20% Month-Over-Month Growth After Launching Connected Fitness on AWS

Brrrn opened its doors in 2018 as a cool-temperature boutique fitness studio in New York City. Classes at 50°F structured around the slide board — a training tool used by professional sports teams — got them national attention: The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Live with Kelly and Ryan.

Then March 2020 happened. In-person fitness classes went away overnight. Brrrn had to pivot, and the pivot had to work.

By July 2020 they’d brought Brrrn At-Home to market with their signature Brrrn Board and a beta mobile web app with a workout video library. It was a start. But to grow the new offering, the founders Johnny Adamic and Jimmy Martin needed a real platform — payment processing, subscriptions, the full set of product surfaces their customers expected. They’d seen our work for a connected-fitness startup in the same space. They reached out.

Brrrn had no in-house engineering team. They needed a partner who could take the beta, architect a platform, ship it, and stay on to run it.

Phase 1 — Build (2021). We took over from the beta web app and designed a full multi-platform product: native iOS and Android apps, a web portal, an e-commerce surface for the Brrrn Board, and the backend that tied them together. Two-week sprints, demos at the end of each, frequent product decisions with the founders.

Phase 2 — Operate (2021 onward). Once the platform launched, we moved into an operational-support SOW: continuous availability of the apps and infrastructure, SLAs on response time, proactive health monitoring, and the periodic feature updates the product needed.

Phase 3 — Steady state (2022–2023). As the product matured, the engagement shifted to focused monthly support covering outage response and infrastructure steady-state work, with feature drops scoped as fixed-price mini-SOWs when the team needed them.

One product, three platforms, integrated e-commerce. Native iOS app. Native Android app. A web member portal. A marketing and shop site. All sharing one backend and one data model. Subscriptions, promotions, and payments were wired in from day one — not bolted on later.

Cloud-native AWS from the start. The beta had been a web app; the new platform was cloud-native. If Brrrn picked up a million users overnight, the infrastructure was already shaped for it. Production, QA, and observability were real environments, not afterthoughts.

The member experience. Users logged in once, saw their subscription status, tracked their workouts, favorited classes, and watched streaks accumulate. The user dashboard surfaced monthly and lifetime stats — minutes exercised, classes taken by category, longest streak.

The operator experience. The Brrrn team got a backend admin surface that mattered: monitor class completions, track engagement daily, pull reports without an engineer in the loop.

Wearable and gamification. As the product grew, we added Apple Watch integration for real-time workout telemetry and a gamified “game mode” with speed-based challenges — work spec’d in T&M sprints and shipped in release cycles with the founders.

The new Brrrn At-Home app gave the team a working front door for the business. After bundling a Brrrn Board purchase with a one-year all-access subscription, Brrrn At-Home saw a 20% month-over-month increase in users — on an infrastructure that could absorb it without a second build.

The move from a dated legacy mobile web app to a multi-platform cloud-native product changed what Brrrn could do commercially: they could run promotions across surfaces, price the subscription cleanly, see engagement in real time, and raise capital against a platform that had room to grow.

We moved from platform build to continuous operational support as the product matured. Periodic feature drops — subscription pricing changes, Apple Watch integration, game mode — shipped as fixed-scope mini-engagements inside the ongoing support relationship. When the roadmap stabilized, the engagement narrowed to focused monthly support on outage response and infrastructure steady-state.

That’s what a healthy build-to-run arc looks like: big build, smaller operate, smaller still when the product finds its rhythm.