Case study · Octoswim
A complete swim-school platform, built and launched in eleven weeks.
Bookings, payments, poolside registers, progress tracking and parent communication for UK swim schools, replacing spreadsheets and paper.
Visit Octoswim
- 11
- weeks from first commit to launch
- 5
- portals: parent, teacher, admin, platform, public
- 95
- screens shipped
- 0%
- transaction fees for schools
The problem
Swim schools run on spreadsheets, paper registers and payment tools that take a cut of every lesson. Nick, who runs Octoswim, needed a platform that handled the whole operation, from a parent booking a place to a teacher marking attendance with wet hands at the poolside, and it needed to launch before the autumn term.
What we built
- Parent portal: book and pay for places, track a child’s progress, see achievements
- Teacher portal: a poolside register mode built for phones, wet hands and glare
- Admin portal: classes, schedules, families, staff hours, invoices, waitlists and reports
- Platform portal: operate and support every school from one place
- Stripe Connect payouts to each school and Stripe Billing for the platform subscription
- Multi-tenant Postgres with row-level security as the primary boundary, across 86 migrations
Where the AI earns its place
- AI teaching guidance for swimmers with special educational needs and disabilities, generated from each child’s intake form
- Five-stage skill tracking with automated certificates instead of pass or fail
- Targeted slot offers that invite the right families rather than broadcasting a waitlist
The result
Octoswim launched as a live, paying product with a flat £20 per month price and no transaction fees, a position its established competitors cannot match. The whole platform, 95 screens and 57 server endpoints, was designed, built, secured and shipped by one senior engineer directing AI tooling in eleven weeks.