Early Summer Updates!

For our customers that have been with us a while, you know we're constantly updating things with Tula and always working to make the product better. Coming off the release of the retention center, we've spent a bunch of time the first part of the summer working on a slew of little improvements all around the system. In no particular order, here are a bunch of updates we've recently pushed out:

Browser Updates

• Loads of performance improvements on Retention Center and Student Filtering. Filtering your students and sending off emails should be faster than ever.
• When credits are on reserve for classes that require payment, view which classes are reserving credits from the student profile page.
• Fixed a date issue on the people by passes report
• We now periodically update campaign stats to prevent customers from having to refresh the page
• Numerous inbound email enhancements so reply's from campaigns are handled more effectively
• Give customers the ability to manually unsubscribe people from receiving emails. Just click on the menu in their profile.

• Bring in the ability for customers to view open, click and unsubscribe information on campaigns once sent

• Give customers the ability to view open and click information on individual profiles for the email's they've been sent.

iOS Updates

In addition to the updates above, we've also submitted a number of enhancements to the iOS apps. These updates are still pending review by apple but should be available shortly:

• We've now enabled multi-tasking on the iPad app. Super helpful if you use multiple apps at once.
• email is now optional when adding new students, just like it is in the browser.
• When people have a check-in flag on their accounts, we'll now show the check in flag in the iOS apps.
• If people have negative credits we'll highlight the row in red to call it out more loudly - just like we do with special events if a student doesn't have a pass to that event.
• When preventing people from de-registering from an event that requires payment, we'll now pop a friendly message explaining why they can't deregister.

We'll be announcing all sorts of updates all summer long, and have a lot of great things in store for the months ahead. We hope you like some of these updates and we'll have more announcements soon!

Initial MYC Presenters announced and early-bird tickets now available!

Hey Beautiful Tula Customer, we'd love to see you at our conference!

Following our announcement that we acquired the Minneapolis Yoga Conference, we'e been working hard to put together a fantastic lineup of instructors. Earlier this week we announced on the MYC blog the initial framework, pricing and schedule of events for the 2017 Minneapolis Yoga Conference.

Maile and I will of course be at the conference, along with the rest of the Tula Team. Maile will be leading an intimate, closed group discussion for studio owners all about owning a studio. You'll have an opportunity to talk about the challenges of owning a studio, discuss things that have worked well for you and make connections you'll keep with you long after the conference is over.

We'll also be doing a host of things to make sure we get a lot of quality time with our customers, and we'll be doing a few special events just for our customers so that we can hang out with you throughout the weekend. 

I'm so excited that we now have a meeting place where we can get together with our customers, have a great weekend with you, and introduce you to a whole bunch of our other friends.

Push the big button below to check out the announcement on the MYC blog, check out the presenter lineup, view the weekend pricing, check out the early-bird discounts and learn about the hotel where we'll be having the event. We hope to see you there!

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!