Quiet Coach

Supporting Coaches in Local Leagues

Quiet Coach, a Toronto startup building a coaching app for amateur sports leagues, lost its development team mid build with no one left to set direction. Ollon took on the role of fractional CTO, secured SRED funding, and rebuilt the app around real time coach to player communication over Bluetooth. The finished app is fully integrated with its hardware and now in beta testing with real coaches and players.

Situation

Quiet Coach, a Toronto startup wanted to help sports coaches in amateur leagues improve the performance of their teams and individual players. They had started work on a technology solution internally, but had run into a challenge with the departure of their existing development team. They looked to Ollon to rescue the product and bring a targeted coaching app successfully to launch

Solution

To get the product back on track, Ollon took on the role of part time CTO and embarked on a three stage approach involving a) attaining necessary funding through SRED, b) conducting feedback interviews with coaches, and c) modifying the product's direction to ensure it meets consumer needs. We fine tuned the solution, producing a minimal, viable product that focused on real time coach to player communications to up the game.

Results

The new app developed by Ollon is fully integrated with an updated hardware solution and currently undergoing a further round of beta testing. Through CTO and software development services, Ollon was able to rescue this incomplete product and bring Quiet Coach's vision to life.

Technologies

NodeJS, Java, Objective C, MySql, HTML/CSS

Our Expertise in Action

Application Triage and Rescue

A Toronto startup building a coaching app for amateur sports leagues had an old prototype that was partly usable but never built out for the real time, coach to player communication the company had decided to pursue. Its development team left before that shift was finished, leaving the build stalled with no one to carry it forward. Ollon took over technical direction, working through the existing prototype to determine what could stay and what needed an overhaul, then reworked both the underlying architecture and the user interface to support that communication. The stalled prototype became a working product that reached testing with real users.

Wearable Technology Integration

Quiet Coach is a Toronto startup building a coaching app for amateur sports leagues. During games, coaches had no way to speak privately to one player without shouting across the field. Ollon integrated the app over Bluetooth with a custom handheld device the coach carried, communicating with hardware players wore on their helmets. The main challenge was keeping that link reliable without mobile data: too much information over Bluetooth created a bottleneck, so the app sent as little data as possible while preserving clear audio, refined through daily testing with the hardware side. The result is a working system for private, targeted instructions during live games.

Fractional CTO and Fractional Technical Leadership

Quiet Coach is a Toronto startup building a coaching app for amateur sports leagues. When its development team left before the product was finished, the company had no one internally to set technical direction or make the calls needed to get the product to launch. Ollon took on the role of fractional CTO, securing SRED funding. From there, Ollon worked through the existing system to understand what had already been built, onboarded a firmware developer and mobile developers, and set technical direction for what could realistically be built within the company's limited budget, keeping the team focused on the work that mattered most.

Mobile App Development

Quiet Coach needed help finishing its coaching app for both iOS and Android after its previous development team left the build incomplete. Ollon continued development using Objective C for iOS and Java for Android, fine tuning the existing codebase into a working product. That included building the app's Bluetooth integration with the custom hardware coaches and players used during games. The result was a functioning application that went through multiple rounds of beta testing, with feedback from each round folded back into further improvements.

IoT

Quiet Coach's coaching app needed a piece of wearable hardware that players could keep on during an active match, letting coaches speak to them privately over Bluetooth. The earliest prototype was a two inch box housing the Bluetooth chip and a small speaker, workable sitting on a desk but impractical for a player moving around a field. As the hardware partner building the device iterated toward a small headset with a microphone, Ollon adjusted the app side integration at each step, keeping Bluetooth pairing and audio data transfer reliable with the new form factor. The result was a low profile, wearable headset players could keep on during live games, in place of the original box.