Help for Heroes: Strive

Help for Heroes already provides rehabilitation support to veterans, but wanted to go further - a dedicated fitness and recovery tool built specifically around veterans' needs, and a genuinely new income stream for the charity outside traditional fundraising.

They came to Giant Digital with an early concept and some initial wireframes, based on experience from someone who'd worked on a similar idea at a previous charity. What they needed was a partner who could take that starting point and turn it into something real, built for veterans facing physical challenges that most fitness products never consider.

Help for Heroes wanted Giant to lead the creative direction rather than be constrained by what already existed, so we took the early concept and pushed it further, acting as a technical consultancy and genuine extension of the charity's own team, making sure every feature in the brief was actually achievable before committing to build it.

The product itself needed to handle a lot of video content - training demonstrations, exercise guidance - without becoming slow or unwieldy. We built Strive using HTMX, reducing the amount of JavaScript the browser has to load and keeping the experience fast and responsive. Video delivery ran through video.js with proper encoding for quick loading, and content sits behind a sign-up process rather than a public platform like YouTube, protecting the intellectual property Help for Heroes had invested in creating it.

We briefed the charity's own content creation team on the technical requirements for video, and worked closely with them as content came in, refining our approach based on what they produced rather than working from a fixed spec that couldn't adapt.

Strive is currently in beta, being tested ahead of full launch. What's already in place is a genuinely bespoke product - built specifically around the needs of veterans in recovery, fast and responsive even with heavy video content, and designed from the outset to protect the value of what Help for Heroes has invested in creating it.

The next phase is proving it in the real world: opening Strive up to veterans at scale, and using what they learn to shape the product as it grows, including a longer-term roadmap already identified for where Strive goes next.