Tula Software to Organize Support for Living Beyond Breast Cancer’s 25th Anniversary Yoga Fundraiser

I’m excited to announce today that Tula Software will be helping to organize support amongst our customers for a fantastic organization, Living Beyond Breast Cancer (LBBC). We’ll be coordinating with our customer base to participate in LBBC’s Reach & Raise fundraising event, which will be held nationwide September 17th and 18th, 2016. 

Founded in 1991, LBBC is a 4-Star Charity Navigator nonprofit organization whose mission is to connect people with trusted breast cancer information and a community of support. National conferences, monthly webinars, regional community meetings, the Guides to Understanding Breast Cancer, award-winning blogs, and a toll-free Breast Cancer Helpline are just a few examples of the services that are provided, always at little or no cost.

Our aim is to engage as many of our customers as possible, implement what we refer to as a “full stack donation system” and activate our collective networks to participate in LBBC’s nationwide yoga fundraiser, “Reach & Raise on the Road.” 

In addition to a free month of software use, we’ll also be working with a host of other companies to offer promotions and incentives for you and your students to participate.

We’ve been thinking for some time about an idea we’ve had that we internally refer to as a “credit for a cause”, which I’ll write a separate post about later, but this gives us the perfect opportunity to begin working on this “full stack donation system” while also supporting a fantastic event and bringing our community of studios together for a cause.

Here’s how it’ll work:

• LBBC is holding the nationwide yoga fundraiser the weekend of September 17th/18th
• Tula Software will encourage studios that use Tula Software to participate in this event by offering them a free month of software use by participating
• Studios reach out to their respective communities to get students involved and purchase the credit for a cause (the cause in this case being LBBC).
• Students purchase a credit for a cause pass.
• This credit will be the first credit used at their next class attendance.
• We suggest instructors forego any incentive pay for anyone redeeming their “LBBC credit for a cause” pass.

We think it’s a beautifully simple idea, and that this full stack donation system allows everyone in the community to participate and contribute, all while relieving any single participant from carrying too heavy of a burden. 

We can do this from a technology standpoint by using Tula Software and making a few customizations. The studios that use our software will be able to accept donations via payment forms that are already sitting on their websites and iOS apps, and the donations will be able to be made by students who already have credit cards on file with the studios they go to. Then, these donations will be sent directly to LBBC.

From a technical standpoint, it works like this:

• We’ll deploy the same pass type to each participating studio.
• Their students can then purchase the pass. 
• The pass will then be good for 30 days.
• The money used to purchase these specific pass types goes to the recipient(s) stripe account - which in this case, is LBBC.

We met the LBBC team for the first time at the NamasDay festival in Philadelphia. When we learned about their Reach & Raise fundraiser, we thought credit for a cause would be a fantastic way to support them. 

We’re looking forward to working with LBBC in the months ahead, and we’ll be reaching out to studios that use our software to encourage participation. And of course, if you’re a Tula customer and want to be a part of this coordinated effort, please email us at [help at tulasoftware dot com] or just get in touch via the support channel in the software.

We’re looking forward to seeing just what we can do with your help for this wonderful organization!

Tula Software has Acquired The Minneapolis Yoga Conference

I’m excited to announce today that Tula Software has acquired the Minneapolis Yoga Conference! We’ll be producing and promoting the 2017 Conference, which will take place at the Hyatt in downtown Minneapolis on March 3, 4, and 5, 2017. With this acquisition we’ll have an opportunity to connect more closely and more deeply with our customers than ever before, while also being able to expand the offering to the Minneapolis yoga community. 

For those unfamiliar, Tula Software has been a big sponsor of the Minneapolis Yoga Conference for the past two years, and we’ve made many new friends in the Minnesota Yoga community as a result. Our intention is to make the Minneapolis Yoga Conference the premier yoga conference in the nation, while also continuing to sponsor and support the numerous independent conferences we already attend, and new ones we plan to support in the future. 

Our aim is to honor and highlight the conference’s roots, where the depths of yoga are embraced and celebrated, and where it sits at the fore-front of the Yoga Therapy movement, while also bringing a new and exciting energy to the conference that only Tula Software could bring. 

Each year, students, instructors and studio owners from around the world will have an opportunity to connect, support and learn from each other. We will welcome, honor and respect everyone for where they are on their yogic path, and express gratitude for each person and what they bring to the larger yoga community. 

