The Customer

One of the things I find fascinating is how businesses can lose focus on, or misunderstand from the beginning, who their customers are. It’s understandable, because as it becomes more and more possible to connect and provide value to anyone, the temptation is to do so with everyone. A new restaurant opening that’s trying to be the best in the neighborhood might look and act a lot differently than the restaurant trying to be the best in the city. And certainly the best Italian restaurant is going to be different than the sushi place, which will be different than the bar down the way.

The thing with this is that it isn’t about right or wrong. It’s about understanding your market, who your customer is, what your intentions are, and making the best decisions based on those intentions.

As with many things, in the world of software these lines can be a bit more blurred. The walls are less rigid and the barriers are fewer. And while this flexibility has allowed us to connect with each other in ways never before possible, it can cause vertigo when developers are trying to figure out who to please.

When everyone’s a user, who wins when the tradeoffs have to be made?

The opinion of our software, is that the studio owner is always the customer. This is why we embed our calendar inside our customer’s site. It is so disrespectful, for example, to take a studio’s visitors away from their site for any reason – but especially to get their class schedule.

Likewise, our software is of the opinion that small studio owners should focus on cultivating a sense of community and creating lasting relationships with their students. This is why we have built a way to easily create recurring monthly memberships, but we have not built a way for people to pre-register for oversold classes because a studio sold too many Groupons. We’re of the opinion that you shouldn’t do that, and so we don’t even try to handle that use case.

If you own a yoga studio, think about how your software is treating you. Are they treating you like your the customer? Or are they servings someone else?

Great business tools for your yoga studio

Between running our own business and watching Maile set up a number of various things for her studio, we’ve learned a lot about a number of great business tools that I thought you might find useful. In no particular order, here are some great apps and services we use to run our businesses. Less Accounting

I’ve tried a ton of different accounting software, and Less Accounting is by far my favorite. You can set it up so that it automatically pulls in data from your bank accounts, credit cards, and PayPal accounts. Financial data is a big deal, and I trust these guys with my information. They’re a small business themselves, and they treat their customers wonderfully.

Basecamp

Basecamp is an awesome, easy to use project management and task management software. Every software project we run has a basecamp project set up for it, and we have an operations project for anything company related. This is a great piece of software that can help you plan any number of projects from building out a new space, redoing a bathroom, or planning a retreat.

Formstack

Formstack makes it insanely easy to add forms to any website. They integrate with a bunch of payment providers, and they can be used for anything from surveys, trivia contests, email list signup forms, and payment forms. There are few products I love as much as Formstack.

Tiny Letter

Tiny Letter is a super simple, light weight email marketing platform. They stripped out a bunch of features, and left users with an awesome way to write a lot of people at once.

MailChimp

MailChimp actually just acquired Tiny Letter, but for those looking for a more robust email marketing option, MailChimp is fantastic.

Media Temple

All my self hosted websites (non web applications) are hosted with Media Temple. They have the friendliest user interface of any hosting provider I’ve checked out, and I’ve had an excellent experience with them. If you’re going to host your own website, you might want to check them out.

Google Apps

We both use Google Apps as our email provider, contact syncing, and shared calendars. You can set things up to seamlessly sync between your phones, computers, and the web. It’s free for up to ten users.

Stripe

We love stripe so much we chose them as the company that powers our credit card processing. Anyone can sign up for an account for free, and you can even hook up your Formstack forms to take one off payment for random business ideas you might think of. Being able to accept credit cards is extremely liberating, and Stripe makes it dead simple.

Square

Square is disrupting the payment industry and making life better for all kinds of small businesses. Their register app for the iPad is a full point of sale system, is completely awesome, and free to download.

We love all these companies and products, and we use them to run our own businesses every single day. I hope you’ll find some of them as useful as we do.

The best in the world

One of my favorite business people is Seth Godin. He writes daily on his blog, has published loads of books, and gives great talks. His advice about marketing, business, and a host of other things is extraordinarily valuable. In one of his books, The Dip, he writes about how every business that succeeds goes through the difficult times, and that knowing when to stick with it and when to quit is the key to success. But beyond this, he talks about being the best in the world. He wrote this on one of his blogs a few years back:

If you’re doing your best, only your AYSO soccer coach cares. If you’re the best in the world, the market cares. The secret, if you have limited resources (don’t we all) is to make ‘world’ small enough that you can actually accomplish that.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because as I’ve been talking with people about Tula, whenever I tell someone that we’re making software for yoga studios, they almost instantly tell me how we could probably expand into other types of fitness studios. Places such as martial arts studios, pilates studios, gyms, etc.

