To bring their Sportpost vision to life, the entrepreneurial founders turned to the business-centric software development experts at Cogniance. Two years later, Sportpost is a vibrant, highly interactive magnet for sports fans – and growing. Driving this expansion is the Cogniance team, a critical component of the Sportpost organization, dedicated to providing the full spectrum of software craftsmanship needed to keep Sportpost at the top of its game.

Sportpost’s Challenge: Succeed or Fail, Quickly

The three founders of Sportpost – Peter Janes, Paul Stewart, and Charlie Cooper – met at Loughborough University in the U.K. They shared a passion for sports, including rugby, as well as smart business sense and entrepreneurial aspirations.

After years of working in arenas such as sports media and representation, sports betting, and digital design and advertising, the three pooled their expertise to capitalize on a market opportunity they discovered: the lack of a social sharing or social bookmarking solution devoted specifically to sports. They created Sportpost as a revolutionary sports website designed to give sports fans, the site’s users, greater control over their sports content.

“The three founders of Sportpost are all strong in our particular domains, but we needed engineering expertise to take our good idea and bring it to life,” says Charlie Cooper. “Cogniance provides that engineering expertise and really adds to our in-house skills.”

As a startup company, Sportpost also had to achieve its goals on a limited budget, and they needed to move fast to take advantage of their market opportunity.

The Cogniance Solution: A Business-Centric Approach, An Impressive Result

After evaluating some London-based independent software developers as employees or consultants, Sportpost instead decided they could ramp up their engineering expertise more quickly and effectively with Cogniance. Their Cogniance team consists of a project manager and five software engineers, plus two quality assurance (QA) experts. The Cogniance project manager/tech lead is the main point of contact with Sportpost, but Cooper and his team also work directly with all the Cogniance engineers and QA staff as needed.

“Because we're an online company and our website is our product, we felt it was important that we do our own website design and user interface (UI) in-house, but Cogniance handles everything else,” says Cooper. “We hand the wireframe and design to the Cogniance engineering team and then we all work iteratively until final release.”

Cogniance also manages network operations center (NOC) support for the production Sportpost environment, which is hosted by Amazon EC2. Cogniance provides 24/7 network operations for Sportpost’s service and applications.

The Results: Successful Platform Ready for Replication

Sportpost brought Cogniance on board just as the company was readying its pitch to early investors. “We used the Cogniance connection as part of our investment pitch, and it helped us get our initial funding from a group of angel investors,” says Cooper.

Even with funding in hand, Sportpost’s budget remained modest. By tapping Cogniance’s Kiev-based pool of highly trained, highly skilled software engineers, Sportpost put a complete team of innovative, business-focused software engineers to work immediately and with greater cost efficiencies than if they had hired their own engineers. With Cogniance, Sportpost also avoided the language and communication barriers that too often mar outsourcing relationships.

“Cogniance’s pride in its English abilities is well-founded,” says Cooper. “Not just at the top of the company, but there’s no language barrier with any of the technical leads, front-end engineers, server engineers, or QA staff. Communicating complex ideas is never a problem for Cogniance.”

With its engineering expertise and quick grasp of Sportpost’s business goals, Cogniance defined the architecture and allowed Sportpost to launch its website quickly – beta version in two months, full site two months later – and attract more than 2 million monthly unique users within a year of its launch. Cogniance remains a vital part of Sportpost’s business, and the Cogniance engineers are fully committed to Sportpost’s success.

“We value Cogniance for their innovative engineering and professionalism combined with their strong personal touch,” says Cooper. “We view the Cogniance team as a long-term partner that’s integral to Sportpost. Our recent investment will allow us to enhance our great relationship with Cogniance by building our own in-house engineering team to complement the Cogniance team, with everyone’s efforts tightly integrated. We also appreciate the flexibility of the Cogniance team, and their ability to change direction and scale up or down on very short notice.”

That flexibility lets Sportpost add new features and expand its offering in response to user demands and changing market conditions. It also is enabling Sportpost to plan its next move, which is to replicate its social bookmarking success in sports in other verticals, such as music, film, and games.

“Social sharing has been around for years, so our challenge is to take our initial success with Sportpost and give something new to users, especially in North America,” says Cooper. “We will rely heavily on Cogniance for these next set of plans, as we once again work to translate big ideas into reality.”

Challenge

• Develop a promising online business idea into a full product without in-house software engineering expertise
• Launch a new social sharing platform quickly to take advantage of a market opportunity
• Work within a limited budget

Solution

• Sportpost delegated all the implementation of its engineering to Cogniance
• Cogniance delivered software craftsmanship from its talented pool of engineers based in Kiev, Ukraine
• In addition to the Sportpost web platform, Cogniance also handles network operations for the production Sportpost online environment

Benefits

• Sportpost leveraged its Cogniance relationship to gain the confidence of early investors and to secure its initial angel funding
• Cogniance helped define the architecture, built a beta web platform within two months, and finished the full platform two months later
• In the first year since its launch, Sportpost.com grew to 2 million unique users monthly with substantial user contribution and interaction
• Sportpost now has a successful platform that it plans to extend into other vertical markets beyond sports

www.sportpost.com