ACE
A two-sided marketplace for Thailand's independent fitness and amateur sports community.
The Challenge
Thailand's amateur sports market faces many different problems. Sports groups like football clubs, basketball circles, and running groups coordinate through fragmented channels such as LINE chats and Facebook Groups. This forces them to use manual payment collection and informal venue arrangements. Independent sports, fitness, and wellness providers, meanwhile, struggle to find clientele in an industry dominated by large multi-national chains.
ACE's founder came to Chana with a vision for bridging both sides on a single platform. Amateur groups would get one place to communicate, make payments, and source venues and equipment. Independent providers would gain a marketplace to find customers on equal footing with the corporate players.
Why a Custom Build
Off-the-shelf marketplace templates wouldn't fit. To make ACE a competitive marketplace in the fitness industry, we needed to allow for advanced features such as allowing businesses to have multiple locations, allowing businesses to automatically pre-fill all of their business details so they didn't have to enter it themselves, and displaying staff or instructors that will be encharge of hosting a session in order to allow businesses to get set up quickly and users to start booking sessions in the most efficient way.
What We Built
ACE is a two-sided marketplace, one experience for members looking to discover and book fitness sessions, and a separate business dashboard for gym owners, instructors, and independent providers to manage their offerings.
Business owners can sign up, choose a subscription plan, and start with a free trial. From their dashboard, they define the types of sessions they offer, pricing, and capacity, and schedule specific bookable instances for members to find and reserve.
Payments happen through the platform. Members pay at the point of booking; providers receive payouts directly, with no manual invoicing or chasing.
Member profiles are built around fitness interests and goals, laying the groundwork for personalised recommendations as ACE grows.
How We Worked
The engagement ran on a milestone-based contract with a 50/50 payment structure with each phase tied to delivered, reviewable features. Notion served as the project hub, with every feature tagged for client review immediately upon completion. A shared kanban board gives the client full visibility into every feature's status at all times.
Throughout the build, we shipped frequent updates and recorded walkthrough tutorials for each feature as it landed, so the founder could see and test progress continuously rather than waiting for milestone reviews to find out where things stood.
"Frequent updates and tutorials helped me keep track of progress throughout the project. Communication was clear and consistent. Would recommend Chana Software to any founder."
- Founder, ACE
Outcome
Phase 1 shipped on schedule, with the full MVP scope delivered according to the original contract. ACE is now in active launch preparation, following a structured launch checklist.
Looking Ahead
The immediate target: at least 10 businesses subscribed before end of year.
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