Previously, The Body Coach couldn’t track user behavior, so struggled to know which features were most popular. “With our previous app, a customer would purchase a PDF and then effectively disappear. We had no insight into what that customer was doing beyond the purchase,” says Saagar Bains, head of product at The Body Coach.

The Body Coach developed the iOS version of the app in 3 months and launched it on the Apple App Store. To manage infrastructure support, it worked with AWS Partner Just After Midnight.

The launch went smoothly and The Body Coach services remained available to customers even when traffic was high. The company used AWS Infrastructure Event Management, which offers architecture and scaling guidance and operational support for planned events, to handle spikes in traffic. It also relied on AWS Lambda for serverless, event-driven compute resources. “When the product launched there was a lot of nervousness around how it was going to be received and also the volume of uptake. But we had absolutely no issues with our services going down,” says Bains.

Using the Amazon CloudFront content delivery network service ensured high-quality content was served reliably across different markets, meaning customers can always quickly access recipes and workout plans.

The Body Coach iOS app now has more than 1 million downloads. Wicks and his team credit this success to the way it’s been able to use data-driven insights about customer behavior to improve their experience.

Knowing how customers use the app allows the team to give them more of what they want, increasing their engagement and reducing churn. “The app is now subscription-based and we can track user engagement, transactions, churn, demographics, and growth of our various revenue streams,” says Bains. “Everything from design tweaks and updating the information architecture to new methods to drive uptake and adoption of features—all of our development is now informed by data,” says Bains.

The Body Coach has used data to confirm, for example, that the greatest demand is in January and during the summer. So it now offers inspirational workouts for the New Year’s resolutions crowd, and recipes with seasonal ingredients for the summer dieters.

It also developed new features that enable users to share their fitness stats and pictures with each other, and allow The Body Coach to promote live events and bootcamps.

The Body Coach collects information about app usage in a data warehouse using Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), which provides object storage built to retrieve any amount of data from anywhere. It uses the Amazon Athena interactive query service and the serverless Amazon QuickSight business intelligence service to analyze the data and generate insights that drive product improvements.

Following the success of the iOS version, the Android app has launched in 175 countries. The global presence of AWS and building the app on serverless infrastructure has made this expansion easier.

As it adds new customers, AWS allowed it to quickly scale compute resources to meet demand and Regions and Availability Zones ensure customers around the world have reliable and quick access to content. “Using AWS has got us thinking on a truly global scale,” says Bains. “We’re gaining customers in new countries and thinking about creating localized and multilingual content. That’s something we never would have thought was possible before.”