Athletes Ocean: one platform where athletes teach, coaches buy for their teams — and net sales grew 2,036% in a year
Athletes Ocean lets people learn directly from the world's top athletes. They came to us with an existing BuddyBoss site and a need for an expert WordPress team to turn it into a business — a social network, a multi-vendor marketplace, and a video learning platform at once.
Learn directly from the world's top athletes
Athletes Ocean is a strong wrestling and grappling community of competitors, coaches, and gym owners. They came to us with an existing BuddyBoss site and a need for an expert WordPress team to extend it: add real functionality, fix the rough edges, and turn it into a business.
Three products at once — and no stock tool could do it
The hard part was that it had to be three products at once. Stock BuddyBoss, WooCommerce, Dokan, and TutorLMS each did part of the job — but none of them did paid team-buying, recurring community access, scalable video, or instructor payouts the way Athletes Ocean needed. So we built those.
Eight pieces, one platform
Everything below shipped into production on one WordPress platform — from team-buying and recurring communities to CDN-backed video and automated payouts.
TeamSpace — coaches buy training in bulk for their whole team
A coach buys a block of seats (minimum 20), enrolls their athletes into a private learning space, and manages everyone from a dedicated Coach Dashboard — enrolling students one-by-one or in bulk by spreadsheet, promoting moderators, and tracking activity. Seats added later are pro-rated to a fair price, extra courses can be bundled in, and team pricing is a deep discount on the per-student rate.
Paid subscription groups — recurring access to an athlete's private community
Verified athlete-instructors create their own private subscription groups, each automatically backed by a monthly subscription product. Access follows billing in real time: pay and you're in, lapse or cancel and you're out — with grace periods, scheduled cancellations, and manual leaves handled. This didn't exist in BuddyBoss; we built it.
Video upload & HLS streaming, built for scale
Native BuddyBoss video choked on large files. We moved hosting, encoding, and delivery off the WordPress server onto Bunny Stream: uploads go straight to the CDN, are resumable so members can keep using the site while a big file uploads, stream back in adaptive HLS quality, and only publish once encoding finishes — with albums and auto-generated preview clips.
Marketplace payouts — instructors get paid through their own Stripe
Athletes Ocean runs on a commission model, so we built a custom Stripe Connect payout method: an instructor connects their own Stripe account in one click, and withdrawals are paid out automatically as Stripe transfers — with a retention period and a minimum withdrawal threshold that give the platform control over refunds, disputes, and chargebacks.
Branded registration, login & social sign-in
We replaced the default WordPress screens with a single, on-brand page for sign-up, sign-in, and one-tap Google/Facebook login, plus a sign-up popup tuned to nudge visitors to create an account. Checkout is gated behind login, so anyone clicking 'subscribe' or 'buy' is smoothly funneled through signup first.
The social community & member profiles
We made it feel like a real community, not a course catalog: rich member profiles with structured fields (gym affiliation, location, and a phone number verified by Twilio one-time passcode), an instructor tab that showcases courses and groups, a 'people you may know' widget that connects members by shared gyms and groups, and group forums for discussion.
UX overhaul & performance — and the sales jump it unlocked
We rebuilt the experience end to end. The homepage went from a confusing news feed to clear sliders that show what's for sale, directory pages were re-engineered front and back, and a clunky checkout became a friction-free 3-step flow: pick package, sign up, pay. Under the hood we cached expensive pages, offloaded media to S3 + CDN, and added lazy loading and infinite scroll.
Operations & marketing automation, behind the scenes
A branded internal control panel for the team — real Stripe revenue reporting, TeamSpace management, order exports, and log viewers — plus ActiveCampaign automation that fires on real purchase events (like a coach buying a plan or extra seats) without ever slowing down checkout.
A look at what shipped
A look at the platform the community actually uses.
What we built it with
The major platforms behind this project — chosen to fit the customer's existing stack, and handed over in full at the end.
Representative of this engagement. We pick tools to fit your stack and your people, not the other way round.
The results
Figures reflect this engagement and are shared with the customer's permission. Live and in production at app.athletesocean.com.
What it is like to work with us
Public reviews left for Growth Nerve across our engagements. They are not attached to this customer and do not describe this project.
Building a community, a marketplace, and a course product at once?
If you're building a platform that has to be a community, a marketplace, and a course/video product at once — on BuddyBoss, WooCommerce, Dokan, and TutorLMS — we've already shipped it, and grown it 20x in a year. The pieces most teams can't make play together, we've put into production.
If that's what you're trying to build, you're one conversation from a head start.