Beta to Production in Under Twelve Weeks — on AWS Serverless

Stryde’s customer wanted it all — a wide range of workouts, their pick of instructors and instruction styles, competitive and non-competitive modes. The market around them was full of single-use, walled-garden subscriptions. Stryde was positioned to be the opposite: an open platform that let customers design their own fitness experience inclusively and affordably.

They had the team to build the hardware. A German industrial designer was leading the sensor-laden bike. A separate engineering team owned the large-screen Android companion tablet. What they didn’t have was the software partner who could bridge those two and ship a product to customers quickly.

We brought our START™ MVP program to the engagement: a step-by-step path from ideation to launch, built around the essential questions and the cloud-native choices that make scaling later cheaper than rebuilding.

The structure ran in eight two-week sprints. Sprint 0 covered prep — discovery, design, architecture, environment setup. Sprints 1 through 6 built features in iterations, with working demos at the end of each and client sign-off on what shipped. Sprint 7 was the deployment sprint.

The other half of the engagement, which doesn’t always get talked about, was the handoff. Stryde’s plan was to build an internal product, design, and engineering team over time. We helped them recruit those hires and transitioned code, notes, and process to the internal team cleanly. When the handoff was done, Stryde was running the platform themselves.

MVP feature design. We worked with Stryde to identify the minimum set of features a first customer would expect — and the minimum that would let the team learn fast after launch.

Customer onboarding and commerce. We built a marketing site to showcase the bike and integrated Shopify for payments, e-commerce, and fulfillment. A customer account profile tied purchase identity to the fitness experience so customers didn’t have to sign in twice for the product they’d already bought.

First-time tablet experience. On the bike itself, customers logged in with the same credentials they’d used to buy. The app opened to real-time workout telemetry — distance, RPM, torque — alongside a progress meter, a leaderboard, and gamified elements to keep riders engaged. A post-workout survey captured feedback. The tablet ran Stryde’s app and, by design, other approved apps customers expected on a modern tablet — Netflix, browser-based streaming — so the product didn’t feel locked in.

Backend services. Purpose-built, scalable, serverless. A CMS for content, customer tracking, analytics, and performance tuning.

Clean execution across the stack. React Native for the tablet app. React for the customer web portal and the admin/CRM portal. Serverless AWS-native backend. Eight sprints of iterative design, clickable mockups, client sign-off, and thorough user testing before each build — a rhythm that kept surprises out of the pipeline.

Beta to production, no backend rework. The serverless architecture carried the product from beta into full production without changes to the backend. What was built to launch was what ran.

Sold out on launch. Stryde outsold its initial production run on launch, with an aggressive growth trajectory into the following year.

A clean handoff. Our post-launch role was intentionally minimal. We helped Stryde recruit an internal product, design, and engineering team, and transitioned code, notes, and process to them. Today, they’re running the platform on their own — positioned for both independence and success.