New Features: Appointments, Services & Bookable Resource

I am thrilled to announce a new feature we’ve been working on to help our customers grow their businesses: Appointments for Services and Bookable Resources.

Create a new appointment from the admin side, or request an appointment from the student side.

The appointments feature allows you to take appointments for any type of professional service such as a private yoga session, pilates session or massage, as well as appointments for physical resources such as a sauna, private meditation space, swim lane or any other physical resource.

Services

Services are “services which can be booked”. When creating a service, you outline which physical resources can be used to provide the service, which service providers can be used to provide the service, and how many of each are required. Most services require one service provider and one resource but not always. For example you can have “studio rental” which only requires a physical resource, or “private yoga over zoom” which would only require a service provider.

Create a service by outlining which service providers and physical resources (if any) are required to provide the service, and which passes can be used to pay for the service.

Bookable Resources

Before you put together your services, you’ll create all your bookable resources, which are made up of both human resources, which we refer to as service providers, and the physical resources you use to provide the services. This allows you to indicate which of your instructors/desk/admin users provide services, as well as which physical resources you use for your services. For each, you can quickly and easily dictate their availability.

Receiving Appointment Requests

Once you’ve put together your resource availability and the services that use those resources, you’re ready to take appointments. You can create an appointment quickly and easily from the admin side, or your students can request an appointment from the student side. For now, we’re following the “request model” where students request an appointment, and you confirm it. Shortly, we’ll allow you to auto-accept requests if you prefer.

Appointment request for a private yoga session with Maile.

Once you accept the appointment request, we create a “service event” which is essentially a special event flagged as an appointment. Like any other event, you’ll see the student registered for the event, It’ll show on your today page and internal calendar but will be hidden from your public calendar, and when the customer arrives for their appointment you simply check them in.

The end result of a booked appointment is a student registered for an event to which they will be checked in like any other event.

Initial Beta Launch

For our initial launch there are a few limitations. Appointments can be made by any logged in student. When students are making the request, we do not yet check for passes or go through the payment flow when a pass purchase is required, though that will be coming shortly.

When students are checked in we’ll alert you as to whether they have a valid pass or not just like any other special event.

How it works

We’ll be posting detailed “behind the scenes” of how this all works next week as it’s a new approach to appointment booking using the latest and greatest AI tools and new interfaces to which we’re all becoming accustomed. For now, we want to focus on the feature itself and the capabilities it provides our customers.

Join the Beta!

All of our customers are invited to join the beta period for the next couple weeks. Please schedule a short appointment for a one on one session where we’ll help get you set up!

Today Page Updates: Sticky Fiters & Global View

We’ve made some nice updates to the today page which make it a lot more useful, especially for those of you with a lot of events, multiple locations, and multiple events happening at the same time.

Sticky Filters
Quickly filter down your view to any event tag or any instructor, and that selection will remain while you navigate to other days as well.

Today page with filter by tag an instructor options, plus global view.

Global View
The global view displays your events in a grid style format, with the start time creating columns and event tags creating rows. This is a more traditional “appointment book” view of your day’s events. This is particularly useful when you have events across multiple locations, instructors or resources often with the same start time. Like the the list view, we display registrants when the class is open and attendees when the class is closed.

Global View - Grid View

Just like with the list view, when you filter the global view by tag or instructor, that selection will stick as you jump around to different days.

Global view filtered to instructor

We hope you like this update as much as we do, it’ll also be useful for some new features we’ll have a blog post up about shortly as well!

New Feature: Custom email domains

For the past year we have been working hard to put together another huge release of feature updates this summer. I’m excited today to make our first announcement: Custom email domains.

No other company comes close to providing the suite of branded features we provide, and today we demonstrate our world view even further by allowing you to verify ownership of one or more domains, add multiple signatures to those domains, and choose the signature you want use when sending any email.

Once you’ve added your signatures, you can choose which email you want to use for notifications sent from your business to your customers.

Easy Setup

Setup is quick and easy. Start by clicking the “Get Started” button. This creates a dedicated email service for your studio.

Next you’ll add your domain.

Once you add your domain, click verify to expose the verification information. You will create one text record and one CNAME record.

Once verification is complete, you can add your signatures for the domain.

If you add more than one signature, choose which to use for notifications from your business to your customers. (Things like registration confirmations, receipts, etc.) You can access the Notification Defaults page using the menu in the upper right.

For your group emails, the system works the same as it always has, but now you’ll choose the sender signature to use.

Likewise, when setting up email triggers on your passes, you can choose the sender here as well.

Longtime customers of Tula know we obsess over how your business is able to present itself to your customers. While we’ve had custom domains for your website integrations and custom mobile apps that live on your domain for a while, there’s been this one missing piece.

Available today for everyone

We’re thrilled to provide this massive upgrade today, and is available on all plans for every customer.


