My wife Maile on Tula Yoga Studio's Facebook page.
I am often asked, will yoga help me lose weight? The answer is maybe, but more importantly yoga helps you lose stress, self-doubt, weakness, fear and worry. Through yoga postures we create space where the stress and fear can release. We challenge ourselves and our physical body and find out that we are more capable, strong and perfect just the way we are than we ever imagined.
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Starting a business is hard. Recently, my dad has been talking about starting a small business as a side project to his day job. He's always been an miracle wood worker. In a way, he's much like me - a hacker (for those of you that don't know, in the programming world we call ourselves hackers). My dad has built countless pieces of furniture and holds the mindset, "We saw this in a country living magazine, I can build that." My parents' house is almost fully furnished by my dad. He wants to make a business out of selling his furniture, but he's allowing his lizard brain to prevent him from doing so. For many people thinking about starting a yoga studio, I'm sure the lizard brain has got them, too. You keep telling yourself you want to open a yoga studio, but there's something that holds you back. There is so much information out there. It's easy to fall into the trap of reading it all. We want to help. We want to share with you the amazing things that can happen if you get started.
There is so much information out there. It's easy to fall into the trap of reading it all.
If you've thought about starting a yoga studio, you've probably searched Google for "start a yoga business" or some other variation. This is probably a good start if you've never started your own business before. You may also find yourself overwhelmed. For example, I performed the search myself and started down the rabbit hole of learning about yoga certification, picking a type of yoga, and the formal process of Bikram yoga.
Don't get me wrong. There's a wealth of information available for one dreaming about starting a yoga studio. We were able to find a few resources we felt really hit the nail on the head.
Once again, Mind Body Green comes through with a great article from Karen Fabian with 14 tips for starting your own yoga business. Karen talks about the importance of a business dashboard and saving for your taxes. These concepts may be new to many people starting a business and also many people who have been running a business to years. Business dashboards can serve great purpose providing you insights into the health of your business.
At Tula, we challenge you to use our reports to gain insights into what classes are most popular and where your recurring revenue is coming from. Personally, I would disagree with focusing on your break-even revenue during your first 3 months of being open, but that's just me. I would argue you should give yourself at least 6 months of runway before you reach your break-even revenue.
Much like Karen talk about the importance of a business dashboard, Teachasana reiterates the importance of keeping track of your class attendance. There are countless ways to do that. Surprisingly, three popular ways to do this include pencil and paper, Evernote, and Google Docs. At Tula, we've spoken to many people running their own yoga studio with note cards for many years. When you're looking to start a yoga studio, you don't need to know everything. If you develop a system that works for you, you're on the right track.
To solve the class attendance problem at Tula, we give you a simple check-in page. As you check-in students, you can record purchases if they don't have enough class credit. All of this ties into insightful reports about class attendance and revenue.
Starting a business is hard. There's no doubt about it. If you think you can become an expert before starting your first yoga studio, you're probably wrong. There's a saying in the business world, "Jump off the cliff, and build your parachute on the way down." When you start a yoga studio, you'll learn something new every day. There's no sense trying to learn it all before you jump off the cliff.
Good luck!
Thinking about starting a yoga studio? Have a yoga studio but aren't using any software yet? At Tula Software, we have many customers just like you. With Tula, you can store credit cards, set people up on monthly memberships, embed a class calendar into your own website, use text messaging to schedule subs, keep track of student credits and attendances, collect payments online, and a whole lot more.
Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jeanwichinoski/
When I started P90x seven weeks ago, I had no idea Thursday yoga would be one of the most difficult days. For someone that has never done much yoga (or any yoga), I had no idea what I was getting into.
One of the things I tried to do was make it part of my routine. With P90x, you have a different workout six days a week. Once I set the same time each day, the routine became much easier.
My next step, as Nike says, was just do it. Try yoga. Don't get caught up in reading all about it. You can do that later. As a software engineer, that's sort of what I've done my entire life. You tend to learn more when you jump into things. You can always go back after the fact and refine what you've learned. Learn by doing.
Learn by doing.
