Keeping fit and active isn't easy on your own. Phil Eligio, Founder of Squads, tells us about how his app is connecting people with the goal of improving themselves, whether it's their overall health or just wellness. Bubble's easy third-party integrations lets builders like Phil have the freedom and ability to create the app they want, all within Bubble's no-code framework.
Tell us about your app and what it does.
Squads is a platform for social fitness discovery. Do stuff. Feel great. Have fun! Squads helps people connect with people with shared interests and goals ('Squads') to improve their overall health and wellness.
We help people keep motivated and reach their goals of a more healthy and fulfilling everyday life by providing a platform for people to discover groups and activities to be involved with and take action to reach these goals.
We also aim to empower professional Squad runners - gyms, personal trainers, fitness instructors, wellness influencers, and more - to build a successful and sustainable lifestyle by offering the capability to nurture engaged Squad followings and monetising these experiences.
We believe that Squads can help people have a better quality of life through improved health and wellbeing.
How does your app work?
Once people sign up for Squads, they are onboarded into the platform by asking a few questions to enrich their profile. This is used to tailor their experience and recommendations to help optimise interaction and ongoing engagement.
Within Squads, people can 'warm-up' to their Squad of potential event participants with simple online chat functionality. These Squads can then create events for Squad members to participate in, or join existing Squad events. Squad members then have somewhere to access this information in a structured way and receive reminders to motivate members and further drive participation.
As our understanding of our userbase grows, we aim to integrate layers of artificial intelligence to understand what drives Squads users to engage, using this insight to present better recommendations to Squads users.
Tell us a little about your background and how you discovered no-code tools like Bubble.
My background is working in international advertising and marketing for over 15+ years. I have been based in Sydney, London, and other cities, having led teams across the globe to understand a better, more sustainable way to grow advertising and marketing practices for organisations of all sizes.
We have looked at a number of ways to build a functional, engaging version of Squads for a few years. After a few attempts using other frameworks, we re-visited 'no-code' platforms recently and found that many of the pieces of the puzzle could be enabled relatively easily. Bubble was recommended by someone in conversation and it just grew from there.
Why did you build your app on Bubble?
Squads uses a combination of specific features from existing user experiences, brought together thoughtfully to drive better engagement. It is built to appeal to the casual fitness and wellness seeker all the way to the fanatic. Knowing that Bubble could accelerate the combination of these existing experiences was a key driver in leveraging Bubble to get something up and running rapidly.
We can implement some of our ideas quickly, encouraging constant experimentation and optimisation.
The way that Bubble works functionality-wise also enables Squads to be developed not only to MVP-level, but to a production-specification application. Bubble allows us to easily integrate some leading third-party services to enhance Squads further, and provide a pathway to future scalability.
What have been your milestones or successes so far?
After soft-launching the Bubble-powered MVP in September (after a 6-week initial development period), every new user that discovers the platform is a milestone for Squads. As the situation around the world continues to shift, we see how certain features and messaging appeals to different users, and we're constantly discovering from user feedback ways to really make Squads available for Squad activities anywhere, anytime.
Squads has also recently been accepted into a Research & Development fellowship program with an initiative to drive innovation in the local media industry. Having the toolset in Bubble enables rapid prototyping in this program to test out various approaches to drive engagement.
What are your future plans for your app?
Squads is now out in the wild, and we're continuously taking in feedback and iterating. The plan in the next month or two is to look at leveraging the Bubble platform and learnings from early user feedback into a 'native' app, making Squads available on the iOS and Android app stores.
Further integration of third-party systems to drive engagement and other AI-driven functionality is on the wish list, as well as formally pushing out the Squads Pro feature set.
Even though Bubble enables less-technical users to push out production-level applications, the search is also on for a technical co-founder to add to the team. We're hoping that bringing Bubble to life and developing traction will help inspire potential collaborators.
Learn more about Squads: Instagram | Twitter | LinkedIn | Facebook
About Bubble
Bubble is a leader in the no-code movement. Bubble offers a powerful point-and-click web editor and cloud hosting platform that allows users to build fully customizable web applications and workflows, ranging from simple prototypes to complex marketplaces, SaaS products, and more. Over 600,000 users are currently building and launching businesses on Bubble - many have gone on to participate in top accelerator programs, such as Y Combinator, and even raise $365M in venture funding. Bubble is more than just a product. We are a strong community of builders and entrepreneurs that are united by the belief that everyone should be able to create technology.
Do you want your app featured by Bubble? Reach out to us and tell us about your app. In addition to this series, we sometimes select our best apps to showcase on our website.
