The Body Coach

The client

The Body Coach App is a new digital-first fitness app launched in late 2020 by fitness trainer Joe Wicks MBE. Joe captured the nation’s heart in 2020 when he held regular “PE lessons” via YouTube, inspiring kids and adults alike to keep fit during the UK lockdown. His fitness videos went viral around the world, and “PE With Joe” gained over 80 million views.

The launch of this app follows his extremely successful 90-Day Plan, which combines structured exercise and nutrition to keep people happy and healthy. The app is the natural next step in evolving the business: a mission-critical, digital-first experience for users, who can now access everything they need for the 90-Day Plan – thousands of recipes, tailored meals, pre-recorded and live workouts, as well as motivation and advice, all in one convenient place.

The app was built by industry-leading digital transformation and product studio ustwo, who are committed to creating products and services that make a tangible difference to people’s lives. They are specialists in emerging technologies and use them to create innovative apps, games, and immersive digital products.

The challenge

ustwo were approaching The Body Coach app launch day at the end of December in preparation for the new year health kick. Due to the huge popularity of Joe and his work, the app was expected to get hundreds of thousands of sign-ups in the first week, with even more expected in January. Due to the high profile of this launch, 100% successful app performance was mission-critical for both the Body Coach and ustwo, as they were aware of the risk to public perception of the app and brand should they experience any critical issues.

A specialist team was required with the right experience and set-up to support the new application from day one, as well as the customer-facing site, admin portal, and underlying cloud services. This support needed to cover both the custom application and AWS cloud infrastructure, as well as incident manage any issues from start to finish and liaise with third parties where required. ustwo was aware that the app would be vulnerable to issues going unresolved once the development team left the office, so they needed the help of a support solution that would ensure that no business-critical app functions were risked – especially during peak exercise hours (early mornings, evenings, and weekends).

The solution

They turned to Just After Midnight as the only Advanced AWS Partner that specialises in 24/7 application support for mission-critical digital platforms.

Just After Midnight began onboarding the Body Coach app in the weeks leading up to the application launch, preparing the team for this critical time. Detailed runbooks were created for each moving part. Each API was detailed, as well as how to diagnose and resolve known and potential issues.

Results

• Hugely successful launch with no technical issues
• All P1 incidents dealt with swiftly and zero downtime during support hours