New Feature: Attendance Types for Hybrid classes

We’re excited to announce a major update to the Tula Software registration system, which allows our customers to effortlessly track both in-person and virtual registrations and attendances for their hybrid events. As well, our new feature allows you to host both in person only or virtual only events.

As we wrote about towards the end of last year, we believe that the path forward for studios involves providing in person, livestream and on-demand classes going forward, as we anticipate consumers will have an ongoing expectation that they’ll be able to access yoga classes however it’s best for them. (Added bonus: our solution doesn’t require you to hand over 15% of your revenue to Apple)

To help our customers more easily facilitate these events, now when you create an event, right alongside the other registration settings you’ll see a “virtual” switch.

Turning this switch on will give students the choice of registering for either an in-person or a virtual attendance. (Note: If you don’t turn on the virtual switch, we’ll simply display ‘Confirm Registration’ as we do now.)

When a student registers, they’ll be added to your registration list as always. In person registrations will appear as usual with a green check-in button, and when they’ve registered for a virtual attendance the check-in button will appear in orange. You’ll also see an orange laptop icon next to their name, indicating that it’s a virtual attendance.

Once an event has reached it’s in person limit, students will see in person registrations has closed, and they’ll be able to register for a virtual attendance.

It’s worth mentioning as well, that any student who has registered for an event, whether for in person or virtual, will have access to the broadcast link. So if someone registers for an in-person attendance but ends up showing up online, you can simply update their registration type by clicking the menu icon next to the check-in button.

You’ll also notice on the event series page, you’ll see a count of both your in person registrations as well as your virtual registrations, so you can quickly and easily see which events people have registered for and which attendance types have been chosen.

Works for everyone

It’s worth mentioning as well that this new feature will work for all users, both logged in as well as those logged out (when you have guest access enabeld). Keep in mind if a logged out student registers for a virtual attendance, they’ll still need to log in to access the broadcast link.

In person / Livestream / On-demand

This update, along with our already existing event recording feature, now allows you to create a single event that students can attend in person or virtually, and to which you can upload a recording for members who wish to watch on-demand.

We spent a lot of time working on a slew of tiny details to make sure this feature fit seamlessly into the system you’ve been using for so long. But don’t mistake the simplicity and ease of use of this update for it being “something small”. This is a massive update that sets our customers up for success in a way that none of our competitors are doing, and studios using Tula

As we’ve written about a couple times now, we believe studios using Tula have opportunities that large tech companies tried and failed to secure for themselves pre-covid, and that together we’ll impact the industry for years to come.

We hope you’re as thrilled with this latest feature as we are, and can’t wait to share what’s coming next!

🥂 Ready 2021: Three live events to help you prepare for the new year

At the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shut-downs, we held a few online events for our customers to help them use our broadcast links feature to quickly bring their businesses online. It was a lot of fun to get together with our customers and we received a lot of feedback that it was helpful for a lot of people.

As we head into the new year, I thought it might be useful to again make ourselves available to share more about the product decisions we’ve made, talk in more detail about some of new feature’s we’ve built, how they align with what’s happening in the industry at large, and generally help our customers get the most out of everything we have to offer for the year ahead.

Each event will take place at 10am ET, on each day of Monday the 28th, Tuesday the 28th, and Wednesday the 30th. I’ve broken the events down into three high level categories, but the format will be casual with plenty of time for open discussion and Q&A.

The event topics will give us a high-level framework to guide discussion more than anything. The schedule will be:

• Monday 12/28: Hybrid - The Holy Grail

• Tuesday 12/29: Memberships, Recurring Revenue and On-Demand Offerings

• Wednesday 12/30: Your website, custom domains, student apps and more

One of my favorite weeks of the year is the week between Christmas and New Years Day - a time to hang on to the things that are working, let go of the things that aren’t, and the hope for a better year ahead.

As we say goodbye to a difficult year, join me to prepare for what we believe will be the brightest days ahead for independent studio owners.

To register for an individual event, please visit our calendar. Alternatively, you can also register for all three events using this link.

We hope to see you there!

