On Competition

The other day I wrote a post about how mindbody attempted to hijack a legitimate quora thread asking about their competitors.

In their attempt to hide this list of their competitors, not only did they make themselves look bad, but it showed that they have a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is exactly they're competing against.

But this mindset, and how we view 'the competition' is often misunderstood amongst businesses of all kinds. It happens in the software world, the world of yoga studios, and almost every other kind of business.

But most likely, your most important competition is something other than your biggest competitor.

Our main competition is not other software makers.

Our competition is apathy. Our competition is people doing nothing. Our competition is fear of cloud based computing. Our competition is the lizard brain inside people's heads that tells them they're not smart enough to embed a calendar into a website or connect a payment system using API keys even though they clearly are.

There are far more people running independent yoga studios with pen and paper than there are people using all of our competitors combined. And it's understanding this that allows us to succeed and compete with companies that have raised millions of dollars while we've organically grown our business without a single dime of outside funding.

But there is a lesson here for the independent yoga studio too.

Your competition isn't the gym down the street, or the chain yoga studio across town, or the private lessons that an instructor you work with is giving to some of your students.

No. Your competition is the same as ours. 

Your competition is people doing nothing. Your competition is the thought in someone's brain that yoga isn't for men. Your competition is the fear beginners have about whether they'll be able to keep up in class.  Your competition is the parent who thinks they're being selfish by taking care of themselves.

Your competition is Facebook, the internet, TV, couches, beer, cupcakes and movies.

Understand this, and you'll have defeated something much greater and much stronger than any business that you might ever have to compete with.

 

Happy Birthday Tula Yoga Studio!

Two years ago today, the doors opened for the first class at my wife's new yoga studio.  For those of you who follow our blog regularly, you of course know it was her studio that served as the inspiration for our software.

Two years after Tula Yoga Studio opened it's doors, I still struggle to find appropriate words to express how proud I am of my wife, the gratitude I feel that I get to take part in the journey with her, and the surprise at how much I myself have come to enjoy a regular yoga practice.

I cannot imagine our lives without the joy brought to our family by her studio, and I am ever grateful that Maile had the vision, gumption, and wherewithal to to make Tula the success that it is.

Congratulations on two years in business, and here's to many more!

Is MINDBODY coercing it's employees and contractors to Lie on Quora?

Earlier this week, we noticed MindBody had hijacked a question on Quora: Does MindBody have competitors? Who are they?  Previously, we and a number of other competitors to mindbody showed up on this page.

Suddenly, the #1 answer was written by Dana Auriemma. With an extraordinary amount of hubris, Dana writes: 

"I have an unbiased point-of-view because I don't work for any of the competitors that are answering this question. "

 Dana conveniently leaves out that she actually WRITES FOR MINDBODY!  Meet MindBody's business blogger, and she actively promotes this writing on her twitter account.

Since Dana is supposedly a business blogger that shares business tips, let me share a business 101 lesson with you: Don't lie and misrepresent yourself on public forums. People will find out.

Quora is supposed to be a place for organic content and honest answers. It's a great place to go to hear all sides of the story. I've read information there we've never read anywhere else. 

From Quora's Crunchbase page: 

Quora is a continually improving collection of questions and answers created, edited, and organized by everyone who uses it. The most important thing is to have each question page become the best possible resource for someone who wants to know about the question.

It seems that mindbody has resorted to lying by omission and has their employees writing fake reviews. Here's another one, this time by Patricia Stern:

 

Of course, Patricia conveniently leaves out that she works for mindbody in tech support. 

If I were Rick Stollmeyer, I'd be worried about this. The NY Times recently reported that the NY attorney general just snared 19 companies in a sting operation for writing fake reviews on sites such as Yelp, Google Local, and City Search.

What's sad about this is that we've even written in the past about how what makes this market so great is that there's room enough here for everyone.

What does it say about a company when they've raised $50 million, yet they're still so insecure that they have to try and game public quora threads, and write fake reviews?

How many customers do you have to start losing before you resort to lying in the open?

 

UPDATE

The Quora thread has now been updated, with most of the comments and 'answers' by mindbody employees either being deleted by the users themselves, or flagged by the Quora staff.

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Introducing Special Events

I'm thrilled to announce today the release of a new feature we're calling Special Events.

We've long wanted to improve how Tula could handle things like workshops, retreats, and other one off events, and we're thrilled with the implementation we've come up with.

Our primary aim is to always make sure Tula is extraordinarily easy to use, and this philosophy can be seen with our implementation of special events.

So how do you make a special event?

We stayed true to the foundation upon which Tula was already built, which is that students buy passes, and these passes give people the rights to attend a class.

Because of this, creating a special event with Tula is almost identical to creating a regular class. First you create a pass that people can purchase, and then you create the class.

Now however, when creating special event passes and special events, there's just a small switch you flip to indicate this is for a special event.

