A running community app for a fitness studio.

The client is a fitness studio with an active running crew: early-morning groups, weekend long runs, trail outings and plenty of members who are just getting started. Its members already record every run on Strava or a Garmin watch, but the community around those runs lived in scattered group chats and in apps built around speed and rankings.

The studio wanted a place of its own, where a slow comeback run gets as much encouragement as a personal best. The brief was the community side of running: share runs, cheer each other on and stay close to the crew, without asking anyone to change how they track, and with the studio team able to keep the space friendly.

We started with a short discovery phase to agree the moments that matter: joining, bringing in your runs, seeing the crew's week, reacting to a run, and taking part in a studio challenge. Everything else was built around that loop.

Three decisions shaped the product. First, import, never track: members connect Strava or Garmin Connect once and their recorded activities flow in, so there is no double-tracking. Second, community before competition: challenges show shared progress towards a goal, leaderboards include every pace, and the guidelines are agreed at sign-up. Third, safety built in: hiding, reporting and blocking are two taps away, with a moderation queue for the studio team.

The interface is calm and warm, with run cards that put distance, pace, time and the route first, and a palette defined as design tokens so the studio's brand can be applied without redrawing screens.

What we built

• Onboarding. Sign in with Apple, Google, Facebook or email, agree the community guidelines and connect a running app in the same flow.
• Feed and stories. Runs and posts from the people you follow, each run with its distance, pace, time and route, plus 24-hour stories from the crew.
• Run page. The route, the headline numbers and mile splits for every imported run.
• New post. Share a thought, attach one of your runs and add a photo.
• Discover. Search runners, see the studio's running crew and follow people with their weekly mileage alongside.
• Challenges. Studio goals such as a monthly mileage club or a sunrise streak, with personal progress and a leaderboard that includes every pace.
• Profile. Bio, weekly miles, total runs, average pace and recent activity, with profile editing and connected apps in settings.
• Messages and notifications. Private conversations between members, and alerts for likes, comments, follows and challenge milestones.
• Moderation. Hide and report posts, block members, and a queue where studio staff review reports and restore content.

Want to see it in action? Talk to the team and we will take you through the app.

The studio has a complete mobile product that covers the member journey end to end, from sign-up and connecting a running app to the feed, challenges, messages and moderation, together with one component system to extend it from and a feature-by-feature basis for planning the next releases, such as creating stories and a separate web panel for studio staff.

It is the way we recommend starting any community MVP: agree the core loop, design it properly and build it on a foundation that can grow. The same approach carries over to native apps from our mobile app developers in London and to other health and fitness apps. Client names and figures in the screenshots have been changed, and the client is not named.