Wizard.fit Digital
Re-inventing Digital Fitness Through Mobile Telepresence Innovation
Wizard.fit Digital
Re-inventing Digital Fitness Through Mobile Telepresence Innovation
About
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 16th
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 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 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.