Over the past couple of years, one of the primary ways we’ve spread the word about Tula Software has been by sponsoring and attending various yoga conferences. And while the raw business results of these efforts are somewhat difficult to measure, I have felt firsthand how valuable and important these conferences are to me personally. I took it as a given that over time, they’d be an important part of our growth, even if it wasn’t something I could measure directly.

After so many positive conference and festival experiences, we had started to think about what a conference produced by Tula Software might look like, primarily so we could have a context whereby we could meet and interact with our customers over a long weekend, and importantly, where they could all meet each other. 

As it turned out, the universe aligned a few things and an opportunity to acquire the Minneapolis Yoga Conference presented itself, and we jumped at it. 

We’ll now be able to both expand the conference for the people of the Minnesota yoga community with whom we’ve become friends, while also have a place where we can invite our customers so we can meet them in person, get to know them and their businesses more deeply, and encourage and support everyone who is helping to spread the wonderfulness that is yoga.

In the weeks ahead we’ll be launching the new website, sharing the schedule, introducing some presenters and give everyone a glimpse of what we’ll be putting together. To the handful of people we’ve already spoken to about this announcement, we can’t thank you enough for your words of encouragement and support.

Thank you

Updated Pricing for Tula Software

Coming off the massive launch of the retention center, I'm super excited to announce today some pricing updates we've made to Tula software and the plan options we've made available. We think each of these tiers now provides more value than ever before, while still giving our customers the same pricing options.

Our pricing plans are staying as they are with three tiers of $79/mo, $99/mo and $139/mo. What's changing however are some of the limits on the plans and the features available with the pans.

The new pricing!

On the $79 Yoga plan, you can now have unlimited studio workers along with your unlimited students! No need to worry about the number of people you have on different roles. I was never in love with charging people more for more instructors, so we're really happy with this change.

The find-a-sub feature has now been moved off of the $79 plan, and put on the $99 plan, along with the electronic waivers and the retention center. Moving this feature onto the mid-tier plan makes the most sense from a feature standpoint, and also allowed us to make the $79 plan become unlimited.

And the $139 plan remains the same, with the custom iPhone application.

Lastly, there's one other big update we decided to make to help celebrate the launch of the retention center! Before the nominal usage based pricing kicks in, we're going to include 5,000 retention center emails on the $99 plan, and 15,000 retention center emails on the $139 plan!

We think this is a great way to thank early adopters of the product, encourage people to upgrade, and also gives our power users another great reason to move up to the top tier plan. 

Here's a handy little graph to outline our pricing tiers. And of course, our existing customers are all grandfathered into their current plans if they don't want anything to change.

$139/month Mudra PLan

• Everything on the Mala Plan +
• Custom iPhone App
• Custom Apple Watch Extension
• 15,000 retention center emails

$79/month Yoga Plan

• Unlimited Students
• Unlimited Instructors
• Unlimited Calendars
• Unlimited Payment Forms
• Registrations
• Member Management
• Gift Certificates
• Etc, etc, etc,

$99/month Mala Plan

• Everything on the Yoga Plan +
• Find-a-sub
• Electronic Waivers
• Retention Center
• 5,000 Retention Center Emails Included

We feel very happy that we're able to offer this pricing, and we think it helps solidify our position as the company offering the most value per customer dollar spent in the entire industry. 

If you're still waiting to check out the retention center, there's no better time than right now, and if you have questions please get in touch!

Introducing Retention Center

I’m thrilled to announce today the release of our newest feature: Retention Center. With the Retention Center activated, you can effortlessly email groups of your students, invoking this new capability from any page where we display student information.

The Retention Center has quite literally been woven into just about every aspect of our product, and will empower studios to communicate with their students in a more targeted, personal and relevant way than ever before.

The easiest way to communicate with your students

Like everything we do with Tula, we obsessed about how to keep this new feature easy to use while also maximizing the power and capabilities given to our customers. We didn’t just want to make it easy for people to send emails. We wanted to empower studio owners to easily communicate with their students in a personal, targeted, and relevant way.

Student Filter as home base for the Retention Center

The first thing you’ll notice is that our student filter page has become the sort of ‘home base’ for the retention center. We’ve made our filters easier to use than ever before and we’ve also added some new filter options so that you can target people more precisely and communicate in a way that’s most relevant to them. 