Apple and Google's App Store Policies are Outdated in a Covid + Post-Covid World

The policies of both the Apple App store and the Google Play store are outdated in today’s economy because both fail to recognize that we no longer live in a “digital” world or a “physical” world; we now live in a hybrid world.

As I mentioned in my post about Apple’s tax on events, the app store commands a 30% commission on all in app purchases that give users access to “premium content”. (Apple has temporarily delayed this, and Google seems to be waiving this fee for now).

But for physical goods, things like food delivery, in-person yoga classes, appointment scheduling, etc. they are not entitled to this 30% commission.

So traditionally, if you had an app in the app store that allowed people to book a spot for a yoga class, you didn’t need to use Apple’s in-app payments system, even if your app allowed payments. But now, to access a livestream or on demand class, Apple (according to them) is entitled to their commission per their policies as mentioned above, which requires using their payment system.

But now that we live in a Hybrid world where these physical and virtual designations are meaningless for your typical consumer, what happens when a ten-pack or a membership can be used BOTH for in-person studio classes?

Well if you use Tula Software you’re all set - your students get the best of everything you have to offer right in the browser via our widgets hosted on your domain AND the student url (essentially a broswer based app) hosted on your domain.

But if studio owners using our competitors aren’t careful they’re going to find themselves paying 15% of ALL their revenue to Apple and Google, or they’re going to be forced to break out their offerings completely, to their own detriment, to fit into Apple’s and Google’s outdated economic model.

The hybrid model that we’re suddenly moving to, which I wrote about extensively in The Path Forward post, is providing independent studio owners with a massive opportunity to offer their customers the holy grail of in person, live stream and on demand classes, all with a single pass.

It’s interesting to think that our economy is evolving so quickly, that the economic model of the software stores of two of America’s largest corporations are both now outdated in some very important ways.

Avoid the Apple Tax with Tula Software

Apple recently announced that they were reducing their commission for app developers from 30% to 15% for businesses with less than $1M in annual revenue. What has been less discussed is that this change seems far more likely to be about online events, and taking a cut from struggling brick and mortar businesses adapting during a pandemic, than it is about app developers.

Apple has made it clear that they intend to subject traditional brick and mortar companies to their 15-30% tax on revenue when an event sale happens through an app, because an online event is considered “premium content”.

No matter the platform, whether it’s Facebook, one of our competitors, your own custom branded app powered by a platform, or anything else, Apple’s position is if a sale can happen in an app, then it MUST happen through their payment system, and they MUST get a 15% to 30% cut.

Fortunately for customers of Tula Software, we stopped trusting Apple years ago back when they stopped accepting branded applications under the same developer account. Since then we’ve invested heavily in ensuring that our customers, and their students, would always have an excellent experience in the browser, free from Apple’s grasp.

Most recently this philosophy was demonstrated with our update that allows our customers to host our website integration widgets on their own domain, along with the student url on their own domain.

Ultimately, our implementation will save our customers well over $1,000 per month when compared to the implementation of our competitors, who are seemingly going along with Apple’s program.

The beauty of our Livestream and on-demand options for our customers is that it’s all powered by the browser and we aren’t beholden to any particular platform. If zoom starts any shenanigans, our customers can seamlessly move to Google Meet. If they start doing anything fishy, they can move to Vimeo.

The reason our implementation is so different than all of our competitors is for the same reason we’ve always been different then our competitors: We always start with the question “what is best for Tula Yoga Studio?” and we go from there.

For almost a decade we have been writing about the importance of operating your business on your own domain and the dangers that marketplaces pose to your independent business.

Now, in the middle of a global pandemic with a quarter million Americans dead, as the worlds wealthiest company is coming to take a revenue cut from small business owners closed by their local governments, we see this reality more than ever.

Fortunately, you are not beholden to Apple thanks to the free and open internet, your domain name, the web browser, and Tula Software.

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Do you own or run a class based business? Get in touch with our sales team to learn how you can avoid thousands of dollars a month in fees by switching to Tula Software!

The Path Forward

When we first started releasing a number of features designed to help studios continue operating during the Coronavirus pandemic, we did so with the belief that the disruption would last anywhere from 6 to 18 months, and further, with a belief that when it was all “over”, some things would be changed forever.

