Sport Endorse: Sports collaborative marketing platform

Business context

Sport Endorse was looking for a partner to develop a smart, customized web and mobile platform for connecting sports influencers and brands. The Ireland-based start-up founders were inspired by their personal experience in influencer marketing to create a platform and app that combined powerful features with a sleek design. The requirements for the sports marketing platform included brand and athlete personal profiles, linking social media accounts, creating opportunities for talent, the ability to pay for deals via the platform, communication between talent and brands, and a convenient admin panel.

Solutions we implemented

1. Business analysis. We conducted both BA (business analysis) and BPA (business process analysis). Our experts analyzed the market, defined budget estimates, clarified business ideas, and discussed strategies with the client. After that, we noted the requirements, validated and evaluated them, and shaped development activities, including anticipated changes during the upcoming process. All this allowed us to organize, document properly, prioritize product features, assure the correct distribution of tasks between releases, predict possible bottlenecks, and present a consolidated vision to all stakeholders.
   
   
2. Product design. The core challenge in the user experience part of the design was to develop a comfortable and intuitive process of connecting brands and sports talent. Both were beneficiaries of a comfortable way of collaboration, and were able to reach their goals and close opportunities successfully. To make the platform intuitively usable and understandable, we worked to gather as much information as possible about our users’ personas. We collaborated with the Sport Endorse project manager to organize user testing sessions, which greatly helped us identify pain points and address them in subsequent iterations.
   
   
3. Architecture. We used the AWS Lambda service to assure scalability and support for a large number of programming languages (including Ruby, Python, Go, Node.JS, C#, and Java) and a huge number of services that have allowed us to use not just serverless computing but also database as a service, message queues, API gateway, and others, which greatly simplify the work with this model. As we created a serverless framework, each endpoint was associated with a specific Lambda. We used Cognito for authorization and AWS Aurora RDS as a PostgreSQL database, with S3-hosted media data bound to CloudFront. Bitrise was used for native mobile apps.
   
   
4. Development. We chose React.js for the front-end because it is excellent for developing complex client-side logic, especially when there are numerous reusable web application components. For the back-end part, we used Node.js. This platform allows you to write server-side code for dynamic web pages, web applications, and command-line programs. With Node.js, the “JavaScript for Everything” paradigm is implemented. It involves using one programming language to develop web applications instead of using different languages to work on the back-end. For native mobile apps, we used Kotlin, Swift, and Java.
   
   
5. Quality assurance. As the code is written, our developers monitor its quality. The primary practices we employ are linters to identify errors and incorrect design during development, and Code Review to ensure code quality and share knowledge within the team. Such standards helped us arrange the code in a uniform way, which made it easier to understand. Our QA engineers conducted web application feature testing on iOS and Android applications using test design techniques. We also provided functional and non-functional testing. Among non-functional testing types, we conducted usability (UI) testing, security testing (basic), and cross-browser testing. We also conducted smoke testing and regression testing for added changes and improvements, and tested all in-built integrations, including Stripe, Google Calendar, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

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Features

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For sports talent

• Customized profile
• Automatic user verification
• Ability to connect social meadia accounts
• Add videos to present a user creatively
• Search and filter for suitable opportunities
• Apply for opportunities, rate the brand
• Automatic payment in a personal account

For brands

• A company profile with key information
• Opportunity for tailored needs
• Contact athletes (short-list)
• Easy secure payment via the platform using Stripe
• Simple transaction export for accounting purposes
• Rate talent

Communication

• Built-in instant messaging
• Automatic messages (if deal is accepted/declined)
• Push notifications for iOS and Android apps

Secure and simple payment process

• Stripe payment system integration
• Automatic invoicing
• Talent can connect a bank account to receive payment automatically
• Sport Endorse commission and any applicable tax calculations made automatically

iOS and Android apps for talent

• Profile creation and opportunities management
• Built-in messenger
• Push notifications (so talent know about new opportunities and can communicate efficiently with brands)

Admin panel

• Admin view of all users
• Ability to edit opportunities
• Ability to edit user profiles
• Ability to adjust Sport Endorse commissions