MOTTIV

The Founder Had 200,000 Subscribers and No App

Taren Gesell built Triathlon Taren into one of the most recognized names in endurance sports media. 200,000 YouTube subscribers. A dedicated audience of triathletes, runners, and cyclists who trained along with his content. What he did not have was a product.

He came to EltexSoft with designs and a business idea: a training platform for endurance athletes. Not another workout tracker. A system that understands the difference between a swimming drill, a cycling interval session, and a marathon tempo run, and delivers personalized training plans across all three disciplines.

There was no prior codebase. No previous mobile team. No legacy to inherit. We built MOTTIV from scratch.

What We Built

The Full Product, From Zero

The team was small and stayed consistent for the entire two-year development period: our iOS and mobile engineering lead, two backend engineers, one QA engineer, and one project manager. Five people building an entire product.

MOTTIV is a subscription-based endurance training platform. The core features:

Personalized training plans. Programs for triathlon (sprint, Olympic, half Ironman, full Ironman), running (5K, 10K, half marathon, marathon), and cycling. Each plan adapts to the athlete’s current fitness level, available training days, and goal race date.

Workout flows. Structured workout screens that guide athletes through each session: warm-up, intervals, rest periods, cool-down. Different workout types for each discipline, because a swimming drill has a fundamentally different structure than a cycling power zone session.

Video training. Instructional video content integrated into workout flows. Technique videos, mobility work, strength training.

Progress analytics. Training load tracking, workout completion rates, performance trends over time. The dashboards that show an athlete whether they are on track for their goal.

Community features. Social elements for athletes to share progress, celebrate milestones, and stay motivated through long training blocks. Endurance training is months of consistent work. The community layer helps people stick with it.

Subscription management. Multiple subscription tiers with different access levels.

The Architecture Problem: Three Disciplines, One App

A typical fitness app has one type of workout. MOTTIV has at least three fundamentally different formats.

A running workout has pace zones, distance targets, and split tracking. A cycling workout has power zones, cadence targets, and elevation data. A swimming workout has stroke counts, interval distances measured in meters (not miles), and pool vs open water distinctions. A triathlon training plan weaves all three together in periodized blocks.

The architecture had to be flexible enough to support all three disciplines without tripling the codebase. Our iOS lead built a component-based system where workout types share a common structure but each discipline plugs in its own metrics, display logic, and progression rules. When MOTTIV later expanded beyond pure triathlon into standalone running and cycling programs, the architecture supported it without a rewrite.

The UI Challenge: Making Heavy Screens Feel Light

MOTTIV’s screens are dense. A single training plan view shows workouts across multiple weeks, each workout with its discipline icon, duration, intensity level, and completion status. The progress screen aggregates training volume across three disciplines with charts, trends, and comparisons. The workout screen itself has timers, video, instructions, and real-time feedback.

The design Taren brought was visually ambitious. Many custom components, dynamic layouts, detailed animations. No standard UIKit patterns that you can drop in from a library.

Our iOS lead built it so the app feels fast despite the density. Loading states are minimized. Data appears quickly. Scroll is smooth even on screens with dozens of dynamic elements. The reusable component library meant that new screens and flows could be built quickly without sacrificing performance, which mattered when the product was evolving during development.

Offline Mode: Athletes Train Without Internet

Runners train in parks. Cyclists train on rural roads. Triathletes swim in lakes. None of these places have reliable internet.

The offline challenge in a training app is harder than it sounds. The app must cache the current training plan and upcoming workouts locally. When the athlete completes a workout offline, the results must be stored and synced when connectivity returns. If the backend updated the training plan while the athlete was offline (because a coach adjusted it, or the algorithm recalculated based on a previous workout), the sync must resolve conflicts without losing data or confusing the athlete.

We built this with CoreData for local persistence and a sync layer that handles conflict resolution between local and server state. The app works fully offline for training execution and syncs cleanly when back online.

Working With a Creator, Not a Corporation

Taren is not a typical business client. He is a content creator who understands his audience deeply because he is one of them. He lives the training, races the races, and knows what endurance athletes need from first-hand experience.

This shaped how we worked. Standard discovery workshops where a product manager interviews stakeholders would not have captured the domain knowledge Taren brought. Instead, we communicated directly with him to understand how endurance athletes think about training: how they plan seasons, how they deal with missed workouts, what motivates them during a 16-week Ironman build, and what makes them quit an app after two weeks.

The domain was niche. Our team did not have deep personal experience in triathlon training at the start. Learning the domain was part of the job. Our iOS lead eventually started running himself, which meant he began using the product not just as an engineer but as a user. That changed how he approached UX decisions.

This is what a five-person team working for two years on a single product produces. Not just code. Understanding.

What We Learned

MOTTIV reinforced something we see across our long-term engagements: small, stable teams outperform larger teams with turnover. Five people for two years meant everyone understood the full product, the domain, the client’s priorities, and the technical constraints. No onboarding overhead. No knowledge loss. No “who built this and why?” conversations.

The other lesson: when you build from scratch for a domain expert, the engineer’s job is not just to implement designs. It is to absorb enough domain knowledge to make product-level decisions. Our iOS lead made UX decisions that Taren had not specified in the designs because the designs did not cover every interaction flow. That is what happens when the budget does not include a full-time product designer, and it is where senior engineers earn their rate.

Who We Are

EltexSoft is a boutique software engineering studio. 35-50 senior engineers. Headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal. Engineering team in Ukraine. Founded in 2015.

MOTTIV is one of several products we have built from scratch. Others include Unfold (Apple Best of 2019), SoRipe (acquired by Hungry), and WinitClinic (functional medicine marketplace). We also build with Laravel, React, Vue, Django, iOS, and Android.

5.0 Clutch rating across 30+ verified reviews. 200+ five-star Upwork reviews. Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted agency status (top 1%). Average client engagement: 3+ years.

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