Four missed launch dates. Then we shipped.
JetSynthesys is a Pune-based digital entertainment company known for gaming, esports and music. After early success in wellness with its meditation app ThinkRight, it set out to build RightLife: a single app covering sleep, activity, nutrition and mental wellbeing.
A year in, and no launch.
An external agency had been building RightLife for about a year. It had missed four launch dates and was on track to miss a fifth. Leadership had a growing sense that they weren't getting a true picture of where the product stood. I was brought in to audit the product and put it back on track.
Found what the agency hadn't flagged.
The audit surfaced three problems:
Infrastructure costs
The servers were already provisioned for scale before the app had a single user. I restructured the setup to grow with actual usage and guided the product changes needed to support it, with minimal rework. Monthly server costs fell by about 66%.
App store approval risk
No one had checked the product against Apple's and Google's approval rules for health apps. Facial scanning, data storage and in-app payments all had to be reworked to meet their guidelines. Left alone, this would have blocked the launch outright.
Scope
About 80% of the features were ready, and the team was stuck on the remaining 20%. I cut the product back to what the MVP genuinely needed.
Hit the fifth date.
The early results led to a full-time role as CTO of RightLife. The app launched within a month of my joining full-time, on the date the agency was about to miss.
Brought technology in-house.
I hired experienced developers first, so they could help shape the team and the technical decisions. Within two months we had a team of 10: seven developers, two QA engineers and a product manager. That was just over half the size of the agency team, and it produced 1.8x the output. The senior developers improved existing features while the junior developers built new ones under their guidance.
Made decisions on data, not opinion.
We instrumented every user journey in Mixpanel and kept the initial launch deliberately quiet. We watched where users dropped off and refined the product until the whole company was confident in it. We shipped a release every week, visible to everyone, and technology, marketing and sales began working in step.
Is your product stuck with an agency?
Start a conversation ↗Product images courtesy of RightLife.