🥳 New Feature: Student Referral System

We’re thrilled to announce our newest feature, the Student Referral System. The Student Referral System allows your students to quickly and easily create their own referral pages right from their profile pages, both in your instant apps and on the student access widgets within your websites.

How it works

Students can quickly and easily activate their referral urls on their profile pages, both in your app, or on the widget in your website.

To activate their referral url, students do only three things:

  1. set their custom url, which defaults to firstname_lastname

  2. Say what they love about your studio - limited to 140 characters

  3. Upload a profile photo

Once they’ve done the above, they’ll have access to their personal referral link.

Activate your referral url

Once created, the referral pages live on your domain. Here’s my referral page for Tula Yoga Studio. (screenshot below)

A view of a public referral page

Shared Links

When your student share a link with their friends over messages and social media, we’ll render their quote, along side your logo.

Your Brand. Your Domain.

Because these pages live on your custom sub-domain, they inherit the custom brand and color settings from your instant apps. This means when students share their referral urls, they’re not just sending people to some random website. Their landing on a page on your domain, with your brand and your design, that also has your full calendar, pass offerings and on-demand library.

Choosing Passes for Referral Pages

On the admin side of things, it’s just as easy for you. Quickly choose which passes you want to be available on referral pages on the Payment Form Settings page.

Choose which passes you want to show on referral pages.

Tracking Referrals

And for tracking referrals, it’s just as easy for you. Our new referrals report shows you everyone who had a referral within a certain date range. Click on their name to drill-down and see their exact referrals.

Referral Tracking

Endless Opportunity

Everyone knows that the best type of referral is word of mouth, and this feature makes it even easier for your students to tell others how much they love you. The implementation allows you to be as creative as you want, to encourage your students to refer their friends to your studio. Hold contests, come up with rewards and create other incentives to encourage your students to share the love of your studio. One idea Maile is kicking around is giving special keychains to people who refer a certain number of people. And maybe a different reward once you reach a certain number of attendances and a certain number of referrals.

You get the idea, the opportunities are endless!

We hope you love it

We’re proud of this feature because it’s yet another way to highlight the degree to which we listen to our customers and the larger community, and the lengths we go to, constantly, to ensure we’re always working hard to promote your studio and your brand.

To all our customers, as always, thank you, it is an honor to work hard for you every day.

💥 New Feature: ⚡️ Instant Custom Apps

I'm so excited to announce our newest feature: Instant Custom Apps. Instant Custom Apps allows you to create a custom branded app for your business instantly, using nothing but your natural language. These custom apps live on your own domain, and take advantage of the custom subdomain you've already set up to host your widgets on your website. Instant Custom Apps put your schedule, payments, account management, on demand video and AI powered chat search all in the hands of your students for quick, immediate access to everything your studio offers.

Instant Custom App is available today for all our customers on every plan.

How it works

Say what you want, and an image or code will be generated. We’ll show you the code that’s generated in real-time!

The first thing you do when you create your Instant Custom App is decide whether you want a background image, or more of a code-designed background. For both, we've integrated with OpenAI's API's: Dall-E2 for images and GPT4 for CSS code. Image backgrounds are great for complex imagery, while code only backgrounds work great for things like gradients and animations. We’ve used both of them during our testing to make hundreds of beautiful versions.

Prompt: An animated gradient background using Purple and Red.

Prompt: A splash of red and purple, with a touch of gold, on a cream colored wall reflecting beauty, wellness, abundance, empathy, care, community and happiness. In the style of monet.

Once you've generated your background it's time to perfect your landing page. Customize the title, footer menu and icons to your liking and you're all set.

Next, it's time to detail the internal pages. This will update colors for the schedule, payment form, etc. You can get pretty detailed on this page, customizing both the header and footer, icon colors, primary and secondary font colors and link colors, and you can control the opacity for all three of the background, header and footer. This allows you to make full use of all the different imagery the AI may provide you with.


The combination of all these elements allows you to create an app for your students that's uniquely you and your business. And, which you can easily and quickly change as often and as quickly as you like.

Oh and don’t forget to upload your logo! That’s what we’ll render on your student’s home screens when they save your app to their home-screens.

Years of effort, coming together today.

It's been over a year since we announced our departure from app stores, instead favoring the open web. While we didn't know exactly how things would play out, the commitment I made - to myself as much as our customers to be totally open - is that ultimately we would come out with something not just sufficient, but competitively better. We believe we have achieved that with this update.

In an instant you can create, customize and publish an app that lives on your domain, works on every device and which can be updated constantly. We have written about how app store business models are outdated in a hybrid world, and how they break the hybrid opportunity independent operators in the industry have, by fracturing their schedules and their passes.Our

Tula customers are able to provide thier customers with a unified schedule, passes that give access all types of classes, a full on demand library and AI powered search chat - making years worth of videos instantly available.

Thank you to our customers!

There are businesses on our platform who have been customers for over ten years. Every day, we work hard to bring you the best the internet has to offer, so you can bring your customers the best that you offer.

This is our best work, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

Thank you.