Matthew Sanford at the 2019 Tula Software Minneapolis Yoga Conference

This post is a part of a series introducing the presenters of our 2019 yoga conference, (March 22-24, 2019) sharing more about them, our own perspective and intentions for their involvement, and how their unique offerings contribute to the larger conference experience.

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Professional Bio

Matthew Sanford is an expert in the process transformation through the healing power of yoga. Paralyzed from the chest down at age thirteen and beginning yoga at age twenty-five, Matthew knows firsthand the transformative effect that yoga can have on the mind-body relationship and how it can transform trauma, loss, disability. He is an internationally recognized yoga teacher, a sought-after public speaker. He is the author of the critically acclaimed WAKING: A MEMOIR OF TRAUMA AND TRANSCENDENCE (Rodale: 2006).

Matthew is a leader in the accessible yoga movement and has also emerged as a leading voice in the integrated health movement. He won the 2010 Pioneer of Integrative Medicine Award from the California Pacific Medical Center’s Institute of Health and Healing. Previous recipients include Dr. Deepok Chopra, Dr. Dean Ornish, and Dr. Mehmet Oz.

The most important design element for our yoga conference is that it is open and welcoming for everyone in the yoga community. It must be a conference that embraces everyone, has offerings for everyone, and importantly, helps professional yoga instructors teach in more inclusive ways. In every way Matthew helps make the conference better than it would be without his presence, and I’m deeply humbled to have the opportunity to work with him.

From my personal perspective on what I see, for as much as accessibility seems to be a part of the foundation of Matthew’s offerings, it also seems to only scratch the surface of what he brings in his teachings. Watch any number of the videos of him that you can easily find on google (my favorite is Jessa Walters, one of the original conference co-founders interviewing him) and you start to understand that he’s had very real discoveries and insights most people have not, and he shares these insights in a unique and amazing way. Really, you should take a few minutes to check out some of the linked videos above.

Matthew has previously presented at the Minneapolis Yoga Conference, although this is the first time he’s presented since our acquisition of it in 2016, and I’m simply thrilled that he’s returning this year.

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You can learn more about the workshops Matthew will be teaching at the 2019 Tula Software Minneapolis Yoga Conference, along with dozens of other presenters bringing hundreds of workshop hours, at https://tulasoftware.com/myc2019. Join us at The Most Comprehensive Yoga Conference in the Nation, March 22-24, 2019.

Antiviral: The Tula Software Marketing Strategy of Investing in the Community we Serve and Expanding our Own Platform

A few years ago, as we watched the cost of pay-per-click campaigns begin to soar on sites like Google, Capterra and other “pay for placement” services, and as we read more and more stories about the news industry being wrecked by Facebook’s expansion and control of the Newsfeed, Tula Software began a deliberate marketing strategy to differently allocate our capital. This strategy would, we believed, allow us to allocate capital within the yoga community, while also allowing us to promote our software more effectively.

Our worldview is that doing anything extraordinarily well takes a significant amount of time, attention, effort and care. We began to see clearly the very real costs - in employee time, mental bandwidth, creativity, and financial - of creating a world class social media presence.

To truly be a different sort of software company, we needed to do things differently on the marketing front as well. First, our product needed to be excellent. We’ve always been a product company first, and so investing in our product for the benefit of our customers has always been our top priority. But as we’ve grown and have been able to allocate more money towards marketing and advertising, we’ve made very real and deliberate trade-offs to invest less of our money on advertising platforms, and more money directly into the yoga community.

Instead of buying Google ads, we’d sponsor yoga conferences. Instead of spending time curating the perfect Facebook page, we’d do things like help Living Beyond Breast Cancer and others with fundraisers. Instead of spending our time posting pictures on Instagram, we’d make ourselves available for one on one phone calls with our customers and those thinking of joining the Tula Family. This strategy of investing more in the community we serve and less with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Capterra, culminated in our acquisition of the Minneapolis Yoga Conference in 2016, a conference owned by two local Yoga Instructors and Entrepreneurs.

Over the past three years, this strategy has resulted in us investing well over $150,000, and thousands of hours of labor, directly into the yoga and overall wellness community, along with other countless small businesses. We’re proud of this, even if it has led to a subpar Facebook and Instagram page.

There are people we speak with sometimes who mean well, but misunderstand our deliberate tradeoffs, who think we should allocate more of our company’s resources to platforms controlled by Marc Zuckerberg. The problem is, they misunderstand that this would require us to do this INSTEAD OF platforms controlled by us, which we believe will ultimately be to the greater benefit of us individually, as well as at least some portion of the yoga community.

Certainly an argument can be made that maybe we’ve overcorrected, but I’d offer than any amount of time or money we allocate to our social media presence right now takes away from either our product, or our conference. There are always trade-offs.

We can’t do it all and we can’t do it all well. What we can do well is make the best software in the world for independent yoga studios, and we can produce the most comprehensive yoga conference in the nation.

We hope that’s enough, even in the absence of the perfect social media presence!

And speaking of our conference, have you seen we launched our full presenter lineup and schedule of events for the 2019 Tula Software Minneapolis Yoga Conference? Check it out!

Introducing Virtual Audio Attendances

If you follow our blog regularly, you know we believe most software companies in our industry have started serving themselves more than their customers, leading them to turn their customers into inventory they sell on their marketplace, as they work to drive down the price of your offerings, generating a race to the bottom.

We believe yoga studios are the marketplace, that they need a software company that honors their place in the ecosystem and is constantly creating tools to help them provide more value to their students, while providing them with modern technology tools to help them compete.

If Mindbody is a deals engine, Tula Software is a value engine.

