Let there be CHAT!

On Tuesday, every challenge on the new Count.It Journey app began talking. That is, participants in all our challenges logged in to find a new chat a newsfeed feature waiting for them to start…cheering wildly.

Challenge participants and admins have been asking for a challenge chat/newsfeed for a while, and it’s now a reality. 🎉

There are two parts to this story. One is about how team bonding starts with communication, and the other is about the tech.

Count.It exists for two reasons, both equally important: To get people moving, and to get them connecting with each other. In a world of increasingly sedentary, isolated work, our mission is to nudge people toward more physical activity, and more community bonding. A body is a terrible thing to waste, and working alone is no fun. 😭

The Count.It Journey app has always helped motivate people to achieve healthy activity challenges, and now it also allows them to talk to each other while they’re at it!

By which I mean talk trash to each other. 😂

We’re excited to launch chat, and, mind you, this is industrial strength chat with all the bells and whistles. Emoji reactions? Yes. Image posting? Totally! Separate channels for teams as well as for important admin announcements? Check!

You might ask, how does a small wellness company afford to build such fancy communications infrastructure? Well, we have an amazing dev team; but, in this case, we chose to buy rather than build. Specifically, we opted to use a great product from Stream.io, which is the software behind a number of chat feeds you may know and love, such as NextDoor, SoundCloud, Under Armour, Crunchbase, and more.

This is the tech part of the story, and non-geeks are forgiven for ducking out now….

After looking at a other solutions, we were extra impressed by the Stream.io API, which is beautifully documented, and by the fact that the API is compatible with Flutter, which is the “cross-platform front-end framework” we use for Count.It Journey. (In tech terms, Stream.io has a great Flutter SDK, ready to go.)

Now, there are no free lunches in software development, but sometimes things can come a bit easier than other times. Thanks to Stream.io, we were able to get a chat feed working in just a few days back in June. It took a bit longer to launch the feature to “production,” but much of that had to do with arcane technical tasks, like, uh, the need to upgrade our Flutter version, etc. 🙄

Bottom line: Challenge chat is now live on Count.It, and we hope all our brave challengers and admins will be as thrilled and talkative as we are! 😉