The Week’s Best Yoga News, according to the people at Tula Software.
Mental Health
In Mexico City’s prison system, yoga is being offered to young offenders to help them change their ways and cope with their current situation as well as what they will face when they leave. In a country struggling with a seemingly never-ending drug war, yoga is one of the ways Prisoner Director Cynthia Rosas Rodriguez is hoping to put them on a better path.
Read MoreThe 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.
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!
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.
Check out @mindbodyonline for my business advice and training articles twice a month: http://t.co/WNVjKpAmhc
— Dana Auriemma (@DanaAuriemma) September 21, 2013
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.
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.
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.