Portfolio \ Teambuildr

By Athletes. For Athletes.

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TeamBuildr is a fully bootstrapped startup founded by Hewitt Tomlin and James Peters, two former college athletes from Johns Hopkins University. James and Hewitt created TeamBuildr to help strength and conditioning coaches at the high school, college, and professional levels. Their software allows coaches to send personalized workouts to all of their athletes. In turn, athletes can follow their workouts, track their progress, upload videos, and view leaderboards. As TeamBuildr’s user base grew rapidly, costs for their infrastructure started to mount, and their users demanded mobile functionality. They turned to 3Advance for support on both fronts.

Phase 1: Mobile Development

After gaining traction on their web platform, Teambuildr, in 2014, hired 3Advance to develop native apps for their growing userbase. Development of v1 took four months of collaborative work, using a lean philosophy to initially produce only what was absolutely necessary to launch - the ability for athletes to record their gym sessions. Over the next few years, the apps were updated iteratively as old features were ported and all-new functionality added. By 2019, over 100,000 MAUs were tracked across mobile platforms, far eclipsing desktop. Teambuildr by then had spread across the globe, and begun to build out their own development team that would take over responsibility for further app evolution. This is what we call a success.

Phase 2: Cloud Scaling Consulting

As Teambuildr grew so did their infrastructure needs. Ultimately the initial platform they created in-house was buckling under their success. With their internal team taking over on mobile, we shifted to a consulting role for their cloud upgrade. We started by working with their team to determine the right way to build and deploy the new API. Working in tandem, we began to roll out updates in stages, one web service call at a time, so there would be no downtime and no impact to any users. We worked to make sure TeamBuildr had a solid foundation that would set them up for success now and long into the future. Teambuildr has not disappointed, and neither has their tech.

Teambuildr is one of our major success stories at 3Advance. While we no longer work directly with their tech team, we're still all close friends. We celebrate their wins, and we're proud of the part we had to play, but really this is all about the unwavering commitment of their co-founders, James and Hewitt.