For example, you might want to email everyone who hasn’t been to your studio in 90 days, and offer them a special one off pass. Or you might want to email everyone who has joined your studio in the last 30 days. Or you might want to email everyone who’s last purchase was a 10 pack and they have more than 5 credits left. Or maybe you want to email everyone who’s last purchase was a membership pass but their last attendance was more than 30 days ago.

All of this is now possible on the new Student Filter page.

Communicate with your students in a way that's relevant to them.

Retention Center always available everywhere

The other thing you’ll notice is that the Retention Center is available everywhere else throughout Tula, as we already provide lists of students in pre-defined contexts.

If you’re viewing an event page, now you can choose to email people who have registered for the event. Or if you’re looking at a past event, you can email everyone that attended. Maybe you’re using the People by Passes report to see who purchased a pass to your upcoming retreat, or maybe you’re looking at your memberships page. 

What we realized was that within Tula, we already have pages throughout the system where your students are segmented. Instead of always making you go back to some retention center home page, we felt the superior approach would be to make it possible to invoke the retention center from just about anywhere. 

Templates

Of course, no Retention Tool would be complete without the ability to save your favorite emails so that you can easily use them again for later emails. By using templates, over time you’ll have quick and immediate access a set of emails you call upon frequently to quickly communicate with your students, while still encouraging you to think about the timing and context of the messages you’re sending.

Updated User Profile Pages

The final thing we put out with this release was a nice update to our user profile pages. We updated the layout so we could display email campaigns that someone was a part of, and in the process we updated the page to more clearly show the active special event passes that someone has along with whether they have an active membership.

Activating Retention Center

The retention center is available as part of the $99 Mala plan, and has an associated usage fee of $5 for every 1,000 emails you send. Alternatively you can opt to choose to send unlimited emails for an additional set monthly fee that’s determined by the number of students you have in your studio. Once you agree to the pricing you’ll be able to save your retention settings and you’ll be ready to send emails.

The way the usage fees work is that you’ll have a separate invoice and charge for your email usage, that will be billed on the same date of your subscription renewal. For example, if your renewal date is on April 15th for your Tula subscription, you’ll also receive an invoice/charge for any emails you sent from March 15 through April 14th. If you choose to have unlimited email added to your plan, then of course that will simply become part of your normal monthly subscription.

Retention Center Version 1.0

This release is Version 1 of our Retention Center, and we already have loads of ideas we’re prioritizing for future development, from automation to conversation tracking and more. We’re excited we have this new foundation on which we can continue to build more powerful communication functionality to help you retain your students. 

We’re thrilled with what we’ve come up with so far, and we hope you like it as much as we do!

Looking at age as a percentage of your available life lived

I'm not sure if I think about the shortness of life more than most people, or if it's simply natural to think often about how temporary our situation here is. But in any case, I spend a fair bit of time thinking about the shortness of life.

But for as much as I have gratitude for each day, I've learned also that always acting in a way that assumes "life is short" can lead to it's own set of woes as the result of an unwillingness to delay gratification.

What happens is we tend to have a number in our minds regarding when we think our time is going to expire. Maybe for you it's 50 because that's when your father had a heart attack. For someone else it might be 95 because that's how old their grandfather lived to. Maybe someone constantly thinks death is knocking at their door because tragedy has visited them. 

The primary problem with thinking about age in terms of years though is that we don't actually know our expiration date. So we're basically working on an equation with an assumed value that's almost certain to be incorrect.

So when we say we're 20 or 40 or 60 years old, it also comes along with the built in assumptions we have about our life expectancy. Instead, I think it's better to think of age as a percentage of our available life lived.

What percent old are you?

This question makes it instantly clear you really don't have any idea how old you are. I'm 39 years old, but wth the rate of technical advances combined with the opportunity for sudden death to befall someone, I could actually either be 99% old or I could be 33% old. 

The thing is, only the dying know how old they are. And sadly, sometimes a 20 year old is older than a 40 year old when we look at age as a percentage of our available life lived.

What I like about thinking about age in this way though is that for me it's a good way to have both extreme gratitude for the present, while it also motivates me to put in the time, effort and work to optimize the things that need optimization even if it means I'm going to be a little less happy or there might be a little more struggle in the immediate future.

After all, if I end up having 60% more life here I want to optimize for it!

For me, thinking of age as a percentage of life, is a good way to find balance when there can be opposing forces at play.

So....what percent old are you?

I know. I don't have any idea either. We're all X%.