The problem with resolutions

December 31, 2014

To celebrate the new year, we made a video about why setting intentions is better than setting resolutions. Check the video and the full text out below. Happy New Year!

Video text

The problem with resolutions is that they set us up for failure.

They create narrow definitions for success based on arbitrary beliefs of self worth at specific moments in time, and they penalize us for learning new information as the year goes on.

Resolutions are unforgiving. They make us feel bad about ourselves. When the excitement of the new year wears off, when we continue to be our inevitable human selves, our resolutions are there to remind us each day of how we have failed and how we are, still, not good enough.

We then dwell on our failure and we look forward to next year when we can try again. The final twist of the knife is that this causes us to spend the entire year not living in the present.

This year, set an intention instead. Intentions come from a place of abundance. They allow you to accept who you are, where you are. They don’t expect you to be perfect, they expect you to be mindful.

To be aware.

To observe.

When you lose sight of your intention, when you have days or weeks where you forget about it, your intention will still be there, and it will welcome you back when you are ready.

Join us this year in scrapping the resolutions, and setting intentions instead.

The gift of yoga

November 24, 2014

We are harder than anyone on our product, and it's bothered us for a while that we didn't have a nice robust feature that allowed our customers to take gift certificates. So I'm thrilled to announce that starting today, gift certificate functionality is available in Tula, and is ready for use today!

Like we always do, we think long and hard about the user experience of everyone involved, and with the introduction of gift certificates we pushed our payment system even harder to create the optimal experience for everyone involved. This means for the person buying the gift, for the recipient, and for the studio owner we needed to make the system perfect for everyone involved.

The result is an implementation that is as simple to use as it was complex to build. Here's how it works:

Enable Gift Certificates

The online store settings have been modified to allow you to choose which of your passes should be available as gifts. Simply choose the passes you want available as gift options, and then save your settings. That's it, that's all you need to do to start accepting gift certificates!

Payment form automatically updates

Once you choose one or more passes to be available as a gift certificate, your payment form will automatically update so that people can choose to indicate a purchase is intended to be a gift. Upon choosing this option, the list of passes is filtered, and the input fields are updated so that they can enter information about the recipient. As always, it's worth pointing out that with our payment form, people can make purchases from you without first creating an account with us. With gift certificates, this distinction is more important than ever.

Match the payment

Once a purchase is made via the online form, match the payment to the buyer of the gift certificate. This is no different than how normal purchases work now. (note, you can also record the purchases of gift certificates from within the app.)

Unique Gift Certificate Code Created

Once the purchase of a gift certificate is made, the person is charged for the gift certificate, and a unique gift certificate code is created. This purchase is noted in the purchasers profile as a purchase, and we indicate that it was a gift purchase.

Redemption

Redeeming a gift certificate is simply the recording of a purchase, but you choose 'Redeem Gift Certificate' as the payment method, which is a new payment option. Upon choosing this payment option, you enter in the code, and this code will only work for the pass type it was intended for. Once the purchase is complete, we indicate this as well on the student's profile page.

Easy, fast and ready to go now!

We're so happy that we can help our customers give the gift of yoga this year, and with the latest updates to our iPhone app, it's easier than ever to match these incoming purchases on your phone.

2026

November 20, 2014

As our customers and anyone who has been following us for a while knows, Tula was born when my wife Maile opened her yoga studio in Chicago. Our idea when we started, was that it was crazy no software product existed that was focused on serving yoga studios. And in particular, independent yoga studios.

How could this be?

How could an industry with tens of thousands of potential customers be considered too small for a software company to serve?

And so we set out to build a product that was perfect for the needs of an independent yoga studio, often times doing things that allow us to better serve our core audience at the expense of reaching a broader one.

We believe in focus, and the benefits of regular, consistent effort applied over a sustained period of time. We recognize too that no-one ever sees the roots and no-one notices the Oak Tree when it's a sapling. (And yet, it becomes an Oak Tree, doesn't it?) No one celebrates the struggle to break through your first 10, first 100 and first 1000 customers. These victories for company like ours happen in private.

So today I'm happy to talk about a different kind of number that affects our company. After 3 years of running her studio, Maile decided that it was time to think about the longer term future for her business. This morning she just extended her lease - which now runs through 2026.

So that's the number I'm focusing on right now. Two Thousand Twenty Six.

While the companies that we compete with announce multi-million dollar rounds of funding, prepare for IPOs, and compare their valuations against one another, we work every day to serve our customers better, with the continued belief that yoga studios and the students they serve are special enough to warrant their own software.

We never set out to be the biggest company, just the best, for independent yoga studios.

