Vitruvian: Thanks to Shake we build meaningful user relationships

Vitruvian, a leading fitness app revolutionizing at-home workouts, carefully tracks, plans, and tailors workouts to suit individual users. Acting as a personal trainer, the app logs workout data to showcase progress, regardless of scale.

We connected with Nathan Castlehow, a Software Engineer at Vitruvian, to discuss Shake SDK’s instrumental role in enhancing their users’ workout experience.

Vitruvian used another competing solution for bug reporting before Shake, which shaped their requirements when moving forward. They sought a tool that would enable them to directly collect and monitor user feedback and feature requests. 

Aside from collecting feedback, they needed a tool that would provide them with valuable data to act on that feedback and solve it way faster. This was pivotal to Vitruvian in order to strengthen its existing relationships with users and form new, meaningful ones. 

Lastly, Nathan emphasized the importance of crash reporting to Vitruvian. They were looking for a tool that covers the whole range of issues a user might experience, not just bugs. This is vital for both product discovery and understanding users. 

Previously, Vitruvian used a competing bug reporting tool but found it to be prohibitively expensive. After a thorough comparison, Nathan concluded that joining Shake was a no-brainer, offering a more cost-effective solution with all the necessary features, including crash reports.

He added that the previous tool, while effective, wasn’t very user-friendly. This was one of the major points that led them to consider alternatives. Vitruvian needed something that would keep users engaged, rather than just gather data on issues. 

Vitruvian views the relationship between users and the app as supply/demand. Nathan added that there is a certain dynamic that they wanted to achieve when it comes to how fast issues are resolved, which simply wasn’t possible with the previous tool.

With over a year of using Shake, Nathan noted increased user engagement and a sense of purpose among users who actively contribute to making the app more accessible. The app now fosters a symbiotic relationship between supply and demand.

Nathan emphasized the accelerated resolution of issues, thanks to Shake. Quick and easy customer reporting, featuring immediate screenshots and logs pinpointing problems, allows users to act as real-time testers.

The team at Vitruvian actively leverages the Slack integration for internal issue discussions and monitoring recurring bugs or crashes.

Vitruvian, releasing daily changes like most apps, stands out by using Shake to implement alterations users truly desire. Immediate feedback from users upon releasing new app versions helps the team prioritize improvements effectively.

Nathan highlighted that hundreds of issues have been successfully addressed, creating a dynamic feedback loop. Vitruvian plans to persist in utilizing Shake in production to consistently deliver improved app versions, ensuring long-term user engagement and satisfaction.

The seamless integration of Shake SDK has empowered Vitruvian to stay agile and responsive to user needs, further solidifying its position as a fitness app leader in the industry.