An Open Letter to the CEO of Mindbody Online

Dear Rick,
I’m taking a moment follow up on my open letter to mindbody's customers, with an open letter to you, regarding the subject of you introducing a Deals Engine to the mindbody connect app. As you know, in this app you now introduce your customer’s competition to their students, and importantly, you allow consumers to immediately connect their credit cards to other businesses.

Before going on, I’d like to remind you that I’ve often spoken positively of you as a person, and of our competition with mindbody in general.

My words are not personal. They are competitive.

I’m writing you in the open because I don’t think it’s proper that you are not holding your own company to the same set of standards you hold your customers to, and they deserve to know where your words about how they should run their companies are incongruent with the way you run your business.

Specifically at it relates to the notion of competition.

According to the comment thread in my open letter to mindbody’s customers, you wrote a lengthy letter on your customer forum to address your rightfully angry customers. 

In this letter you outlined what you believe are false perceptions by your customers. While there’s not enough room on this blog to address each of your points, there are a few in particular that need to be called out so that you understand how the way you operate your company is different than the way you talk to your customers about how they should operate their businesses.

Your words below, talking about what you believe are false perceptions.

Perception #1: Competition is inherently bad and must be avoided..
—> We don’t agree. The presence of competition indicates a vibrant market. Healthy competition brings more awareness and more buying into the ecosystem. It is the principle reason shopping malls, downtown business districts, theme parks and the Las Vegas Strip exist. It’s the reason all the medical and dental offices in my town are in the same area

Wow. Considering the fact that mindbody is so concerned with people knowing about your competition, that your company literally hijacked a Quora thread to take over the question “Does Mindbody have any competitors? Who are they?”, you sure do have a lot of nerve scolding your customers about the importance of competition.

And that was a Quora thread, something designed to answer these questions.

So let’s be 100% clear here: You don’t even want A QUORA THREAD to contain information about your businesses competitors, and yet you have the nerve to try and educate your customers about the important notion of competition WHILE TRYING TO EXPLAIN TO THEM HOW IT’S OKAY THAT YOU INTRODUCED THEIR STUDENTS TO THE GROUPON STYLE DEALS OF THEIR COMPETITORS.

Unreal.

You go on to say:

—> In this spirit, we will change our policy about removing posts that name competitors. (“Touché” indeed!) To make up for that, here are the best MINDBODY competitors: www.zenplanner.com, www.booker.com, www.wodify.com, www.vagaro.com, www.motionsoft.com. www.appointments-plus.com. I know the CEOs of each of these companies, and they are all talented, decent people running reputable companies. If you truly don’t embrace the “marketplace of wellness” we are creating, and their software can meet your needs, check them out.

It’s convenient how you leave out the fact that you hold your customer’s credit card data hostage for a ransom of $600. Data you tell them they own on your pricing page. Data that you know is so valuable you've given your customer's students the ability to instantly transact with any of their competitors. 

So again, let’s be clear about what you’re doing: You’re pretending to hold the door open for your customers, all while the customer remains chained to the wall because you’re still holding their credit card data hostage.

Because you love competition so much.

The simple fact of the matter is that unless and until you are willing to let your customers take their credit card data without a $600 penalty, everything you say about the importance of competition smacks of unwarranted self righteousness.. The credit card data portability standard is something that any decent company that embraces competition adheres to. As you know, mindbody has as of yet still not joined the data portability alliance even after our call for you to do so.

But good news, later on regarding your false perception #4 you say something where we agree completely:

Perception #4: That you are somehow all playing a zero sum game, fighting over a fixed number of clients in your communities.
—> This isn’t even close to true. On average, less than 1 in 5 eligible adults in your communities are engaged in ANY organized wellness activity. Your biggest competitor is the couch and television. 

YES! We agree! See there can be harmony in the universe! I wrote this blog post about competition all the way back in October of 2013 where I say “Your competition is Facebook, the internet, TV, couches, beer, cupcakes and movies.” 

Hey wait a minute, that post came about because it was me talking about competition in relation to that whole Quora thread incident. So wow that’s super weird. 

The root issue you don’t seem to understand is this: There’s a difference between operating in a free market competitive landscape and having THE COMPANY YOU TRUSED WITH YOUR CUSTOMER DATA INTRODUCING YOUR CUSTOMERS TO YOUR COMPETITION’s DEALS.

I could go on and on but I think the point is made. You simply don’t expect your company to operate under the same environment you’re putting your customers in.  If you did, you’d free your customer’s credit card data, you’d stop hijacking internet threads about your competitors, and you certainly wouldn’t have built Groupon 2.0.

Credit Card Processing Rates Dropping to 2.3% +$.30/transaction

I write often on our blog about how we're a different kind of software company. From the way we were born to the way we operate, we put our customers ahead of ourselves more than anyone in the industry. One of the biggest ways we're different is in that we don't make any money off processing credit cards. Instead, we use the collective volume of our entire customer base to drive down the processing cost for everyone.

I'm beyond thrilled to announce that starting in January the credit card processing rates for all our all our customers will drop from 2.5% + $.30/transaction to 2.3% + $.30/transaction. (Note: In some countries beyond the US the rate is still lower by default)

This is the second time we've been able to lower our credit card processing rates since we launched in 2011, and we look forward to continuing to drive down the cost of processing credit cards for everyone on our platform.

Let's take a look at how this breaks down in the real world. 

Processing Fees on Various Purchases

The higher the transaction amount the more you save with Tula.

As the chart above shows, Tula now provides better processing rates than either Square or PayPal for most of your credit card transactions. 

We wanted to include mindbody in our comparison, but unfortunately between all their hidden fees, PCI compliance fees, qualified vs. non-qualified transactions, etc we don't feel we know what their rates are.

We're so happy we can bring these lower rates to our customers, and as always we'll continue doing what we can to make running your studio easier and more efficient than ever.  

Happy New Year!

Tula Software to Sponsor the Transformation Yoga Project in 2016

I'm happy to announce today that Tula Software will be sponsoring the Transformation Yoga Project throughout 2016. The Transformation Yoga Project is a non-profit organization that seeks to "heal people through empowerment" and provides yoga for people recovering from addiction, yoga for veterans and yoga for prisoners.

Our sponsorship will focus on teacher support at two locations: The Delaware County Youth Detention Center (Lima Juvenile Detention Facility) in Lima, Pennsylvania and Coatesville Veteran's Affairs Medical Center outside of Philadelphia. 

I met this group through the wonderful NamasDay festival (A superb festival that happens twice each year). We started talking about how Tula might be able to support them, and supporting the teachers that went into the various locations to teach the classes seemed like the natural thing to do.

In addition to helping them sending in teachers though, we wanted to also do something that helped these stories of transformation get out. So along with our sponsorship the Transformation Yoga Project has agreed to have a post on their blog each month by a teacher about how yoga is working to serve the needs of the students they teach, and information from the students about how yoga has affected them.

I strongly believe there's a lot that can be done to help spread the word about the power of yoga, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to help this great organization make an impact and tell their story. You can learn more about the Transformation Yoga Project at www.transformationyogaproject.org.

 

 

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!