Yesterday we made our biggest announcement to date, that your yoga studio can now have an app in the app store!
There's so much more thought that went into the decisions about the functionality behind this announcement, other than just the fact that we wanted our customers to be able to have their own presence in the app store, and one item that's worth exploring in particular is payments.
Our decision to release this new set of features is probably related more to payments than anything else.
Sometimes people think I'm exaggerating when I tell them we are different in our DNA than other companies that do what we do, but I don't think I'm exaggerating. Unlike every one of our competitors, we made a conscious decision to avoid making payments a part of our revenue model. The reason we made this decision is because as a company we asked a fundamentally different question than everyone else.
Whereas they ask, "how can we provide credit card transactions at a reasonable rate while generating some revenue for our business?", we asked the question, "how can we set things up so that eventually our customers pay no credit card transaction fees."
That future isn't here yet, but it's coming like a freight train and I for one and extremely happy that when Apple comes out with whatever payment thing it is that they're going to announce, we'll be embracing this technology and helping to bring our customers into the world of this amazing new technology instead of wishing it didn't exist.
We've had an app for studio owners for a while now, and without the context above it might not make sense as to why we did such massive enhancements on the student side of things first. The reason is because the most important innovations on the horizon are going to be worn on your student's bodies or living in their pockets, and so it made sense to start the foundation there.
Between our integration with Stripe that allows you to store student credit cards, our student iPhone app options that allow your students to make purchases with the touch of a button, and the fact that we have no financial incentive whatsoever to keep the newest and best payment innovation away from you, we've never been better positioned to take our customers into the future.
We can't wait to see what comes next.