I was interviewed a few weeks back by Carla Wilson and Keeley Mitchell, producers of the Yoga Biz Studio - a bi-weekly live video show - about the business of yoga, business philosophy, how studios and instructors can market their businesses, and more.
Thanks for having me Carla and Keeley!
Guest: Andrew Wicklander of Tula Software* Join +Keeley Mitchell and +Carla Wilson and our special guest +Andrew Wicklander of Tula Software - the best software in the world for independent yoga studios. We'll broadcast live on Thursday, May 28 at 10am EST.
I'm super excited to make another series of announcements today about Tula and a host of new features.
First, we now have native iPad application! Version 1.0 comes with most of the features of the iPhone app, plus it also includes a new feature - the new ability to have your students sign waivers electronically! And with this, the iPhone now also has electronic waivers as well.
The waivers functionality will ultimately be available as a part of the $99/month plan, but we're making it available to everyone for a couple weeks so you can play around with it and see how it works.
Like everything we build in Tula, we spent a lot of time thinking about all the different people that would be interacting with this new feature, and we worked hard to create a nice, easy and fast experience for everyone.
The way we approached building this feature though, is understanding that an electronic waiver is really just one part of the overall workflow of adding a new person, and so we optimized this entire process.
Now, using either the iPhone app or the iPad app, you can have a student add themselves to your studio, review and sign your studio waiver, and optionally put a credit card on file once they've completed the waiver. For existing students that are alread in the system, but for whom you don't have a signed waiver, you can simply search for their name, and then get taken through the exact same waiver process.
How it works
Adding your waiver
The first thing you'll do is add your electronic waiver using the browser by going to "studio settings" -> "waiver settings". From there simply type in or copy/paste your existing waiver.
Press 'Create Waiver' and you'll be all set!
The first thing a student will do is complete the small form to be added to your studio.
Once they add themselves, they can review your contract, and sign on the iPad or iPhone.
Once they're finished signing, they'll be emailed a copy of the signed contract.
And lastly, we'll ask them if they'd like to put a credit card on file at your studio, so that they can make rapid purchases moving forward.
Once the waiver is signed, we'll store a copy of it on their profile page, and you can easily access it whenever you like.
We're thrilled to now support our customers with our new iPad app, and our new electronic waivers feature - enjoy!
The other week we announced our multiple calendars, payment forms and custom widgets feature that allow you to customize and filter your widgets. It's been a big hit and we wanted to make the individual calendars for your instructors a little easier to get to. Now, whenever you look up the profile page for anyone with the role of admin, desk or instructor, you'll see the option to view their calendar.
In addition, your instructors can pull their own calendar widgets when they log into your studio.
This allows you to put an individual calendar on a specific profile page at your studio website, and it also allows your instructors to put their schedule at your studio on their own websites.
We hope you love the multiple calendars feature as much as we do and let us know if you have any questions in the comments section!
One of the things that separates Tula from anyone else in our industry are the lengths we go to to put our customers front and center. I was stunned from the very beginning that everyone who makes software in our industry would take their customer's students away from their customer's websites and over to theirs.
So disrespectful.
Today I'm thrilled to announce the next evolution of our widgets, which is that they are now color customizable, allowing you to pick your own custom colors and we also allow you to create multiple custom calendars for specific event series', specific instructors, or groups of each.
Maybe over the summer you have a stand up paddle board class over like the fine folks over at Gaea Yoga. Well now you can have a calendar just for those events. Or maybe you want to have a calendar just for your private lesson availability, well you can use custom calendars for that too!
With this latest update you can create as many different calendars and calendar combinations that you want, and this new functionality is available on all of our plans.
Custom calendars, combined with the ability to create custom payment forms and now customize your colors too, means you can have a more seamless experience than ever before when integrating our widgets into your website.
Implementation
Like everything else with Tula, using this feature is very simple to use. You simply select 4 colors to customize - a background color, 2 text colors, and a link color. From there, we do a few things behind the scenes to layer transparencies, create borders and build a visual hierarchy for the pages based on your color selections.
The result is fully customized widgets with your colors, with a professionally designed look and feel. Check out the screenshots below to see how many different looks you can create!
The title of this talk is: "Lessons from Yoga Applied to Business", but it could probably also be named "Wherein I splay myself out in front of a bunch of Minnesota Yogis".
Jessa Walters and Amy Patee are the producers of the Minneapolis Yoga Conference, an event that ended up making me feel extremely comfortable, and I shared some pretty intimate feelings about business, the yoga industry and the lessons that I've learned from yoga that can be directly tied to business.
If you've ever thought to yourself, "I want to hear an impassioned plea from someone that yoga professionals can survive and thrive in business", well then this is the video for you.