Sport Endorse: Sports collaborative marketing platform

A sports marketing sponsorship platform that allows brands and marketing agencies connect with elite athletes to strengthen their marketing campaigns. Sport Endorse shortens the path to achieving stunning sponsorship deals by using smart technological solutions, a user-friendly interface, and a large database of sports stars from more than 60 countries.

Services:

Industry:

MarTech

Location:

Ireland

Declan Bourke

Co-founder

“When we engaged Geniusee we were happy with the initial stages of our project, but by the end of the project we wound up being more than happy, we wound up delighted. The team assigned was pro-active in challenging us and in providing valuable input. They made the project their own and functioned much like an enthusiastic internal team. There were scope changes agreed along the way and Geniusee demonstrated a very fair and balanced flexibility. Excellent communication, a system delivered that is stable, secure, efficient, and well supported. Geniusee remain our chosen development partner today and we look forward to building more of our future with them”

Business context

Sport Endorse was looking for a partner to develop a smart, customized web and mobile platform for connecting sports influencers and brands. The Ireland based start-up founders were inspired by personal experience in influencer marketing to create a platform and app that would combine powerful features with a sleek design. Requirements for the sports marketing platform included brand and athlete personal profiles, linking social media accounts, creating opportunities for talent, the ability to pay for a deal via the platform, communication between talent and brand, and a convenient admin panel.

Key challenges:

Creating a simple, intuitive UX design for brands and athletes
Development of a serverless AWS architecture for easy application scalability
Implementation of a suitable payment system for pay-ins and pay-outs that is fast and easy to use for all stakeholders
Launch the platform in a short time frame

Work approach

Close cooperation with Sport Endorse team

Experience tells us that proper communication is a key to successful development, and that is why Geniusee always strives to build a partnership with a client to benefit from the synergic effect.
SCRUM process

We decided to go with SCRUM to assure the quality of the deliverables, ending the project on time and within budget. The work was based on easily-managed sprints with coding and testing iterations during sprint reviews.
Lean approach

Geniusee used a lean approach that proposed moving quickly on the product development lifecycle. It allowed making quick iterations in order to gather user feedback often and improve future versions based on their needs.
Working with user feedback

To clearly understand end-customer needs, we developed a prototype that was tested in focus groups. Based on the client’s reviews, we made changes so that the final Version 1.0 delivered against user requirements

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Process

We identified the key features of the brand and athlete sponsorship platform that enabled a rapid launch. This helped us release the first version of the platform in four months, test it, and collect essential user feedback. We built a new instrument in sports sponsorships allowing brands find the ideal fit for marketing opportunities and campaigns easier and faster with real proof of influencing potential based on social media..

We conducted both BA (business analysis) and BPA (business process analysis). Our experts analyzed the market, defined budget estimates, clarified business ideas, and discussed strategies with the client. After that, we noted the requirements, validated and evaluated them, and shaped development activities, including anticipated changes during the upcoming process.

All this allowed us to organize, document properly, prioritize product features, assure the correct distribution of tasks between releases, predict possible bottlenecks, and present a consolidated vision to all stakeholders.
The core challenge in the user experience part of the design was to develop a comfortable and intuitive process of connecting brands and sports talent. Both were beneficiaries of a comfortable way of collaboration, and were able to reach their goals, and close opportunities successfully.

In order to make the platform intuitively usable and understandable, we worked to get as much info as we could about our users’ personas. We collaborated with the Sport Endorse project manager to organize user testing sessions, which really helped us identify pain points and fix them in further iterations.
We used the AWS Lambda service to assure scalability and support for a large number of programming languages (including Ruby, Python, Go, Node.JS, C#, and Java) and a huge number of services that have allowed us to use not just serverless computing but also database as a service, message queues, API gateway, and others, which greatly simplify the work with this model.

As we created a serverless framework, each endpoint referred to specific Lambda. We used Cognito for authorization and AWS Aurora RDS for PostgreSQL as a database. Media data was hosted by S3 bounded with CloudFront. Bitrise was used for native mobile apps.
We chose React.is for the front-end because it is great for developing complex client-side logic, especially when there are a lot of reusable web application components.

For the back-end part, we used Node.js. This platform allows you to write server-side code for dynamic web pages, web applications, and command-line programs. With Node.js, the "JavaScript for Everything" paradigm is implemented. It involves using one programming language to develop web applications instead of using different languages to work on the back-end.

For native mobile apps, we used Kotlin, Swift, and Java.
As the code is written, our developers monitor its quality. The main practices we use are linters to find errors and incorrect design during development and CodeReview to ensure the quality of the code and share knowledge within the team. Such standards helped us arrange the code in a uniform way, which made it easier to understand.

Our quality assurance engineers conducted web application features testing iOS and Android applications based on test design techniques. We also provided functional and non-functional testing. Among non-functional testing types, we conducted usability (UI) testing, security testing (basic), and cross-browser testing. We also processed smoke testing and regression testing for added changes and improvements and tested all in-built integrations such as Stripe, Google Calendar, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Project tech stack

Realizing the importance of the technology stack for the project of sponsorship platform, its scalability, and efficiency, we held a team brainstorm with the Sport Endorse team. There we assessed the size of the project in sports marketing and its probable future needs and selected the appropriate technologies. This tech stack let us release Version 1.0 of the platform in a very short timeframe.

Back End:

Front End:

iOS:

Android:

Geniusee team

As our customer on this project was a young startup, we decided to build a team of middle and senior specialists with good technical backgrounds and serious experience who were ready to take part in active work, possibly with revisions, because it was necessary to build the architecture of sports sponsorship platform from scratch and establish high-quality work of the systems.

Product team

Development team

Ihor

Tech lead

This project was challenging yet exciting. It was difficult to sync the overall tech stack, DevOps, and management, as well as connect delivered solutions to Instagram and Facebook to track followers and activities on the athlete’s pages. That said, this project wasn’t very complicated for us as a team when regarding flow and tech stack, as serverless and React are our specialties.
Oksana

Project manager

It was a great pleasure to work with Declan and the Sport Endorse project manager as we built an honest and productive collaboration. The Sport Endorse team was very responsive to our requests, especially when we asked to get feedback about the product from athletes and brands. This empowered us with a deeper understanding of their requirements and needs during the development process.

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Features

For sports talent:
- Create a compelling profile
- Automatic user verification
- Ability to connect your Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts
- Add videos to present yourself creatively
- Search and filter for suitable opportunities
- Apply for opportunities, rate the brand
- Automatic payment into you account
For brands:
- Create a company profile, adding key information
- Create an opportunity for your needs
- Contact athletes you short-list
- Easy secure payment via the platform using Stripe
- Simple export of transactions for accounting purposes
- Rate talent
Communication:
- Built-in instant messaging facilitates all necessary details to be agreed before the final deal
- Automatic messaging if deal accepted or declined
- Push notifications for iOS and Android apps
Secure and simple payment process:
- Stripe payment system integration
- Automatic invoicing
- Talent can connect a bank account to receive payment automatically
- Sport Endorse commission and any applicable tax calculations made automatically
iOS and Android apps for talent:
- Profile creation and opportunities management
- Built-in messenger
- Push notifications so talent know about new opportunities and can communicate efficiently with brands
Admin panel:
- Admin view of all users
- Ability to edit opportunities
- Ability to edit user profiles
- Ability to adjust Sport Endorse commissions