Building strong data analytics for a health & fitness app.
How it all started.
A leading Australian health-tech company developed a health & fitness app to help consumers improve wellness in their daily lives with custom nutrition plans.
Years later, their app was at a crossroads. Leadership wanted to introduce new features and revamp the revenue funnel.
But their data infrastructure had significant gaps. No single source of truth. Discrepancies in reporting across different teams. Unreliable data flows between systems.
That’s when the SaaS founder reached out to Zenius.
Using custom skill-based assessments, the hiring experts at Zenius vetted and onboarded a dedicated data analyst and senior Flutter developer.
Within the first three months, the new remote team had untangled data flows, built well-designed BI dashboards and integrated third-party REST APIs into the app.
- Industry: SaaS
- Product: Health & fitness app
- Mission: Personalized & balanced nutrition for all
- Company size: 11–50
- Founded in: 2015
- HQ Location: Alexandria
- Based in: Australia
The challenges.
Though the health & fitness app was flourishing with a loyal user base, their data analytics hadn’t kept up with the growth.
Team members were pulling data that didn’t reconcile across reports. And without visibility into what was actually working, leadership couldn’t confidently make decisions or map out product direction.
The codebase was also old and saddled with technical debt. But they urgently needed to fix data flows and integrate third-party APIs with their Flutter app.
Messy data that couldn’t be trusted
The most pressing concern was that subscriptions, transactions and churn calculations didn’t match the expected numbers. One internal dashboard showed a certain monthly churn rate, but a manual check of subscription records showed a completely different number.
Improperly cleaned and unified data meant that there were many such gaps. If anyone wanted to forecast revenue or evaluate acquisition channels, they just had to look at the best available figures and guess.
No visibility into user behavior
The client had started tracking user behavior on their app and website, but implementation was incomplete. Some product features just didn’t have tracking. Custom event names were inconsistent and confusing, which made it hard to run queries even when data existed.
This meant the product team was often unsure which features actually drove retention and which ones were barely used. Was it worth it to expand their recipes section? Were there any pain points in the daily logging page? The company needed a data analyst to sort through the chaos.
Urgent need to integrate third-party REST APIs
The Flutter app had to be integrated with a few different third-party REST APIs, including a payment processor. This task needed a developer who could build reliable data flows between different systems, handle authentication properly and make it robust enough for a seamless user experience.
To make this more difficult, the client’s codebase had accumulated technical debt over the years and had almost no documentation. Token refresh wasn’t handled, and the auth logic was scattered across unrelated parts, making it risky to make changes.
Remote team that didn’t need hand-holding
The founder had tried to fill these positions on their team before, but it was impossible to find the right people.
As a lean SaaS company, they wanted to bring on professionals who could work independently, with minimal oversight from the leadership team that was already stretched too thin.
They preferred hires who could take initiative, fully own the areas they were responsible for and catch problems before they spiraled out of control.
Our solution.
In order to get usable insights and improve their Flutter app, the client planned to onboard two remote talents, a data analyst and a senior Flutter developer.
At Zenius, choosing the right person is not just about years of experience or whether they can pass a LeetCode test.
So based on the client’s exact requirements and current tech stack, our expert hiring team developed custom Ideal Candidate Profiles (ICPs) for these positions.
Beyond the required qualifications and competencies, the perfect candidates would be comfortable solving new problems every day, building up systems from scratch and getting alignment across leadership, product, finance & marketing teams.
Carefully designed custom assessments.
To evaluate candidates at scale, we created role-specific assessments to test skill proficiencies and independence directly. Designed by domain experts, these tests focused on performance in real-life situations.
Data analyst assessments
Hands-on questions covered advanced SQL skills like complex joins and window functions. Candidates were also tested on their familiarity with tools like GA4 and their ability to interpret & spot issues in given dashboards.
A few situational questions checked the candidates’ judgement and decision-making skills when faced with complicated day-to-day problems.
These questions were also used to evaluate candidates’ communication skills. For example, can they clearly explain complex data-related issues to non-technical colleagues?
Senior Flutter developer assessment
Practical coding questions focused on real-world integration scenarios. Candidates were evaluated on their ability to write clean code that gracefully handles API fetches, authentication, retries, token refresh and more, with robust error handling.
Situational questions helped us assess the candidates’ problem-solving aptitude and ability to communicate effectively with stakeholders and get aligned on specs.
Applicants for the job openings
Role-specific custom assessments
Talents hired in the remote team
The results & ROI.
Within three months of starting the engagement, the client already had:
Clarity into data across the business
Working across tools like GA4, BigQuery, Stripe and Looker Studio, the data analyst resolved data discrepancies and built BI dashboards. Leadership, product, marketing and finance teams now have a shared, trusted view of key SaaS and revenue metrics across the app & website.
Robust product analytics
Well-designed usage tracking and A/B testing have resulted in a sharper understanding of why users keep returning to the app (or don’t). The remote data analyst independently studied user behavior and flagged potential risks & growth opportunities.
Completed REST APIs integration
The hired senior Flutter developer led the integration of the Flutter app with the payment processor and the other third-party REST APIs, which was completed well within the deadline. They also debugged and resolved long-standing integration issues & inconsistencies.
Graceful implementation of authentication & retries
Reliable, secure & graceful handling of authentication, token refresh, retries, concurrent requests and edge cases means users get a seamless, error-free experience.
More maintainable and performant codebase
Between refactoring, better error handling and well-thought-out feature expansions, the codebase is cleaner and has less technical debt than they started with.
Reliable talents who drive the business forward
Zenius remote team members have proved to be assets for this lean health-tech SaaS team.
“[The data analyst] brought up some churn signals that the client hadn’t even considered and described how they’d already started tracking them,” said a team lead. “That’s when I was like, okay, they really do care about the product.”
Required tech stack.
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