I’m thrilled to announce today what I feel is the perfect expression of the beliefs above, with a new feature we’re calling Virtual Audio Attendances. This feature allows you to attach an audio recording to any event in your studio, allowing any of your students with unlimited credits to listen to the audio. The aim of this feature is to give your students another reason to become, and stay, members at your studio.

The idea of recording a class, in and of itself, of course isn’t all that innovative. Podcasts are everywhere and there’s no shortage of content being delivered over the internet, whether that be youtube videos, or other online video marketplaces.

What makes this feature unique is that it’s tied in directly with our credit system, allowing you to give only your members access to these files. And because the recordings are of you and teachers from your studio, the other thing that’s different is the intimacy it affords your students. This feature isn’t necessarily intended to help make your studio accessible to a global audience (though you could certainly use it for that). Instead, this feature is designed with your members in mind, allowing them to take their home studio with them when they go out of town for Thanksgiving.

A statement on the industry

As much as this feature is a statement on what we think is wrong with some of our competitors, it’s also an expression of our belief of what’s wrong with the industry. We believe filtered images, and moving images often lead to a product focused more around the teacher and how they look than the student and how they feel. An excellent yoga instructor can queue you with words alone. And when it comes to the delivery of yoga instruction, we feel the audio of an instructor from a student’s home studio provides a superior experience than video of someone they’ve never met.

Release phases

We are releasing this feature in two distinct phases:

Beta release: In our alpha release customers can upload audio files to any event, and any logged in student can listen to the recording of that event from the online calendar. Once an event is over, if it has an audio file attached to it, a “listen” link will appear where the registration link normally appears.

Public Release: Once we’ve been in beta for a few weeks we’ll make things public at which point the listen capabilities will be tied to the credits system, allowing only students with unlimited credits to access the voice files.

From there, we’ll observe usage patterns of our customers and enhance the feature like we do with everything else we build. Our intention is to eventually tie the listening of audio files fully into the credits system, allowing you to charge a half credit for example, to listen to the audio and log a virtual attendance. For now however, this feature is intended to be a direct way of providing your members with additional value.

Fast, Powerful and Easy to use

Like everything else we build, this feature is powerful while being super easy to use. Once enabled on your account, you’ll see a new audio icon on each event page. Clicking the audio icon allows you to upload a file to that event.

Click the audio icon

Upload your audio

Done

Once you’ve uploaded your audio file, students who are logged in will be able to listen to the class audio from your calendar. As a reminder, with our initial release any logged in student will be able to listen to the files, but shortly this will be locked down to students with unlimited credits.

Click

Listen

Because everything is browser based, your students don’t need to download an app, create a new account or do anything different. All they need to do is visit your calendar and search through past events for any that have a listen link associated with them. When we come out of beta we’ll also be providing you with a new widget so you can easily pull only your classes with audio attached to them.

Studio empowerment

The Tula system empowers studios in ways that no other company is doing. We’re excited about the release of this new feature and look forward to sharing and hearing tips about how to create quality audio recordings. Speaking of, we want to extend a special thanks to Rhiannon Kirby, Studio Manager and Resident Yoga Instructor at Tula Yoga Studio, who has been working with us to play around with recordings, do different audio tests, etc. We look forward to sharing what we’ve learned about recording audio in the days and weeks ahead, and in the meantime if you’d like an invite to our beta release of this feature please email us at help@tulasoftware.com.

More coming soon!

New and Improved Student On-boarding and Waiver Signing

Over the past couple months, we’ve announced a number of significant improvements to our electronic waivers system. We’re happy to announce yet another update to our waivers system that now eliminates the need for an iPad.

For years students have been able to add themselves and sign waivers while in the studio by way of our native iOS apps. The problem for some of our customers though, was that this required having an iPad.

I’m happy to say that today we now have a browser based version of our student on-boarding page, allowing our customers to onboard new students and gain waiver acceptance quickly and easily using any device, whether it’s an iPad, Android table, laptop or desktop.

Accessing the Onboard Page

You’ll see now when you click the “add” icon that you can either add a new person yourself as always, or “Accept Waiver”. When you choose this option, we’ll pop open a new page with fields for your students to fill out, your waiver, and an acceptance checkbox.

We’re thrilled with this update we’re able to make the waivers functionality to everyone, regardless of what type of hardware you choose to use for your studio.

As always we’re already busy working on even more updates and enhancements and look forward to sharing a number of exciting updates in the weeks and months ahead.

September 2018 Updates

On the heels of our big updates to the electronic waivers functionality, we took some time in September to push out a handful of small updates that make some nice improvements to Tula, as well as fixed a handful of bugs. Check them out below!

Defaulting to a pass when only one pass is available.

One of our most beloved features are the custom payment forms; they allow you to quickly and easily take payments for any kind of service, are fast and easy to use, and help you generate revenue. There was only one problem with them: if you made a payment form for only one pass, students still had to select the pass on the form, which is really an unnecessary step when there’s only one pass to begin with. So now when you make a custom payment form with only one pass, we’ll just default to that pass.

Updating Special Event Registration Logic

We had a bug that was in some cases preventing students with valid uses on special events from being able to register for their desired special event. After we investigated we learned that we were counting the pending registrations incorrectly, falsely inflating the pending registration count, which was preventing people from proceeding. This has been fixed!

Retention Center Email Creation was buggy on mobile, particularly Android

When trying to send an email via the retention center on a mobile browser, the text input was unstable and difficult to use. We updated Trix, the wonderful editor we use open sourced by the fine people at Basecamp, and all is well again.

More coming soon!

We’re always working to improve Tula, and we’ll have a bunch more announcements for you soon!