The Client
The client is a startup aiming to disrupt the way coaches recruit players in youth soccer digitally. It enmeshes popular features of social media platforms and applies them to youth football.
They aim to uncover talent by ensuring that it is visible to verified scouts and coaches who can do something about it and influence young kids’ lives.
The Challenge
The client’s core purpose is to spotlight youth soccer talent on a safe digital platform. It aims to match coaches and scouts to players and lets them see firsthand what potential players can do, right in the palm of their hands.
Players abundantly use social media platforms, but it is fragmented and relies on virality to ensure the right people see it. Lack of success with this hit-and-miss approach paved the way for technologically disrupting youth soccer’s scouting process. Excellarate aided by hosting workshops to define the challenges faced by target personas. It also uncovered latent needs and defined transparent workflows for each target persona.
The client is immensely passionate about breaking down the scouting barrier through tech. However, it lacks the technical expertise to formulate a robust technical solution that would address the challenge head-on. After a lackluster experience with previous technology partners, they joined hands with Excellarate. The partnership results in the customer-facing application and the infrastructure supporting it are built using proven technology and scalable to support future needs.
The Solution
Excellarate helped create a one-of-a-kind mobile application that brings together coaches, players, and scouts on a digital platform. The platform enables them to interact with each other in a structured, standardized, and transparent way.
Excellarate works with the client to channelize its vision and mission to a technology solution. Excellarate’s UX team built on its experience and expertise in developing mobile apps to craft a pixel perfect UI for the app. The primary consideration being that the target audience is mainly 14-18 years of age.
This app was the first launch for the client. It was vital to learn from the ground, which required rapid responses to changes. Excellarate selected a tech stack that ensured the ability to incorporate these changes with minimum lead times. Following an Agile methodology and using 2-week sprints, developers from Excellarate designed and developed a highly available and scalable cloud infrastructure on AWS and set up CICD pipelines for rapid deployments.
The Outcome
The client now has a functionally robust and elegantly designed mobile application for both Android and iOS users. Players sign up on the platform to start uploading player reels showcasing their talent. Scouts and coaches can then discover these reels in the Explore section of the app. To create a social community, players can also follow each other to have a feed containing each other’s athletic updates.
Coaches can manage their players using the app by creating teams and adding players to these virtual groupings. They can also add training videos and tag players to it, especially during the COVID period, where the on-ground training is limited. Even more, coaches can rate players, which will be useful for the scouts and seek talented players.
In under 3 months since launching, over 3,000 users use the app. The app ranked #2 in the Sports Category of the App Store charts for several days.
The Tech Stack
- Mobile App:- ReactNative, GraphQL, Hasura, AWS Cognito, AWS SNS
- Admin panel:- Angular JS
- DevOps:- AWS, AppCentre, BitBucket Pipelines.
- Analytics:- MixPanel, SmartLook, Crashlytics
Frontend
ReactNative to save time and cost since same code can be reused on both iOS and Android App
Backend
- GraphQL to ensure faster response time in data/ API response retrieval since enables the front-end to query exactly what it wants
- Hasura as it provides CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality instantaneously hence shortens development cycle
- AWS Amplify, Cognito and SNS which provides scalable services for user onboarding, real-time feeds and targeted campaigns
- Mix Panel has also been integrated with the app to get insights on user behavior
