We're happy to be a part of the Minneapolis Yoga Conference this year. If you're here, come say hi.
Andrew will be giving a talk about lessons from yoga applied to business at 1-2pm today. We'll be taking pictures and recording a few videos of his talk. He'll also be on a panel tomorrow discussing what it takes to be successful as a yoga teacher and studio in today’s world.
We've very much enjoyed the conference so far and look forward to the next two days.
Six hundred dollars.
60% of the annual cost of their most popular monthly plan.
This is how much money mindbody charges their customers if they want to get their student credit card data. Data, mind you, that mindbody says their customers own, right on their pricing page.
Be sure to ask the experts about credit card data portability!
Telling people they own their data, but that they have to pay $600 for their credit card data, is like telling someone they own their yoga mat, but they have pay $100 to take it out of your studio.
It is flatly unethical.
When I did a live chat with a mindbody sales person, they didn't even know if there was a fee. They had to get in touch with the conversion department.
Credit card data is not just any data by the way. It is the most important data a small business can have. It allows them to charge their monthly members, which keeps cash-flow steady, and enables their customers to have a seamless payment experience. Most importantly, it creates a sense of loyalty between the customer and the business.
There is a reason Tim Cook talks about the number of credit cards the iTunes store has on file during Apple keynotes.
Today I am publicly calling on mindbody CEO, Rick Stollmeyer, to immediately join the data portability initiative started by the payments company Braintree. Learn more about this initiative at http://www.portabilitystandard.org.
From the very beginning, credit card portability was of the utmost importance to us, and it is one of the key reasons we chose to work with Stripe. And, it is why we integrated with Stripe in the way we did - having our customers get their own stripe accounts, and then authorizing us to conduct transactions, as opposed to all transactions flowing through our account.
We felt credit card data was so important, that the closer our customers were to the payments portion of our stack, the more ownership they had of the card data, the better.
Our customers are cage free and we’re very proud of this.
One of the big ways yoga has influenced me, is that it causes me to think a lot more about my intention with things. Our intention with this campaign, is to make the entire industry better for people running small health and wellness businesses. Credit card portability has become standard in much of the tech world, with companies like Stripe, Recurly, Braintree and others leading the way.
We want to do the same in our industry.
Because mindbody is so big, we're calling on them publicly, but we hope everyone in this industry including Frontdesk, ZenPlanner, Booker, PunchPass and others will join us as well. This is an active campaign, and it will remain active until we achieve our goal - which is to get every software company that serves yoga studios to agree to credit card portability, and make it a standard.
To be clear, I’ve maintained from the very beginning of our launch, that the people at mindbody seem to be good people. They actually just bought a company owned by someone that Maile went to high school with. Small world, and I have no ill will to any of the humans over there.
It’s actually quite annoying. Rick Stollmeyer used to be an officer on Navy submarines, and the fact is that mindbody is one of the pioneers in the SaaS business. You don't become a Naval officer and build a company on it's way to being valued at a billion dollars without having some good qualities as a person.
This isn’t personal, is my point, and it isn’t angry link bait either.
What I have always maintained though, is that different constraints, and different people to please, leads to very different products and very different companies. This in turn, leads to a very different experience for customers.
When you have to maintain valuations and prepare a company for an IPO, when you have early investors that want their liquidation, when Morgan Stanley wants that $750 million dollar valuation, well those are some serious and significant constraints to deal with.
Slowly, but then suddenly, the needs of your customers - the people that should be the most important to you - become secondary.
The result of all this is that mindbody has been locking their customers in by holding their credit card data hostage since 2013, and I believe that this significantly and artificially props up their valuation.
Which brings us back to the credit card hostage situation. One of the things all SaaS companies have to deal with is churn. Churn is the number of customers that leave your product, and churn can happen for a number of reasons.
People can go out of business, they might find a product they like better, or they might decide to stop using software all together. But the point is, churn happens to everyone.
And the larger you get, the more your churn hurts.
When you have 40,000 customers, if you had a churn rate of 1%, that means you are losing 800 customers every month. (Which means you need to add 800 just to stay in place).
Most people fear churn, but what I’ve learned is that by embracing it, you can use it as a compass. By understanding precisely why customers leave you, you can break it down into categories of ‘good churn’ and ‘bad churn’.
For us, good churn might be a martial arts studio that tries us out, but feels we’re not quite the right fit because we don’t have features that deal with belt colors. Bad churn would be a small yoga studio leaving us.
The way you end up with a product like mindbody’s, is you fear churn, you build features to please everybody, you become a sales driven organization and you lock in your customer’s most important data.
This can work for a while. And it might even get you to the public markets. But it’s not a recipe for long term, multi-decades long success. nor does it maximize customer happiness.
New entrants are too good, too nimble and have products that can out compete.
The portability standard recommends asking these questions of any software company you might work with, and we couldn't agree more. No matter who you are considering for software, be sure to ask these questions:
By asking these questions, you'll be able to ensure that your business maintains control of the most important information you have, and that you'll never be held captive.