After the first two weeks of doing yoga on Thursdays, I thought it was time to do some research. I had questions like, "Is P90x yoga a good start for a beginner?" and "What's the deal with all these different poses?". I tried to come up with a bunch of resources to read more about yoga and start my journey to become involved in the yoga community.
My first stop was Reddit. For those of you that don't know, Reddit is the front page of the internet. Users share links and vote those links up in popularity. It's also a place that's home to some extremely strong communities in fitness. Even the Terminator posts on Reddit.
If you're looking to get inspired, the yoga section of Reddit has 22,000 yogis at the time of writing this. Get involved.
Mind Body Green is a popular resource with some community driven content. People submit blog posts that get featured on the website. Tula Software has some yoga content featured there as well.
I particularly enjoyed Mind Body Green to learn about the different types of yoga poses. With P90x, you only perform a subset of the poses, so I was always curious what else is out there (and what poses I know I'll never be able to do).
I was surprised to find this post from Huffington Post and figure out that I had only done one of these poses in P90x. Yoga is a whole new world to me.
To me, Yoga Journal seems similar to Mind Body Green. It's another great resource to read about yoga. Their yoga sequence builder seems like a hit in the community. I've already seen many yoga studios using it to showcase their classes.
After reading this article, it was the first time I knew about the many different types of yoga. Helping our customers with their yoga studios, I've always known there were many different types, but this was an eye opener. Bikram yoga was the one that keened my interest, but I don't feel like turning the heat up in my house. I'll have to take a class for that experience.
This was such a great use of the yoga sequence builder from Yoga Journal. Thanks to Yoga on the Brazos for these series for beginners.
Is P90x a good start for a beginner?" This review helped me answer that question. This was the first time I read that P90x is mainly power yoga. This made sense to me since many of the poses require a ton of strength in your legs. I even found that I could barely hold my arms up halfway through the yoga session.
Reading this review brought more questions to my mind. What is power yoga good for? Obviously, strength, but what else? If you have a good answer for me, I'd love to hear from you.
I'm thrilled to announce we just released the most important new feature for Tula since we first introduced Payment Center. Starting today, all our customers can now sell their passes and accept payments on their own websites using Tula Software's new online store!
What's great about this new feature though isn't just that you can accept payments online - it's HOW you can accept payments online.
The 'usual' way companies enable this kind of feature is that they make your customers sign up for an account on their software platform. Then, once they have an account, they can purchase something from you. But we think that's the wrong way to do it.
That method adds friction for someone who just wants to buy something quickly by making them sign up for a software product just because their favorite yoga studio happens to use that software.
And on top of the desire not to require people to create user accounts with us, we also didn't want to take students away from our customers websites. These students are OUR CUSTOMER'S CUSTOMERS, not our customers.
So we took an approach that was far more difficult to engineer, but provides a much better experience for the students of our customers.
We now enable everyone that uses Tula to create an online payment form that they can embed on any website. This form is a direct connection to Tula Software, and is 128 bit SSL encrypted so it's secure. And even better, students only need to fill out their name, credit card info, and their zip code.
When someone fills out this form to make a purchase, on the back end we do a lookup on the name and email of the person that submitted the form and make a recommended 'match' suggestion inside Tula.
Once you match the payment, the credit card is processed and credits are assigned.
The result is that your students can buy something directly from you, without having to create an account with us.
And of course, when they do, we'll send you an email and text notification.
We think you'll love this new feature, and as with everything we build, Maile uses it for her own studio. Want to see the payment form in action on a real website? Check out Tula Yoga Studio's payment page right here.
Oh, and if you don't use the best software ever created in the history of the world for independent yoga studios, you can check us out at www.tulasoftware.com
My wife Maile on the rarity of being disconnected and how it's likely to increase in value:
Looking to the future, I anticipate that the experiences that allow this disconnection will become more and more valuable. Right now, the value is placed on connection - Wi-fi, faster internet speeds, more wires, cell phone towers. I believe that in the future, that value will be placed on disconnection - internet 'dead' zones, retreats, getaways, yoga classes. This disconnection will be become more and more elusive and we are going to crave it in our lives even more.