Enhanced Student Searching and Check-in Flags

Over the past few days we've released some subtle but super handy enhancements to Tula.

Updated View Everyone Page

First, we've updated our 'view everyone' page to allow you to view, filter and sort your people on a number of new parameters. We also killed the pagination and introduced endless scrolling on this page, which makes it a lot more functional.

For example, maybe you want to see everyone who's last attendances was after January 1st. Or maybe you want to see everyone who purchased a pass prior to a certain date. Or maybe you want to see everyone who bought a pass after one date, but their last attendance was after or before another date. Like a lot of things in Tula it's super easy to use and quite simple in the UI, but very powerful underneath.

Check-in Flags

There's always been a nice way to leave notes on your students, but sometimes you might want to call out something important about someone to other staff members. Maybe they've gone negative too many times and they need to make a payment. Maybe there's a medical issue you want your whole staff to be aware of. Now, there's a fast and easy way to add an alert to someone when they're checked in.

When people have the check-in flag set, there will be both a pop-up alert when they're checked in, along with a red flag indicating there's important information about them.

We're always looking for ways to refine and improve Tula, and we hope you like these new features as much as we do!

169 Improvements to TULA in 2014

2014 was a great year for all of us at TULA - and that includes are customers too! Looking back, we improved TULA a total of 169 times and maybe more. That means, we added or improved features, fixed bugs, and increased the performance and stability of TULA 169 times in 2014.

Here's the complete list (in case you were wondering):

Even with all of these improvements in 2014, you can expect the same from us in 2015. We strive to do all of this without complicating our product. You can count on us to keep things simple while making you a more powerful business owner.

Racking up the WOW points

This is a blog post by Derek Hopper, Lead Engineer of TULA.

One of my first jobs was with a company called Mike's Carwash (they're a big carwash chain throughout Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky). Our main focus was the customer and giving them the best experience possible. Customer retention is high because the employees are friendly and always do the right thing.

Mike's Carwash has a concept called "WOW points".  For example, you get a point if a customer mentions you by name when you're not around. If a customer takes the time to send in a comment card about a great experience, you get a point.

It's a reward system at its core, but it's so much more than that. Doing these things becomes second nature. You become less focused on the points and more focused on continuing to do the right thing. You start racking up the points with customers because you're always focused on them.

I like to think we have a pseudo WOW points culture at TULA. No matter how long a customer has been with us, we treat them the same - we treat them as we would want to be treated. Our glowing reviews reflect that.

We are racking up the WOW points as best we can. That's how we try to stand out. Customers that have received responses from us in less than a few minutes know this. Customers that ask us for advice know this. Customers that need website help know this.

Each time a customer comes to us with a request, we handle it in the best way possible.

Here's the best part. You can translate WOW points into many different parts of your life. You can do it at your yoga studio. You can rack up points with your friends or at the office. If you focus on it for at least thirty days, you'll form a habit of it. Eventually, you'll forget about the points altogether and all you'll have left is a better culture, a better yoga studio, and a better you!

Improved Special Events and Event Series

We're super happy to announce today a big improvement to our special events feature, the way in which the special events are created, how multiple events are tied together and the way in which you go about tying passes to events.

Previously the feature was super powerful, but we felt the experience of create the events and tying passes to them could be optimized to be a lot better. We wanted people to be able to very easily tie together both multiple events to a single series, as well as tie multiple passes to each of the events in the series.

For example: A beginners workshop that happens on Monday nights and Saturday afternoons, or a retreat that has 15 classes inside of it, or a guest instructor teaching 5 workshops over a weekend, all of which are part of a specific series.

Below are a few screenshots highlighting the new and improved feature:

Associate Repeating Events or Random Events to a single series
Now you have the option of not just adding repeating events, but also random events, to a single series.

New Event Series Page: Easily add and remove events to/from an existing series
On the event series page, you can now view all events in that series, detach events from the series (or delete them entirely) and add new events to the series. Added bonus: When you add a new event to the series, it automatically gets all the valid passes for that series attached to it.

Add new passes for a special event, while creating the special event
Previously it was a little bit clunky to add new passes and new special events. Now it's all part of the same workflow.

We're thrilled with how this enhancement turned out, and hope you find it a lot easier and pleasant to make your special events!

A filter on every frame

I somewhat regularly go through the #yoga hashtag and others similar ones like it on Instagram. Lately though, I just can't get this thought out of my head: A filter on every frame.

The pictures are beautiful, and let's face it, sometimes the bodies too. Men and women alike.

But everything looks so fake.

Remember when technology was trying to get good enough to represent the real thing? Now our technology is so good that reality just isn't good enough, so we spend time where everything has to be even better than reality.

And then we put a filter on every frame.

Why I think this is interesting though is because for all of this 'stuff' there is it's opposite, and what I love about the irony of the yoga hashtag, is that it's anecdote is the yoga studio.

We can put filters on our frames, but we can't lie to ourselves.

I can only speak for myself, but I think I need to spend a little more time putting my body on a yoga mat, and a little less time putting filters on my frames.