As we enter what seem to be darkest days of the pandemic, we are planning not only for the immediate future, but also for the dawn that will follow this winter, when studios hopefully re-open fully, and once again welcome their communities into their spaces.

And while we cannot predict the future, what we can do is share how we’re viewing things, what we’re doing with our product (and what we’ve already done), and what we’re planning for at our own studio in Chicago. Our hope is that by sharing more about how we’re looking at things and what we’re doing, our customers can position themselves as well as possible to continue to survive during the pandemic, as well as thrive once we come out of it.

With the already existing seasonality of the yoga business - with fall and winter marking the busiest times, and spring and summer the slower times - our expectation is that most studios will be looking at another 10-12 months before beginning to see a full recovery at which point we think studios might see their best seasons ever at the end of 2021 and early 2022.

The next four seasons

When I’m trying to think about what lies ahead and peer around the corner, I find it helpful to think in terms of the natural seasons, and then view those alongside a business quarter. Underscoring we know we can’t predict the future, we are currently operating our company with the belief that the industry as a whole, will follow a timeline something like the below:

Nov 2020 - March 2021: Slower than usual Winter Season, with continued and sustained consumer appetite for virtual classes.
April 2021 - June 2021: Slower than usual Spring, and likely slower than the covid spring. Continued interest in virtual classes, but with less demand than the winter season. We suspect this time period will be particularly challenging for a lot of studios.
July 2021 - September 2021: Normal Summer Volume. Still the slow season, but perhaps a normal slow season.
October 2021 - March 2022: Best Seasons Ever! Should vaccines be distributed effectively and trusted by the population at large, it seems that we might be back to normal economic activity levels next fall.

Of course, we assume different parts of the country will follow different schedules. Here in Chicago we’re on “Stay at Home Advisory” again, Philadelphia has suspended indoor dining, while some other cities remain largely “open”.

Long Term Opportunity

Ultimately, after an undeniably challenging time, the Coronavirus pandemic will have helped studios, in the long term, survive and thrive. It might be hard to believe, but looking back to today, ten to fifteen years from now, that may well be the case. The forced learning and rapid adoption of video streaming tools, among both business owners and consumers, will yield long term positive results for studio owners.

When you take a step back and think about what was happening pre-pandemic, there were a host of internet businesses coming to the realization that they wanted and needed access to physical locations.

Groupon, Living Social and Mindbody all came out with discounts and deals in their marketplaces, trying to sell you on the idea that your studio had “unused inventory”. ClassPass operated at gross negative margins for years, trying to gain a foothold with your customers through discounted pricing, while having access to your location for free. Google came out with their booking capabilities, in their efforts to allow people to interact with your business through their website instead of yours.

In each case, the high-level pattern was an internet business, usually a marketplace, trying to position themselves so they had access to your physical location for their benefit, while simultaneously working to wedge themselves between you and your customers.

Today, it seems every internet company on earth is trying to take advantage of the home fitness trend. Lululemon acquired Mirror. Facebook launched virtual events. Apple launched Apple Fitness +. And of course Peloton has shown everyone how big this market can be.

And along side all of this, as a response to the pandemic, the yoga studio industry at large has flipped the internet trend that was happening on it’s head.

Instead of a handful of internet businesses slowly working their way into and eroding studio businesses eventually succumbing to the gravitational force of the marketplace trend, tens of thousands of individual business locations, across the country and in unison, moved their brick and mortar businesses online.

Collectively, they have proven we don’t live in the winner take all world some try to trick us into believing in.

The Holy Grail: Hybrid

We have written in the past about how the tech industry has spent literal hundreds of billions of dollars trying to gain a foothold into the brick and mortar world, and that it was they who needed you, not the other way around. Now, we are seeing this proven reality.

The greatest power of the internet, still today, is the way in which it enables individuals and small businesses the opportunity to succeed and thrive by connecting directly with their customers.

Independent studio businesses when this is all over (/the metamorphosis is complete) will be operating in-person classes, live-stream classes, on demand audio classes, and on demand video classes.

And all of it available to your customers, via the community you’ve built, in a space you manage, on a domain you own, powered by a software company that promised to walk with you every step of the way, no matter where the road took us.

The path forward will not be easy, but it will be worthwhile.