How two pro athletes turned a broken development process into a live, revenue-generating product - in nine weeks.
Here's a conversation we have a lot at Rise. A founder sits down with us and says something like: "We've gone with an offshore dev team because we can't afford UK rates, and now we're not sure if what we're getting is what we asked for."
It's not a confession. It's a completely rational decision. Offshore development can be brilliant - genuinely. The talent is real, the cost savings are significant, and for an early-stage startup watching every penny, it often makes total sense. But there's a catch, and it's one that bites hardest when the founders aren't technical: without someone who speaks both languages - the founder's language and the developer's language - things drift. Slowly at first, and then all at once.
That's exactly where Katie and Ant Botha found themselves with Lokr Sports.
Katie is a professional hockey player from Australia. Ant is a professional cricketer from South Africa. Between them, they've spent decades inside elite sport - and they'd noticed something that frustrated them. At the top end, athletes have access to sophisticated performance tracking, development planning, and coach-player communication tools. But drop down a level - to the serious amateur, the elite academy player, the performance school athlete - and you're looking at spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups, and a lot of stuff falling through the cracks.
Lokr Sports was built to close that gap. A platform where coaches and athletes can track development, share session feedback, build personalised training plans, and actually see progress over time - all in one place, at a price point that doesn't require a Premier League budget.
The idea was sharp. The execution? That's where it got complicated.
"We felt like we were paying for the privilege of being confused"
Katie and Ant had engaged an offshore development company to build the app. On paper, it made sense - they were self-funded, pre-revenue, and UK development costs would have burned through their runway before they had anything to show for it. So they went offshore, signed a contract, and got to work.
Except "work" started to feel a lot like treading water. The scope kept growing in ways that didn't quite match what they'd asked for. Every new feature seemed to introduce new bugs. Estimates ballooned. And because Katie and Ant aren't developers - they're athletes and entrepreneurs - they couldn't always tell whether a quoted timeline was reasonable or whether they were being taken for a ride.
The hardest part of being a non-technical founder isn't not knowing how to code. It's not knowing what you don't know - and worrying that someone else is exploiting that gap.
They were paying time-and-materials rates for a scope that kept shifting, locked into a contract they probably shouldn't have signed (but didn't know any better at the time), and watching their launch date slide further and further away. By the time one of their investors suggested they talk to Rise, they were frustrated, out of pocket, and starting to wonder if the app would ever actually ship.
Here's the thing people don't always realise about working with a studio like Rise: we don't have to be the ones writing the code. Sometimes the most valuable thing we do is make sure someone else writes it properly.
When we came on board with Lokr Sports, the brief wasn't "rebuild everything from scratch." Katie and Ant were too far invested for that - financially and emotionally. And honestly, the existing work wasn't unsalvageable. It just needed someone to grab the steering wheel.
So that's what we did. We stepped in as a technical intermediary - think of it as a technical co-founder, without the equity conversation. In practice, that looked like:
Put another way: we levelled the playing field. Katie and Ant went from feeling like they were at the mercy of a process they couldn't see into, to being in control of their own product again.
Within six weeks of Rise getting involved, the Alpha version of Lokr Sports was ready. Three weeks after that, the Beta went live on the App Store and Google Play. Katie and Ant could finally start onboarding users and generating revenue.
That timeline wasn't magic. It was the result of stripping out unnecessary complexity, resolving miscommunication that had been costing weeks at a time, and holding a development team to the standards they should have been hitting all along. No heroics, just clarity and accountability.
Today, Lokr Sports sits at a 4.9 rating on the App Store, is actively winning new customers, and continues to evolve based on real user feedback. Rise is still involved as a technical advisor, helping Katie and Ant make smart decisions about what to build next as the product grows.
It's not "don't go offshore." Offshore development is a perfectly valid choice, especially at the early stages when capital is tight. The lesson is this: if you're a non-technical founder working with any development team - offshore or otherwise - you need someone in your corner who understands the technology as well as the developers do. Someone who can spot when a two-week estimate should really be four days. Someone who can look at a codebase and tell you whether it's solid or held together with string. Someone who'll tell you which features can wait, and which ones are the whole point.
You don't need to become technical. You need access to someone who is - and who's on your side.
That's what Rise does. Whether we're building the product ourselves or advising alongside another team, the job is the same: making sure founders stay in control of their own thing.
If any of this sounds familiar - if you're mid-build and something doesn't feel right, or you're about to start and you want to avoid the potholes - book a discovery call with us. Thirty minutes, no obligation, and you'll come away with something useful whether we work together or not.
30 minutes. One conversation. No obligation.