And as I think about the fact that 12 years ago there was no Facebook, no iPhone and no Twitter, I'm so happy that we can tell our customers we'll be walking through whatever technological advancements we see over the next decade right along side you, and that like today, you'll be using the exact same piece of software that the woman I love uses to run her business.

No matter where your business goes or where the technology takes us, I promise you, if you own a yoga studio, you will not find any other company on the planet that will treat you better.

2026, here we come.

Preparing our customers for the future instead of locking them into the past

September 5, 2014

Yesterday we made our biggest announcement to date, that your yoga studio can now have an app in the app store!

There's so much more thought that went into the decisions about the functionality behind this announcement, other than just the fact that we wanted our customers to be able to have their own presence in the app store, and one item that's worth exploring in particular is payments.

Our decision to release this new set of features is probably related more to payments than anything else.

Sometimes people think I'm exaggerating when I tell them we are different in our DNA than other companies that do what we do, but I don't think I'm exaggerating. Unlike every one of our competitors, we made a conscious decision to avoid making payments a part of our revenue model. The reason we made this decision is because as a company we asked a fundamentally different question than everyone else.

Whereas they ask, "how can we provide credit card transactions at a reasonable rate while generating some revenue for our business?", we asked the question, "how can we set things up so that eventually our customers pay no credit card transaction fees."

That future isn't here yet, but it's coming like a freight train and I for one and extremely happy that when Apple comes out with whatever payment thing it is that they're going to announce, we'll be embracing this technology and helping to bring our customers into the world of this amazing new technology instead of wishing it didn't exist.

We've had an app for studio owners for a while now, and without the context above it might not make sense as to why we did such massive enhancements on the student side of things first. The reason is because the most important innovations on the horizon are going to be worn on your student's bodies or living in their pockets, and so it made sense to start the foundation there.

Between our integration with Stripe that allows you to store student credit cards, our student iPhone app options that allow your students to make purchases with the touch of a button, and the fact that we have no financial incentive whatsoever to keep the newest and best payment innovation away from you, we've never been better positioned to take our customers into the future.

We can't wait to see what comes next.

Introducing Studio Branded iPhone Apps and Student Access on iOS

September 4, 2014

We believe our biggest advantage as a company is that we can better empathize with people who own yoga studios, and that because of this, we are able to provide them with superior technology that can help their businesses succeed.

Since we launched almost three years ago, with the first students checked into Maile's studio using our software, we have gone out of our way to provide the kind of experience we think is right not just for our customers with our software, but also the kind of experience that students of yoga studios want to have with the studios that they go to.

We do not think marketplace apps that help people find studios around them based on their location are the kinds of things yoga studios need to help their businesses succeed. We believe these serve no other purpose than to help turn yoga into a commodity and mis-understand the unique place that yoga studios play in the lives of their students.

Instead, we believe yoga studios would benefit more by having their own place on the home screens of the phones of their students, so that the communities they build can feel more connected directly to them.

Today we are thrilled to announce that with Tula, you and your studio can have a presence in the world's most important online store, Apple's App Store. Complete with your logo, your studio colors and your custom loading page, your studio can have an application in the app store by being on the $99/mo plan, and paying a one time setup fee of $500. It's eventually going to be $750 but we're having an introductory price of $500 for a couple weeks.

It's that easy. No hourly rate, no design fee, no extra service fee.

Along with this announcement, we're also announcing the release of Student Access on iOS, which is available via an updated Tula Software iPhone app which is available for download right now in the app store.

It comes at no additional charge for all Tula subscribers and the students they serve.

This means you have two choices for allowing your students to view your schedule, register for class, store their credit cards and make purchases via a native iPhone app.

Option 1: A free application, that has the Tula Software logo and branding, or Option 2: a more premium option that provides all the functionality of the Tula application, but branded for your studio.

We're so excited about this announcement, and thrilled that as Apple gets ready to announce their next generation of devices and services, our customers can count on us to help navigate them into the technological future, wherever that may take us.

If you're an existing customer of Tula, you can sign up for this service by simply logging in and going to 'Studio Settings' -> 'iOS Apps'. If you're not a Tula customer but this sounds like the kind of thing you think your business deserves, you can send us an email at 'hello@tulasoftware.com'.

Below are some screenshots of the Tula iPhone app with the student experience, along with the branded version of Tula Yoga Studio next to it, to help give you a feel for the different options.

Very lastly, if you're a developer interested in access to the data inside Tula, information about an API will be coming out in the future as a result of these efforts. We plan to embrace anyone that wants to build products and services for the growing base of Tula's customers.

Check out just a handful of screenshots below to see how the custom app might look with your studio's brand!