The challenge
Kestrel's founders had a strong insight about social accountability in fitness and a product spec listing 80 features. They had funding for roughly 14 weeks of development. Two previous agencies had quoted nine months and $400k — timelines that would have ended the company before launch.
What we did
Cut the scope, hard
Discovery identified one job the app had to do: help a user complete a workout they'd otherwise skip. Seventy-one of the eighty features didn't serve that job. We shipped nine and parked the rest with an explicit v2 list so nothing felt lost.
Designed for the activation moment
Every design decision optimized for one metric: percentage of users completing a workout within 24 hours of install. We got that from a 19% prototype baseline to 61% at launch through onboarding iteration.
Built for real scale from day one
React Native with a Postgres and edge-function backend. Boring, proven architecture that handled a 40x traffic spike from a viral TikTok in month four without a single incident.
Instrumented before launching
Product analytics, crash reporting, and a funnel dashboard shipped with v1. When retention dipped in month two we could see exactly which cohort and which screen — and fix it in a week.
The result
Kestrel launched in 11 weeks for well under a third of the previous quotes. They hit 104,000 users in year one with 38% day-30 retention — roughly double the fitness app category median — and raised a seed round on the traction.
“Every other agency said yes to our 80-feature spec and quoted nine months. Digital Squad said most of it was wrong and showed us why. That honesty is the only reason the company still exists.”