Send your ClassPass registrations into Tula

We've been pretty vocal that we're very lukewarm on daily deal sites and discounts in general. We tend to think that things such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Amazon local and the mindbody connect app work to turn yoga studios into a commodity.

As such, we haven't spent much time doing development to integrate with these sites.

We've started hearing more and more about a company called ClassPass though, and they sounded intriguing to us. I was even speaking with a reporter about them the other day. I mentioned that while I haven't made up my mind about ClassPass yet, I looked at them differently than a daily deals site.

Why does ClassPass seem different to us?

For starters their members are limited to the number of times they can visit your studio each month, so they seem to have solved the firehose problem that the daily deal sites have. And while ClassPass does attract people that are willing to pay a monthly fee for their fitness routine, which are the best customers to have, they can't replace a membership at your studio.

I'm also particularly fond of the idea of how ClassPass can help introduce people with a fitness routine to the practice of yoga. I think getting more runners to learn about the benefits of yoga for example would be great.

Very most importantly though, we have customers that use ClassPass, who have decided it's good for their business, and their day to day routine of dealing with ClassPass registrations was more difficult than it needed to be.

So today we're happy to announce that if you use ClassPass, you can simply forward your registration emails into a custom studios address, we'll parse those emails, and we'll add the student to your registration list. It doesn't matter whether that person has a Tula account already or not, or whether they've been to your studio before.

We've leveraged the same powerful functionality that our payment matching and registration matching features use, and extended it so you can simply send your ClassPass emails to us. 

Once your comfortable with the process, you might even want to consider auto-forwarding all the emails.

Your custom studio address is available use immediately, and you can determine it by taking your studio subdomain and creating the following type of address: yourstudioname@inbound.tulasoftware.com.

If you've decided ClassPass is good for your business, we're thrilled that we can now make your lives a little bit easier as you handle your incoming registrations. And as always, if you need a hand just shoot us an email at help@tulasoftware.com.

iPhone 6 Updates Now Available

Another version of the Tula app has hit the app store, this time with all the updates for the iPhones 6 to account for the new screen sizes. We also pushed out a handful of small bug-fixes with this release, and all our customer white-label apps have received the updates as well.

Grab the latest version of the iPhone app on the app store, and for those of you with custom white-label apps be sure to tell your students to look out for the updates as well!

Footsteps, not clicks

One of the things that most inspires me, is when I see someone walking in our Chicago neighborhood with a yoga mat, headed towards Maile's studio.

We work in an industry where people measure clicks, page views and conversion rates. There are conferences about sales funnels, lead optimization and a host of other things that attempt to turn the art of making something extraordinary and valuable into a predictable science.

And yet the thing I think about most, is footsteps.

People who have built yoga studios, and the people who teach yoga, they do something so valuable that every day people stand up, change their clothes, and sometimes walk through snow storms to get to their yoga.

Think about that. Would you walk for 20 minutes through the snow, in 15 degree weather, to get to your Facebook page? How about to get to your favorite TV show? Questionable at best.  But every day I see people walking through our neighborhood to get to their yoga.

Why this matters is because we recognize that the point is to create something so valuable that people would walk through the snow to get to it - not to trick them into landing on your website with a different button color.

We're often asked how we're different. I don't know how to answer this sometimes, but I suppose one way is to talk about the things that inspire us.

And I find no inspiration in measuring clicks.

Footsteps on the other hand, those are inspiring.

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.

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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):

• Added new and better reports for revenue, attendances, and passes.
• Added a payroll report so studios can calculate paychecks.
• Changed our pricing to include 3 major plans.
• Improved incoming payments by allowing studios to ignore them.
• Improved our search engine for people.
• Launched an API for our iOS app.
• Launched student access.
• Improved payment profiles.
• Added student access to our iOS app.
• Added document storage.
• Reduced our payment processing rates to 2.5%.
• Launched white-label iOS apps. Any studio can buy a custom, branded iOS app.
• Improved our studio migration script to handle credits and expiration dates.
• Added payment matching to the iOS app.
• Improved the check-in page.
• Launched gift certificates.
• Improved the instructor dashboard.
• Improved the login process for the student widget.
• Added check-in to the iOS app.
• Improved special events and event series creation.
• Added desk access to our iOS app.
• Improved the people page.
• Added a check-in flag to alert users about something when they get checked-in.

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.