Background
Samten was an exciting new meditation and mindfulness app. Grounded in Buddhist beliefs, the app supports beginners and experts alike with accessible meditation practice. Following a disheartening launch to market with their first offer, the founders approached us to reimagine their app and bring their dream alive.
Together, we established their true vision and ambition for the app. Focussing on delivering an exceptional user experience, we took the time to really understand their customers and as a result created an intuitive, beautiful and serene app that has seen exceptional growth since its second launch.
Solution
With more than 70 million working days lost annually to mental health issues in the UK, costing employers over £2.4 billion each year, there was a clear need for an evidence-based self-help solution that could help people develop practical strategies to manage their mental health and wellbeing.
Samten set out to relaunch its meditation app and needed the right digital partner to bring an improved version to market. Building on the lessons learned from a disappointing first iteration, the goal was to create a more engaging, user-friendly experience that better met the needs of its audience.
To support its ambitious growth plans, Samten recognised the need for a clear digital roadmap that would guide future development and position the business for long-term success. With mindfulness experiencing strong global demand, establishing the right foundations was essential.
The resulting strategy provided a platform for sustainable growth, helping Samten create an innovative and scalable commercial proposition while giving the business confidence to pursue its long-term vision.
Impact
Our approach to the build entailed repurposing the database structure. Enhanced tables were needed to support the new native app and the API services alongside the auth server. It has been deployed through Azure through a series of iterations where we took time to “test and learn” with key users to understand their experiences of each section, gaining ongoing feedback and deploying new releases in response.
The main application was built using Microsoft Xamarin, which enables common language to produce cross-platform, fully native apps for both iOS and Android.
Subscriptions are handled using native in-app purchasing options provided by both Apple and Android.
For hosting provision and data infrastructure, Microsoft Azure was chosen as a platform due to its ability to quickly scale to suit demand on the system and the ability to automate tasks and services.
The website was built using Umbraco CMS, which gave Samten a feature-rich and easy-to-maintain website to support the app.
Results
"It makes all the difference in the world to work with a partner company who really understands your needs, and that of the audience. What we have now is ‘night and day’ compared to the first iteration of the Samten app: it’s completely revitalised our core meditation content and made it accessible and engaging to a far wider audience."
