2020 StrengthPortal retrospective: Platform integrations and improvements

by Matt McGunagle

2020 was an incredibly challenging year for the industry as a whole. Covid-19 shut down our customers businesses around the world. As you would expect the in-person tracking activity on our platform dropped to almost nothing while governments and companies tried to figure out how to navigate the pandemic. Despite this challenge we were incredibly happy to see that our platforms features for online remote training allowed of our customers to continue running their business and helping their clients. For many this was their first venture into online personal training and something that we know will continue to be a strong, growing service within the industry for years to come.

While the world seemingly came to a halt for most of the year, we kept our heads down and continued to improve our software platform with the following updates:

  • New landing and pricing pages.
  • An improved flow for new single location gyms and personal training to onboard and setup their StrengthPortal accounts.
  • Supported integration for Mindbody customers to easily onboard their training staff and manage their client accounts.
  • Built out support and RBACs for a new customer company setting in our platform called Open Organization to match the needs of training teams that share programs and clients with each other.
  • Rebuilt our responsive web app programming and tracking with the latest and greatest version of react js for improved performance.
  • A huge upgrade for our backend to python 3 and the latest and greatest version of AWS elastisearch for improved stability and performance.
  • Rebuilt our mobile apps from scratch with new UX and UI to improve the workout tracking experience for trainers and their clients with the latest version of react native.

At a high-level 2020 was a huge step forward for us as a company. Version 2 of StrengthPortal from 2017 had successfully scaled and met the needs of our customers, but with software platforms you have to continually invest into updating your infrastructure to ensure you can build and deliver a high-quality experience. 2020 was the year we took the time to set ourselves up for success for the next 5-10 years of company and platform growth.