AgilyTeam

From SortieSport to SortieSport PRO

It all started with SortieSport, a web and mobile app for people who play sports: anyone could find sports partners nearby. As sales progressed, we realised that a business model based on community size alone would not be enough.

So my partner and I built SortieSport PRO, an offer for sports professionals: website, client records, activity and event scheduling, sign-ups and online payment, all in one place. Professionals could also reach the community through sponsored placements, targeted by the sport people were looking for.

Inovallée, the client that changed everything

Among our twenty or so PRO clients, one made us think hard: Inovallée, the technology park in Meylan (around 12,000 jobs). It chose our most complete plan to offer lunchtime sports activities to the people working on the park. Until then, everything was handled by hand, down to payments by cheque. With online payment, participants no longer had to come in person to sign up.

Inovallée then asked for more and more features, one in particular: creating events that were not about sport. Technically it was almost nothing, we just had to make the event type optional. Commercially it was the opposite, because sport was the very essence of SortieSport.

Inovallée went further still: it fully integrated our solution into its own apps, through our APIs.

Under the hood

The whole platform ran on a single technical base:

• a C# backend (.NET Core, Web API) on SQL Server, with SignalR for real time
• client websites generated by our CMS, in ASP.NET MVC and Vue.js
• an Angular admin interface
• Flutter mobile apps
• hosting on Azure and OVH, with Azure DevOps for code and deployments.

The birth of AgilyBox

Together with a sales strategy consultant, we decided to create AgilyBox: the same toolset (CRM, CMS, scheduling, sign-ups, online payment) sold as a white-label product. New market, new pricing, new sales strategy. SortieSport kept serving sports professionals, while AgilyBox targeted local authorities and companies, with a dedicated workplace well-being offer.

The two brands met in the middle: AgilyBox’s corporate clients wanted to offer their staff sports activities in set time slots, which SortieSport’s professionals could run.

AgilyBox Entraide during Covid

Then Covid hit. Anything built on people meeting was on hold, and several contracts with large groups that were well under way were paused. To keep serving local communities, we built AgilyBox Entraide for free. It reused the matching module designed for sports partners, this time so that residents could help each other: an elderly person who could no longer go out posted a request, and a neighbour did their shopping for them, without contact.

Each local authority set the types of help, the geographic scope and the approved volunteers itself. Carpentras, Fréjus, Saint-Raphaël, Tassin-la-Demi-Lune and Dieulefit rolled it out. In Saint-Raphaël alone, the platform collected 240 offers of help.

The end of the journey

AgilyBox Entraide got us through the door of several local authorities, but we never managed to turn it into revenue. The product was finished and there was nothing left to build. So I suggested to my partner that I go freelance while the Covid wave passed, as he kept selling the solution. A year later the business had not grown the way we hoped: we chose to stop, and my freelance career truly began.

In the press (in French)

• La startup meylanaise Agilyteam met une plateforme d’entraide à disposition des collectivités locales, Place Gre’net, 11 April 2020
• Agilybox : l’appli au service des solidarités territoriales, MesInfos, 16 April 2020
• Covid-19 : ces collectivités qui portent l’élan solidaire des citoyens sur le web, Cap’Com, April 2020
• Lien no. 146, Covid-19 special (PDF), City of Saint-Raphaël magazine, April 2020
• Covid-19 : bien vivre son confinement à Fréjus (PDF), City of Fréjus practical guide, 14 April 2020