with a local and regional network of people who want to train with the best.

THE CHALLENGE

When the COVID-19 crisis shuttered fitness studios across the country, entrepreneur Soofi Safavi saw the devastating effect it had on the instructors who inspired him. As a hot yoga enthusiast, he knew the form-intensive classes wouldn’t translate well to platforms like Instagram and Facebook Live. These failed to recreate the true studio dynamic, and beyond that, instructors had no integrated way to collect donations. As an entrepreneur, Soofi saw the gap and knew he and his team could help. With that, the Wizard.Fit concept was born. The ability to make it happen now was essential—to start immediately and build on an accelerated timeline, to get the app into the hands of the fitness community as quickly as possible—was key to the vision for Wizard.Fit.

THE SOLUTION

Soofi and his team approached Topcoder about leveraging the platform to bring Wizard. Fit to market at hyper-speed. Just four days after the idea was born, work began. The app would be built with two foundational considerations in mind—making sure it’s safe and secure for financial transactions for both sides of the marketplace, and creating a user experience that captures the live studio experience as much as possible for both the instructor and the student.

Wizard.Fit was built with a 100% remote team, including technologists, project managers, marketers, and yoga instructors who beta-tested to provide rapid feedback along the way. They used tools like GitHub, MarveI App, the Topcoder platform, Slack, and others to collaborate and work as a holistic machine at a hyper-accelerated pace.

PROJECT TIMELINE

The timeline for our application from idea to design and coding is illustrated below

  • MARCH 16

    Soofi comes up with Wizard.Fit concept

  • MARCH 17

    Soofi reaches out to Topcoder

  • MARCH 19

    Project kicked off on Topcoder platform → Where we left off in Part I

  • MARCH 20

    API Development begins

  • MARCH 21

    UI/ UX Design begins and Front End Web Server & Autho set up begins

  • MARCH 22

    Web Server & Autho work complete

  • MARCH 23

    Front End base trainer and student functionality begins

  • MARCH 24

    UI/UX base designs delivered

  • MARCH 25

    Base trainer and student functionality complete

  • MARCH 26

    Front End updated to Ionic + UI/UX Design Revision 1 delivered

  • MARCH 27

    Paypal integration begins

  • MARCH 28

    Paypal integration delivered

  • MARCH 29

    Zoom integration begins

  • MARCH 30

    UI/UX Design Revision 2 delivered

  • MARCH 31

    Zoom integration complete + UI/UX Design Revision 3 delivered

  • APRIL 2

    Front end Dev nearly done, main integrations finished, UI design perfected

  • APRIL 3

    Continuous instructor feedback

  • APRIL 6

    Zoom integration updated

  • APRIL 10

    Integrations completed

  • APRIL 11

    QA & Testing

  • APRIL 20

    Wizard.fit app launch

THE RESULT

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“The scope of functionality that we’re putting together would’ve been a 12-month project from initiation to technology selection to team selection to build an organization… and we are actually pulling it together in less than three weeks.”

Soofi Safavi , Wizard.Fit

THE BUSINESS IMPACT

Wizard.Fit was born of the immediate need to solve a devastating problem—a huge community of fitness instructors suddenly facing unemployment in the wake of the Coronavirus. But the long term impact is even greater, providing an amazing global platform for fitness and wellness. The greatest ideas often come out of the greatest adversity, and Wizard.Fit is a fantastic example of ingenuity in the face of uncertainty. The project is unique for the sheer speed of innovation. The confluence of an idea, on-demand talent, open APIs, and the passion of talented contributors from across the globe personifies the real future of work.