Building a Full-Stack Dojo Management Platform from Scratch — Martial Apps
A purpose-built club management SaaS for martial arts dojos — now live with Kingston Kicks as the first client.
The Challenge
Martial arts club owners were managing their entire operation with spreadsheets, paper attendance sheets, and disconnected tools. Belt progressions were tracked manually, payment collection was inconsistent, and there was no way to manage video libraries or send push notifications to students. No existing gym management software understood martial arts-specific workflows like Kyu-Dan belt ranking, grading examinations, or curriculum-based attendance tracking.
What We Built
AI Buddy built the entire Martial Apps platform end-to-end. The backend runs on Node.js with Prisma and Redis for WebSocket routing, with Cloudinary handling all media (images and video with signed URLs and Strict Transformations). We built a complete belt/rank system with image extraction and Kyu-Dan color mapping, a promotions page with eligible student tracking, attendance filters by curriculum, belt, and member role, a full video library with upload pipeline and Nginx configuration, push notifications, and subscription tier access control. We conducted three phases of load testing with k6 — establishing baseline throughput, discovering 3 critical race conditions in concurrent write scenarios (attendance bulk-marking, exam grading, profile switching), and validating staging server performance. Infrastructure runs on Azure with staging and production environments.
Key Results
Results
Martial Apps launched as a fully operational SaaS platform with multiple subscription tiers. Kingston Kicks is the first live club using the platform. The load testing uncovered and resolved critical concurrency issues before they hit production, and the staging server achieved higher throughput than the test server.
Services
Technologies
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