Codementor Featured Stars: Amanda’s Profile
Amanda Kifer is participating in Codementor’s Featured Star program, where she will work with a dedicated mentor to bolster her understanding of programming concepts and become a better entrepreneur.
Who’s Amanda?
I’m a founder of Sportsy and Bad Features, a mother, a new runner and a hobby collector.
Product is my passion. Creating mobile and web products allows me to be creative and to dream up innovative solutions to complex problems. I’ve built several startups, sold one of them and had a brief gig at Evite.com in between ideas.
We founded Sportsy a couple years ago to radically improve the way athletes train for sports. We work with professional and D-1 soccer players to build a curriculum based on the training used by some of the world’s best athletes who have played at a level most only aspire to reach. Hundreds of thousands of young athletes are using Sportsy to improve their soccer game. Our next sport launches soon and will positively impact millions of athletes and coaches around the world!
Why Codementor?
When I started running, I relied on proven training plans and discussed my progress with other runners. When I was pregnant and about to become a new mom, I took a newborn class and talked to other mom experts. When training kids to learn soccer, Sportsy’s core belief was to turn to the experts and see how they train.
Learning to code isn’t any different. Having an expert available to answer questions and point you in the right direction so you can learn at your own pace is undeniably better than reading a book or trying to learn it on your own.
What’s my motivation?
I can dabble in all areas of our business except coding. I understand high level how web and mobile apps work, but that’s not enough for me. I want to learn the plumbing of mobile apps and create small apps of my own. It’s the whole girl power thing. I want to have more knowledge around our technical capabilities and even code something (anything) that will touch our athletes.
More importantly, I have a 2 year old daughter and I want to prove to her that girls can do anything including code. We have a bedtime story we read often. It’s called What do you do with an idea? and is a story about how an idea grows into something big. Ideas are powerful and we should help them grow. As she gets older I would love to walk her through how to build apps from ideas. Everything from designing and coding to beta testing and submitting to the App Store (assuming the App Store is still a thing). That is why I’m here.
Who’s Sportsy?
Check out Sportsy at: Web , iOS App Store, Android Google Play
We are a small team of product people, developers, cinematographers, and designers looking to radically improve the way athletes train and coaches coach through mobile apps. We’re based in Playa Vista, CA.
Let’s get started!
I’m proud to have gone through the Techstars Boulder 2014 cohort with Sportsy. I learned so many valuable lessons while in program. My favorite is ‘Give First’. If there is anything I can help your startup understand, please reach out! I’d love to help! Now, I’m ready to dive in head first! Let’s go! Please cheer me on through this process… even better, join me in my journey and learn to build something yourself.