Add your pass (or passes) that people can purchase for your special event.

specialeventpass.png

Next, add your special event or group of events. Importantly, you can make repeating classes to also be special events.

How it works

When you create a special event pass, instead of giving it credits, you indicate how many times is can be used at associated special events. 

Then, when making your special event class, you indicate which special event passes can be associated with that special event. 

Instead of removing credits from students when checking people in, we instead check to make sure that they have a pass for that special event that can still be used. 

And of course, checking people into a special event is just as easy as a regular class. The only difference is, instead of showing you the number of credits they have left, we indicate for you whether they have a valid pass.  And if a student needs to purchase a pass to that special event, we'll only show the valid passes as purchase options.


Indicating special events

Very lastly, whenever a class is a special event, or if a pass is a special event, we'll indicate this reality with a nice red badge. 

 

 

Easy, powerful and flexible

What's so nice about this implementation is that it's very open to a number of different use cases. Have a special event that consists of 15 classes? No problem! Have a single retreat, that can be handled too. Need to have a separate price to special events for members and non-members? That too can be handled with ease. 

We're thrilled to launch Special Events, and we hope you love this new feature as mch as we do.

 

Why you should use Google Analytics at your yoga studio

When you're starting a new business you probably ask yourself, "Do I need a website?" The answer is most definitely YES.

There are a handful of different ways to create a website for your yoga studio. At Tula, we recommend Squarespace or Wordpress. Some people even use Weebly. Your website is far less important than your physical yoga studio, so don't make it too complicated. Squarespace or Wordpress will help you create a suitable website for your yoga studio. The most important goal is that you should be able to update your content quickly and easily.

After you create the website for your yoga studio, are you done? No. You should take advantage of some of the many tools out there to measure the traffic coming to your website. 

We'd like to tell you about Google Analytics today. I'll show you what it looks like and tell you some of the great reasons you should be using it. In the tech world, it's the de facto standard. You just don't put a website out there without it.

Here's what it looks like. This is just one of many views of the traffic into your studio's website. 

Your dashboard can be customized so you see the data you want to see.

Your dashboard can be customized so you see the data you want to see.

Traffic Trends

The graph on your left quickly shows you your traffic trends. It's a graph of the daily visits to your site. You may be able to tie your spikes in traffic to specific events. You might notice a spike when you send an email blast. Someone influential might share one of your classes on Facebook or Twitter. You'll never know unless you're keeping track. 

Your traffic comes from somewhere. Keep track of it with the referral traffic section on Google Analytics. 

Your traffic comes from somewhere. Keep track of it with the referral traffic section on Google Analytics. 

Referral Traffic

One of my favorite screens to look at is referral traffic.  This section will tell you where your traffic is coming from. This is important because you may not actually know. If you see an interesting website referring to yours, you may want to reach out to them and thank them. You may realize your studio's Facebook page has been driving more traffic to your site than usual. If that's the case, you can start to recognize where you should focus your efforts online. This can be the difference in boosting your revenue or missing out on some big opportunities.

Yelp

Tula Yoga Studio has a 5-star rating on Yelp.

Tula Yoga Studio has a 5-star rating on Yelp.

This is Tula Yoga Studio's Yelp page. They have a glowing 5-star review. Yelp is known to drive a lot of traffic to businesses. A bad yelp review can unfortunately cripple some. If you notice your yoga studio's website is getting traffic from Yelp, you may want to start keeping track of your Yelp score. Chances are, if you ever get a bad review, you will lose that traffic from Yelp. Add Google Analytics to your website today and start keeping track.

Your Class Calendar

Most yoga studios have a schedule of classes on their website. Do you know how much traffic your calendar gets? If you knew it received a lot of traffic, would you make sure it was always updated with correct information? If you use Google Analytics, you'll know. You probably get more traffic than you think.

Search Engine Optimization

What happens when you search for yoga studio chicago? 

Simply by typing "yoga studio chicago", people can easily find your studio.

Simply by typing "yoga studio chicago", people can easily find your studio.

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is more important than you think. When people don't know about your yoga studio, this is one of the ways they find out. When you use Google Analytics, you'll start to see how much search traffic you get to your website. You'll also see what they're searching for. SEO is a tough cookie to crack, but it's a good thing to know about and understand on the most basic level. Google is important.
 
 
There are many ways to improve your SEO. Having a Yelp profile will likely help you. Getting a local blog to write about you will likely help. There are lots of little things to help, but I am by no means an expert. I wish you the best of luck. 
 
I hope you learned a few things about the important of Google Analytics for your yoga studio's website. If you ever have any questions, write a comment below or email us. 

 

  Tula Software is the world's best software for independent yoga studios. We provide an embeddable class calendar with class registrations and an embeddable online store for students to purchase passes. Sign up today for a free trial.