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About Second Skin Society
Second Skin Society (SSS) is a fitness technology company building an inclusive platform for people with and without disabilities. Their mobile app reimagines what fitness can look like when accessibility is a first-class feature — not an afterthought.
The Situation
When SSS came to DS Business Solutions, they were at one of the most precarious moments a startup can face. Grant funding from the University of Ottawa — used to hire their original development team — was nearly exhausted. AWS credits that had been keeping their infrastructure running were running out. And the product that was supposed to justify further investment hadn’t yet launched on the App Store or Google Play.
The backend had seen considerable progress. But the mobile apps and administration interfaces that users and operators would actually interact with still had a long road ahead. SSS needed more than developers. They needed leadership.
What DS Business Solutions Did
DS Business Solutions provided a Fractional CTO to guide SSS through the transition.
In a company of fewer than 20 people, that role was necessarily expansive. It covered:
- Team assessment — evaluating the existing team’s strengths and identifying capability gaps
- Team building — recruiting and onboarding the right people for the road ahead
- Architecture decisions — making structural choices that would shape the product’s scalability and cost profile for years
- Security and compliance reviews — ensuring the platform met the stringent standards required for serving users with disabilities
- Mentorship and training — investing in people as a long-term asset, not just a short-term resource
The Central Challenge
SSS faced a tension that will be familiar to any resource-constrained startup: they needed to cut costs aggressively, while simultaneously meeting some of the most demanding compliance standards in the industry — Section 508 and WCAG accessibility standards — requirements that exist precisely because their product serves a community that too often gets left behind by technology.
There was no shortcut. Meeting these standards wasn’t optional. The challenge was finding a way to honor them without burning through what little runway remained.
How We Solved It
The Fractional CTO pursued a multi-pronged strategy.
On the people side, rather than competing for expensive senior engineers in a tight market, the team hired promising junior developers and built a robust in-house training and mentorship program around them. This approach had an unexpected secondary benefit: developers who were trained within the company developed a strong sense of belonging. Retention during this period was notably high — a direct result of investing in people rather than simply hiring and hoping.
A deliberate blend of onshore and offshore talent gave SSS the flexibility to staff appropriately for different workstreams without overspending on any single one.
Strict adherence to CI/CD best practices meant that every developer — regardless of experience level — could ship reliably and frequently. Productivity per engineer went up, and the risk of costly integration failures went down.
On the architecture side, the most impactful decision was choosing a cross-platform mobile tech stack — a single codebase capable of generating both the iOS and Android applications. For a startup that had been looking at the cost of maintaining two separate native development tracks, this was transformative. It cut mobile development effort roughly in half and concentrated the team’s energy where it mattered most.
The Outcome
Second Skin Society launched on both the App Store and Google Play. Both apps are live and revenue-generating.
They got there on a budget that was 65% lower than what the company had been spending before the Fractional CTO engagement began.
The team that was built during that period largely stayed. The junior developers who came up through the mentorship program became a stable, loyal core — proof that building people and building product aren’t competing priorities.