An Open Letter to Mindbody's Customers

Dear Mindbody Customer,

Many of you are understandably upset about Mindbody’s latest update to their connect app, where they’ve introduced a “Deals Engine”. 


Can you believe it? The CEO of mindbody is actively promoting a “Deals Engine” on twitter. A Deals Engine. For your studio. A Deals Engine. For the love of god a DEALS ENGINE! Seriously do we need another deals engine?

Okay so back to you being upset: You should be upset and this is actually the appropriate response. Mindbody’s strategy of Introducing your customers to your competition’s deals shows clearly what we predicted months ago: That they’re in a competition with ClassPass to become “the uber of fitness” and they do not care if your business is collateral damage in this battle.

I’m not writing to you on Christmas Eve about their app in particular though, or why it’s bad for your business. Instead, I want to write to you about how software is made, so that you can understand the kind of company you’re dealing with. 

The thing with software, is that like many other things, it takes time to build. It takes effort, and care and intention. You plan things three or six or twelve months out. You build features that are sometimes laying the foundation for other features that you know are coming, but that your customers don’t know anything about yet. 

I’m taking the time to point this out because while the connect app was only introduced a few days ago, mindbody as a company has been laying the foundation for this app for quite some time, and I want you to understand that they too are operating with intention. 

And by understanding the intention, you can understand them as a company.

It is not an accident that mindbody released this app a week before christmas. They know very well that the last thing you want to do over the holidays is switch business software. And they know that no matter how poorly they treat you, if they can get you to stay on their platform until January 1, it at least increases the likelihood that you won’t churn away. You can be guaranteed this came up in mindbody meeting rooms.

And so this is what I want you to think about.

Six months ago when mindbody started texting all your students, telling them to download the connect app every time they registered for a class, they were laying the foundation for this app. 

The reality is that the company you’ve chosen to run your business on, the company you trusted with your customer data, the company that tells you on their pricing page that you own your data…that company has been planning for almost the entire year to introduce deals to your students. 

Groupon style. 

Except unlike Groupon, who for all their faults and failures did in fact build their own consumer following, mindbody is exploiting your business and mining it for the consumer.  They’ll tell you that you can opt your business out of the deals, but what they don’t tell you is that this is irrelevant. Your students are still using the connect app and still seeing the deals from all around them. If you use mindbody, even if you don’t put your studio on the connect platform's "Deals Engine", you’re putting your students on the deals engine, and that’s what they care about most right now.

Let me explain what the connect app is for you: It’s a prettier Groupon with a slower poison intake.

After months of planning, after what you can be sure were thousands of hours designing, developing and testing this app,  after telling the story to their investors of how they were going to become the goto marketplace for everything health and wellness, they announced 9 days before christmas the fact that they had effectively put every single one of your students onto a Groupon like platform, putting you and all the studios around you into a cage-match, igniting a race to the bottom for those willing to take the bait.

Think about this as you spend time with your family this Christmas. Think about the meal your business helped you afford. Think about the gifts your children are opening. Think about how for you, your business is in fact your nourishment. Think about all the investments you made, both with time and money, to bring people into your doors.

And then think about the fact that this year, mindbody decided to use this holiday against you, for their own benefit. That’s the kind of company you’re dealing with.

For those of you for whom this is the last straw, switching away from mindbody to Tula Software is much simpler than you might think, and we're here to help you every step of the way.

You and your business both deserve something better, and you have my promise we'll always treat you right.

 

 

How to migrate from Mindbody to Tula Software

We've been getting more and more people moving over to us from Mindbody - both because of our bigger and better feature set for independent studios - and because people are understandably upset about mindbody promoting other studios to their students. 

One of the things I've noticed when I speak with people though is that they're genuinely surprised at how easy it can be to switch from mindbody to Tula. We want everyone to know how easy it is to come over to us so i figured I'd put up a helpful guide outlining the steps it takes to move from mindbody to Tula.

Migrate away from mindbody in 5 easy steps

Migrating away from mindbody requires just a few primary things:

  1. Creating your schedule of classes. With Tula this process is fast and easy and can be done in minutes.
  2. Creating the passes that you sell at your studio. Here again, the process is fast and easy.
  3. Importing your students. We help you with this! You simply provide us with a spreadsheet with a column for first name, last name, email, phone, and # of credits remaining that someone has, and when those credits expire. Once you provide us with this we import it into your studio and all your existing students are in the studio with their current credit counts.
  4. Set up your website widgets. Now that you have your studio set up, it's time to put your calendar, payment form and website widgets into your own website. Once you've done this your students can make purchases, set up their accounts, register for classes, manage credit cards, etc. If you need a hand with this, we're happy to help. And no, there's no charge! People keep asking us if there's a charge for this kind of thing and it really highlights how mindbody has made some people really afraid of companies like ours. 
  5. Optional: If you have credit cards on file with mindbody that you want to move, we'll work with you to move them to our payment provider, or alternatively you can use the power of our simple payment forms to recapture your student's credit card information.

