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The Booty name is synonymous with sports and competition, spanning several generations of athletes. Jack was a Louisiana Player of the year and coached under Doug Pederson. Two of the brothers, Abram and John David, played in the NFL. Josh played in the NFL and MLB. General Booty is a QB at Oklahoma and Josh’s sons are High School standouts in Louisiana.
Two of the brothers, Jack and Josh, were in between projects when they decided to start a business together. Jack had just sold a thriving consumer goods business he had at Disneyland and Josh had just finished a consulting gig. After much brainstorming, they decided to create an app that mirrored their daily lives – challenging each other to pretty much everything, all day, every day – from golf to working out, playing hard, jokes, stunts, living life, and having fun. They also wanted to make sure that nobody could cheat and that there was always a winner and a loser. Ties were rare and frowned upon, resulting in more challenges. Together they co-founded Bula, a childhood term they used to mean “Pay Up!”, which also means “Wishing you Life” in Fijian.
Jack Booty, CEO, stated, “Josh and I wanted to share the same fun and excitement of challenges and trash talk that we enjoy daily with our friends and relatives, so we created Bula.”
Bula, lets users create a challenge, invite participants, record and upload head-to-head videos, select a judge, create the terms of the challenge, and ultimately choose a winner.
The Brothers wanted to utilize the most cutting-edge Web3 technologies and enlisted Michael Caplovitz, former Head of Innovation at The Howard Hughes Corporation, and current CEO of GetChkd, to help design and build the application. Michael also rounds out the Bula Team, as their Technical Co-Founder.
Bula needed skilled, reliable Flutter developers. “We were looking for a group that we could have a long-term relationship with that could augment all of our skill sets,” Caplovitz said.
Plus, he said, “we wanted to work with a company that had great communication,and could take us all the way from startup to a CTO-type role, as needed.”
After a meeting at Atlanta’s Tech Village, Bula brought Dualboot onboard in January 2022, to help bring their brand-new, cutting-edge app to market.
“Designing and connecting passwordless login, Blockchain environments, distributed video, and so many other components, while ensuring a great user experience in months… it’s kind of like building an airplane while it’s flying. It’s not easy, but we knew we could do it and that’s what we did.”
Michael Caplovitz
CEO GetChkd and Bula Technical Co-Founder
Bula was essentially a greenfield project. Dualboot was tasked with pairing down the concept to a minimum viable product (MVP) and then architecting, designing, and building the entire front end, while at the same time working with GetChkd to connect their blockchain backend. The initial phase of the project was to go from concept to launch in both the Android and iOS app stores in 6 months.
“The overall complexity of the Bula project was kind of like building an airplane while it’s flying, and it’s not easy, but we knew we could do it and that’s what we did,” Caplovitz said.
The Dualboot project team, which scaled up and down as needed for the engagement, was in regular contact with the UX and blockchain teams while developing the app. Communicating regularly at daily standup meetings fostered productive relationships. “We have a very good working app right now; it’s really about what is the end result.”
Dualboot and Bula will continue to embrace an Agile methodology post launch with defined two-week sprints addressing the backlog and features.
“We came out with a product that is at the absolute forefront of Web3.”
“The Bula app is something that didn’t really exist in the gaming and social space before now,” Caplovitz said. “Thanks to the hard work of Dualboot’s developers, and other partners such as Storj and LoginID, Bula is a really simple and elegant application unlike anything else.”
“We’re really pushing the boundaries of all these technologies,” Caplovitz continued. The app development included passwordless login, creating blockchain environments, wallets with rule sets, securing and sharing data, smart contracts triggering notifications, connecting to distributed storage, and much more.
Users signing into Bula are immediately met with head-to-head videos of other community members challenging, daring, performing stunts, showing team spirit and competing in new ways. The user can view, like, share and follow users or upload a video and challenge others. Users will set the terms, pick a judge and, if they win, get bragging rights. Meanwhile, it’s all happening seamlessly in the app without the users being aware of the blockchain backend or Web3 complexities.
“Bula is incredibly scalable and there is so much interoperability. Anything can get added in or pulled out,” Caplovitz said. “We are really poised for growth – stay tuned!”