But here’s the thing, and I’m being completely serious when I say this: we are striving to be the absolute best software in the world for independent yoga studios.

The best in the world.

Yes, in the entire world.

And in order to be the best in the world, we need to make sure we’re keeping our ‘world’ small. And our world is, you guessed it, independent yoga studios.

I have absolutely no interest in making the third or fourth best software that can also be used to schedule hair appointments.

I could never have predicted that today I’d be making software for yoga studios. But I love it. I love how this product was born, I love our customers, and I love that there are people just like my wife running their businesses with our software.

The typical belief is that in order to grow, you need to expand and widen or wither and die. But there’s a second option no one ever talks about. You can go deeper. You can more intimately understand the needs of a particular business so well that no one else can possibly compete with you.

Diluting our attention away from yoga means that we’d be serving our core customers less effectively. It’s true that other types of places find our software useful, but that’s a happy accident.

Our focus on yoga isn’t a weakness, it’s a strength.

If you own a yoga studio, you should check us out – we just might be the best software in the world for you.

Let's talk about the elephant in the room

I often laugh when watching presidential contenders refer to the sitting president as ‘my opponent’. Um, yes, we know who your ‘opponent’ is – THE PRESIDENT for crying out loud. It’s in this spirit that I’d like to talk openly about another software maker – and a company you’ve almost certainly heard of – Mindbodyonline. If you’re shopping around for yoga studio software, you’d have to be hiding under a rock not to know who they are.

Now, it’s normally considered taboo to talk about a competitor, but let’s face it, they’re huge, and we have to answer the question ‘why should we use your product over theirs?’.

So let’s do it. Let’s talk openly about the elephant in the room.

The question I often get from people when I talk about our product is something like: “…oh man, do you just totally hate mindbody?” The answer to this is No, not at all. In fact, as someone who owns a small software company in Chicago, I have enormous respect for them. I know first hand that building a product, marketing it, and getting people to use your software is not easy.

On top of this, they often get ‘best places to work awards’ so it’s not like they’re some big bad evil nasty factory. Oh, and to top it off, their CEO used to be an Officer on a nuclear submarine. WTF man!?!

Actually, I do kind of wish it was easier to hate on them. ;)

But here’s the thing, and this is central to my belief as an entrepreneur. We don’t live in a world where in order for one company to succeed, another has to fail. This is true for yoga studios, and it’s true for software companies.

Your small yoga studio doesn’t have to try and take down Bally’s or some other huge gym in order for you to thrive. There’s enough room in the market for both of you to succeed.

You’re different. Your customers are different. And for some people, your small studio is better than a corporate studio or a gym membership.

And it’s in this same way that our software is different from MindBody.

The type of software you use is directly dependent on who it’s makers are trying to please. And if you’re using the same software that’s used byCorePower, and martial arts studios, and spas and Health Clubs, and is also a point of sale system and also does accounting………you are going to feel it.

Our software was made originally for one person. My wife Maile and her yoga studio. And there is a very good chance that your studio is a lot more like my wife’s yoga studio than it is a large health club.

And if that’s the case, there’s a great chance our software is going to be better for you, your studio, and your customers.

MindBody was originally bootstrapped just like us, but has since raised over $20 million in Venture Capital funding.

And because of this they have a lot of people to please. Their software has to please investors, spas, health clubs, gyms, and places that process hundreds of visitors a day. They have to grow, expand, and go international. Every single one of these realities influences their software, and the decisions they make. This doesn’t make them bad – it’s just the reality of the situation.

You know who we have to please? Maile, her instructors, and her students. This reality is baked into every decision we make. And as a result we’re able to please a lot of independent yoga studios that are a lot like Maile’s studio.

It doesn’t make either of us better or worse than the other. It just means we’re different.

Instead of having a two week merchant account application process, we integrated with Stripe so people can take credit cards with our system instantly. Instead of building out a full point of sale system, we say, you know what – you should probably just use Square Register. They’re awesome.

The only thing that’s ever bothered me is that a lot of people thought they didn’t have a choice. They thought they had to use MindBody or nothing. That may have been true at one point, but it’s no longer the case.

Yoga is only getting more popular. New studios are opening up every day. And for many of them, we’re the best option out there.

To our customers that have chosen us, we’re grateful for your early support. And to those who have been looking for a better alternative, don’t worry, you don’t have to start hating MindBody to love us.

There’s room enough here for everyone.