Now, it's true, there is some effort involved with moving away from mindbody - as is the case with ending any relationship that isn't serving you well. But the effort is usually much less than people expect, and the rewards are well worth your while. 

Once you have your list of students from mindbody, you can literally be up and running with Tula in less than an hour - including credit card setup, payment setup, registrations, schedule, etc.

If you've been on the fence about moving over, know that we'll be here to help everyone that wants to cut over between now and the new year and we're here to support you however we can!

 

Reporting Enhancements

For the last few weeks we've been working hard to make our reports a lot more valuable for everyone using Tula, and I'm excited to announce that our latest changes have just been released. We're really happy to get these out now so you can spend some time playing with your data and getting new insights into how your year went.

While some of the reports are the same, we've also introduced a number of new reports, combined some others, and made everything much easier to access with more intelligent defaults. We're really happy with these updates, and put up this short video on our YouTube channel giving a short overview of the latest updates. We hope you like the new reports as much as we do!


Updates to pass management and website widget builders

We're always pushing out updates to Tula and today we have a bunch of improvements that will give you more power than ever before. We've added another state to passes (trashed) so you can keep them better organized, we've completely re-organized our website widgets section to make building custom payment forms and calendars easier than ever before and we've brought in additional filter options so you can create even better calendars and payment forms.

Trash your passes

You've always been able to mark a pass as active, or archived but after some time things could get a little unwieldy with passes from older events. Now you have the option of trashing your passes so you can not only remove them from sale, but they'll also stop showing up as options in your reports. For the relevant reports such as the payroll report you'll have the option of including or excluding your trashed passes as a group. So the various states will now look like this:

  • Active Passes are available for sale and can be targeted individually for reporting purposes.
  • Archived Passes are NOT available for sale, but CAN be targeted individually for reporting purposes.
  • Trashed Passes are NOT available for sale, and can NOT be targeted individually for reporting purposes. 

Website Widget Reorganization

We've made our website widgets easier to use and more powerful than ever before.

Basic Setup

Now when you choose the basic setup, you'll have an individual tab for each of the Calendar, Payment Form, and Student Access widgets that will contain both the embed code that you put in your website, and a preview of that that widget will look like in your site. (Note, you're logged in as yourself, so you'll see your name whereas your students will of course see their name when they are logged in.)

Custom Setup

When you choose the custom setup option, you'll now see the color selection options at the top of the page, along with the Live Preview. Below this you'll see tabs where you can preview your color selections right inside the app. 

More filters means power

Along with the reorganization of the widgets page, we've also added some new filters to make our calendars and payment forms more power than ever before.

Custom Calendars

With the custom calendar section now you can create separate calendars for your regular classes and special events, and continue to create specific calendars for an individual event series or a group of event series'. Combined with the ability to allow your students to register for an entire series/group of events all at once, this new set of functionality gives you more power than ever before when it comes to managing your calendars, events and registrations.

Custom Payment Forms

As is the case with the calendars, you can also create as many custom payment forms as you like. Now in addition to creating individual custom payment forms, you can also choose to use the default settings from your online payment form settings.

More power than ever before

This group of updates gives our customers more power than ever before to create the perfect experience for students who visit their website. Whether you have multiple special events, have a business that focuses on courses/series, or whether you simply want to display individual instructor calendars on their own pages, Tula gives you more power than ever before to create the custom experience you and your students deserve.

We hope you like these updates as much as we do!

A little big update: Rapid Credit Card updates for students

We just pushed out a nice little change that'll make managing your members a little easier. For a long time now we've supported memberships and recurring billing, but if someone's card declined and they needed to update it, they had to get in touch with the studio.

No more!

Now, if any member has a credit card failure when we send them an email alert, we also include a link that will take them directly to a credit card update page. Even better, we'll auto log them in so all they need to do is click the link, and update their credit card.

What's great about this update is it also includes a foundation that'll allow us to more easily help new customers migrating to us from other systems.

We hope you like this little enhancement and let us know if you have any questions about i!