Cage Free Customers

The best thing about making software is that you can share your opinions, worldview, and philosophy with others through your work. Though, I suppose this is true of most any creative venture and not just software. But for us, it's through various features, functionality and design elements that we're really able to show people what we're all about.  With this in mind I wanted to write about a new feature we've just released.

Over the past few months we've been getting more and more people inquiring about moving to us from other systems that aren't serving them as well as they'd like. We're always happy to have new people join us, but the one thing we've noticed is that in almost every single case these potential customers feel locked into their current systems.

And the reason they FEEL locked into these systems is because they ARE locked into these systems. There's literally no way for them to easily export all their data. In some cases we've had to help people enter in hundreds of students by hand because it was the fastest way to help them.

Locking customers, and locking in their data in particular,  is something I am fundamentally against as a software developer.  It is not right and any company that keeps their customers by locking them in displays a lack of confidence in their product.

We of course always want our customers to stay with us, but we want them to stay with us because they love our software, not because we've caged them in. After all, if our customers aren't free to leave us, how can we know if they truly love us?

Effective today, with a single click, all of our customers can export their most important studio information. This includes the name, email address, phone number, # of credits remaining, the expiration date of those credits, and the customer ID of our payment processor (which ties to customer credit card data) for every person in your system.

Yes, you read that correctly, if any of our customers want to leave us they can get ALL their most important data, including credit card data. The data in our system is our customer's data, not ours.

The only reason we hadn't built this in earlier is we didn't really think about it. We had always made it easy for people to export the names and email addresses of everyone inside Tula, and so this just takes that a step further.

While we hope our customers never have to use this feature, we think it will give them the confidence they deserve that they're always free to do what they like with their data - even if that means leaving us.

 

Thank you

It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day, and forget all the things we’re grateful for. I like Thanksgiving because it reminds us we should take a step back and reflect. While there are of course many things I appreciate that extend beyond the world of Tula, for the purpose of this post I’d like to say thanks to some people who made it possible.

Most of all, I’m grateful to be married to a woman who didn’t think I was crazy when I told her we could build something better. It took a lot of faith on her part to run her new business on software that hadn’t been used by anyone else before, and I’m lucky that she supports us as much as she does. Quite simply, Tula would not exist were it not for the inspiration, love and support that Maile gave.

I’m thankful for the small team of people that keeps making Tula better. Derek, Keoni and Arpad give their all every day to make our software the best it can possibly be. We’re fortunate to live in a world where small teams can compete with huge corporations, and I’m grateful every day that I get to work with the people I do.

And I’m thankful for our customers. Every day we see new people trying a product they’d never heard of before. Some seek us out, others hear about us from someone, and others happen to stumble across us some other way.

But every one of our customers, at some point, made the decision to do things a little differently than what every other yoga studio was doing. And while this decision is never for us, we always recognize and appreciate what it means, and the responsibility we’re taking on when someone decides to run their business with our software.

To everyone who has helped to make Tula Software possible, thank you.

May you have a wonderful, happy and safe Thanksgiving holiday.

Creating classes and checking people in

When we designed Tula, one of our opinions was that a studio shouldn’t have to purchase any external hardware. Sure, for really large gyms and places like Core Power, it probably makes sense to have a card reader that members can swipe a card through. But for an independent studio, that seemed like overkill to us.

Instead, we made it so our users could check people into a class in seconds – and record new purchases and transfer credits right inside the same screen. The result is a fast, efficient, and easy way to check people into your classes. Check out the video tutorial below to see how it works.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CahtxEH1qAk&w=560&h=315]

Using Tula's embedded calendar

When we built Tula, one of the most important things we wanted to do was preserve the look and feel of a studio owner’s website. When we built our calendar functionality though, we didn’t just want the calendar to look great. We also wanted navigating in and out of the calendar to feel completely seamless to our customer’s students. Your yoga studio is unique, and so your website should be too!

In our calendar, students can click on an instructor name and get taken to an instructor bio page – and click on a class name to get routed to a class description page.

Instead of just displaying information stored in our system, we link to information on our customer’s site.

The result is a great looking calendar, with an easy way to easily navigate to other parts of the website within which it’s embedded, and an iCal feed so students can keep the schedule of their favorite studio right inside the calendar of any modern phone.

Check out the two minute screencast below to learn how to set up your embedded calendar.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJt2wYCB4kc&w=560&h=315]