Two Pivots Later, Doin' Found What It Was Really Building: Infrastructure for Participation.

During an early customer interview, a guy told the Doin' team that his friend group had been running a daily exercise challenge in a WhatsApp group for over a year. The whole thing was held together by social trust and duct tape, assembled from five different tools because nothing better existed. He was, without knowing it, describing the product they were trying to build. That was the moment the demand stopped being a hypothesis.

How It Started

It started with a fitness influencer who happened to be Alyona's friend. He was disciplined, daily workout videos, the whole routine. But his audience just watched. He wanted them to actually do it with him, and no tool existed to make that happen.

That kicked off a wider round of interviews. Friends running challenges in WhatsApp groups. Brands struggling to get real engagement at conference booths. The pattern repeated: "The demand for participation was everywhere, but clearly the handy infrastructure to make it happen didn't exist." A platform where a creator could challenge their audience and the audience had to prove they showed up, was the missing piece.

Building From the Baltics

Doin' was born inside StartSchool, part of Latvia's startup ecosystem, and Alyona is direct about what that meant: unfair advantage. StartSchool delivered tech knowledge, mentors who had actually built companies, and a network that would have taken years to assemble alone.

There's a wider Baltic dynamic at work here, too. The regional ecosystem is small enough that one good intro lands you in front of a decision-maker, but it's plugged tightly enough into the rest of Europe that you're never building in a bubble. "We wouldn't be where we are without that launchpad," she says, which is the kind of credit founders elsewhere don't always understand they should be giving their ecosystem.

How It Works

Doin' is the infrastructure layer underneath every kind of challenge. Share a link, run a challenge, own the data. Participants get auto-notifications, post daily photo proof, see each other's progress in a live feed, and compete on a leaderboard.

The use cases vary widely and that's the point. A brand runs a challenge at a conference and walks away with daily user-generated content and full analytics. A creator challenges their audience to wake up at 5 a.m. and sees exactly who actually showed up. A friend group picks something like reading, cold showers, anything, and holds each other to it.

The problem that disappears is passive audiences. As Alyona puts it: "Doin' turns watchers into doers."

Under the hood: React Native with Expo for a single iOS/Android codebase, Next.js for the web app and brand platform, TypeScript across the stack. Deliberately lean setup that matches how fast the product has had to move.

The Hard Part

There isn't one dramatic near-death moment in the Doin' story. The pressure is structural. "Building a startup is a rollercoaster by design," Alyona says. One day a promising pilot conversation with a brand. The next, a VC tearing the hypothesis apart at a pitch competition. Three founders trying to ship a mobile app, talk to customers, refine positioning, and move fast enough that nobody beats them to it. "Pressure isn't one big crisis. It's the constant feeling that if you slow down for a week, someone else fills the gap."

The product itself took two pivots to find. Doin' started as a betting app for parents and kids to build healthy habits together. That didn't stick. The team pivoted to a general habit-building app and quickly learned nobody needed another one of those.

The breakthrough came when they stopped thinking about habits and started thinking about challenges. "The value was never the tracking but the group, the proof, and social belonging." Three product versions and two pivots later, the lesson resolved into a single line: they weren't building a tool, they were building infrastructure for participation.

It's the kind of clarity that only shows up on the other side of being wrong twice.

What's Next

Near-term: iOS and Android launch, first paying brand customers, and, the move worth paying attention to, native WhatsApp challenge delivery. Participants will be able to join, get reminders, and submit photo proof directly inside WhatsApp without installing anything.

That play has a regulatory tailwind. The EU's Digital Markets Act is forcing Meta to keep the WhatsApp API accessible and non-discriminatory, which makes Europe a uniquely good place to be building this kind of integration right now. (Worth noting: this is the second founder in this series to point at the DMA as a structural advantage for European startups, there's a pattern forming.)

The three-year vision: Doin' as the default infrastructure for participatory campaigns. Not ads, not impressions, but campaigns where the audience participates and produces the content.

Daily Drivers

When it comes to tools, the team's best friend is Claude Code with skills, alongside Claude Design. The kind of AI-leveraged workflow you'd expect from a three-person team trying to outrun much bigger competitors. "Doing more with less" isn't a slogan here; it's a stack choice.

On the reading side, the picks are unsurprising in the best way, both deeply operational. The Lean Startup is, in Alyona's words, basically their "bible." For anyone who wants something faster and lighter, she points to The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick, a short book about how to talk to customers without lying to yourself about what they say. Two books that, between them, explain a lot about how Doin' actually moves.

🎯 How you can help: Doin' is in active build mode and needs testers, both individuals and enterprise representatives who can give the team real feedback while the product is still being shaped. If you run challenges, run a brand, or just want to push a new piece of infrastructure before it goes mainstream, reach out via Linkedin.