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Wellness

Supporting a superstar personal trainer to spread the gospel of fitness

Crockfit achievements
Top-rated app Health & Fitness category

Crockfit

Workout app for a superstar personal trainer

Alex Crockford is one of the UK’s most popular fitness influencers and personal trainers (PT). As a trailblazer from amongst a new generation of PTs, Alex found success in leveraging his online popularity to launch a web store through which he could sell workout plans to anyone from around the world. 

But as any good entrepreneur knows, a business venture’s long-term success is often entirely dependent on continuous innovation. Either that or watch helplessly as someone with a better product steals all your customers. Crockford obviously chose the former and approached us to build a mobile app through which he could provide his followers with a more immersive workout experience.

“I posted on my social media about looking for an app developer […] and woke up with messages from around the world, tweets, and everything. But, nothing was as powerful as my friend in London saying ‘Hey, I’ve been working with Calcey’ and that’s how I found them”
Alex Crockford
Creator – #Crockfit

Iterate, Then Innovate

We kicked off things with our UX team, who took the lead in conducting a series of design & discovery workshops through which we tried to iteratively arrive at a prototype version of the app. These workshops allowed us to create Hi and Lo-fi screens of the app, formulate the underlying logic for workflows, investigate each feature and user role in detail, scope out potential integrations with external services, and finally design an overall solution architecture which our developers could follow.

We built the #Crockfit app to effectively serve as a storefront through which Crockford could sell workout plans to users, with new plans being added regularly. Since Crockford already owned and operated a successful web store but didn’t have a large team to help him, we made sure that the new app was compatible with the existing web store’s backend too. This allowed Crockford to upload new workout plans on both the app and the web store with a single click. It also meant that he could spend the time he saved to create more workout plans for his followers, which is great!

In order to convert casual browsers into paying customers, we built in a free trial period for each plan. Naturally, this required us to implement in-app purchases. For the uninitiated, Apple’s rules on in-app purchases are notoriously strict. It is what has led to Fortnite publisher Epic Games taking Apple to court, and smaller companies like email service Hey.com loudly decrying Apple’s ‘gangster-like’ approach (their words, not ours). But our developers were able to implement a fully-compliant in-app purchase system for the #Crockfit app with relative ease. 

“As the owner of the platform and the manufacturer of the hardware, Apple is very much the gatekeeper to its own ecosystem. As such, it is not surprising that it’s rules are very strict. But experience, discipline, and diligence have helped us understand how to build apps that are fully compliant with the App Store’s rules. That’s a badge that we wear with pride.”
Ruveen Thirimanne
Program Manager

MVP to top-rated app

Thousands of downloads and hundreds of five star reviews later, the #Crockfit App is now one of the top-rated apps on the App Store and Play Store in the health and fitness category. Thanks to the app, which continues to be supported by our team at Calcey, the size of Crockford’s fitness community has also grown by leaps and bounds.

But more than any of that, the #Crockfit app has allowed Alex Crockford to inspire and motivate thousands of people around the world. As COVID-19 crippled societies in 2020, Crockford leveraged his following built around the app to offer a popular workout plan for just 99p (reduced from £72) – with all proceeds going towards charities such as Age UK, The Trussell Trust and Mind which were all providing support to those affected by the pandemic. These efforts led to a surge of support and to think that we too had a part to play in enabling such a good cause is indeed humbling, and is something we will forever be proud of.