**UPDATE**
John Zimmerman, CEO of Front Desk, a competitor to both Tula Software and mindbody, has confirmed that there is no fee to move credit card data from one provider to another in the event a customer cancels.
Every movement needs a first follower, and we're grateful for the leadership that Front Desk has shown by publicly joining us.
You can read a post by John Zimmerman about his opinions regarding credit card portability on his blog post, and you can also read the Front Desk documents about portability in their FAQ section.
Tula is very heavily geared towards Yoga Studios, and we truly believe we're better for independent yoga studios than anyone else, including Front Desk. If you have a gym, martial arts studio or other fitness business and we're not quite right for you, you might want to check out Front Desk. If nothing else, you know they won't hold you hostage, and that's definitely not something that can be said of mindbody.
One of the toughest problems we've had to sink our teeth into is registrations. Making it even tougher is our belief that your students shouldn't be required to create accounts with us, just to interact with your business. And making it tougher still is the fact that many of our customers have been asking for the ability to require payments to certain classes, in order to allow students to register for them.
We've been thinking about this problem for a long, long time.
Today we are proud to announce an entirely new set of features to the Tula registration system that will allow you to do the following:
Together, this new set of features represents the single largest release we've ever put together, but what makes us so happy, is that in order to begin leveraging this new functionality, all you need to do is edit a class, and click on a radio button.
That's it. To begin requiring payment for any of your classes, all you need to do is edit the class, and choose to require payment in order to register.
When you create or edit a class, in addition to the Calendar Settings you've always had, there's now one more option: "Require payment in order to register?". When "Yes" is selected to require payment, we will only allow a student to register for a class if they have credits on file.
Importantly, this means that if they attempt to register for a class and they are not logged in, they will have to log in, so that we know their current credit count.
With this new functionality, you might want to consider updating the language on your websites in certain places.
For new students, you'll want to point them to the payment form, as they don't have accounts yet. Our payment form has been modified so that once someone purchases a pass, they can register for the number of classes equal to the pass they are purchasing. For example, if you have a special event series with 5 classes, and someone buys a 3-pack to that special event, they'll be able to register for up to 3 classes in that special even series.
For existing students, while they can of course use the payment form, if they log in they'll be able to register for classes with the click of a button, they'll be able to instantly make payments if they're out of credits, etc.
In short, when requiring payment in order to register for a class, send new students to your payment form and send existing students to the calendar.
Check out some screenshots below with annotations, to see the different views people will get based on whether they're logged in, logged out, using the calendar or using the payment form.
Loads of features enabled by answering a single question!
These changes are all accounted for on the iOS applications, however if you require payment for a class, your students on iOS that don't have credits will simply not be able to register. Our updated app will be available soon, but it's pending Apples approval.
We have a philosophy that the browser doesn't wait for iOS, so while your students won't be able to register for classes that require payment, they won't get proper error messages until our newest version is approved. We don't like to have breakages anywhere, but we were willing to make this trade-off to get the feature out today.
As large as this release is, we still have a lot more features, functionality and refinements that we'll continue to bring! Please let us know what you like, what you want improved and how you're using this in the wild. We can't wait to hear what you think!
As a result of doing all this work, we're able to give you one final feature a lot of you have been asking for - the ability to create multiple payment forms with specific passes on them available for purchase. We're considering this a power user feature and it's sort of hidden in the website widgets section.
By going to the custom form builder, you can create and build a payment form with a set of passes, and, you can put a custom prompt in the dropdown that prompts people to make a purchase.
To all of our customers that have asked for these features so they can run their businesses better, we send you a huge thank you! We couldn't build this without you!
Since we launched Tula all the way back in 2011, we made a commitment to providing our customers with the best payment experience we possibly could by integrating with our favorite payment processor, Stripe.
For years, our customers have been using our integration with Stripe to take payments online, store credit cards and process monthly membership payments.
Today, we're announcing an even deeper integration with Stripe that allows you to handle one-off transactions with the option of conducting a one time charge without storing a credit card. Of course, if you want to store cards you can still do this, and now the workflow is better than ever.
As we continue to deepen our integration with Stripe, we want to encourage our customer to get more student cards on file and to speed up the process when one-off transactions are in order. In the UI our changes are pretty minor, so the changes will be pretty easy to follow.
Same Dropdown - new options
Now when you go to record a purchase, you'll see a slightly different hierarch of payment options:
Note the key changes:
When you choose the 'Enter Credit Card' option, you'll now be presented with a modal so you can quickly and easily enter in the credit card details without leaving the page you're on:
As mentioned above, we've preserved the option to record payments with an 'unsaved credit card' via an external system such as Amazon Local, Square, Shopkeep or any other point of sale system you might want to bring. We've always wanted Tula to be flexible enough for people who have another swipe system they want to use and so this option remains.
For those of you that want to leverage the connection to stripe even more though, now you have another option to quickly and easily conduct credit card charges and store your student cards.
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.