We've been pretty vocal that we're very lukewarm on daily deal sites and discounts in general. We tend to think that things such as Groupon, LivingSocial, Amazon local and the mindbody connect app work to turn yoga studios into a commodity.
As such, we haven't spent much time doing development to integrate with these sites.
We've started hearing more and more about a company called ClassPass though, and they sounded intriguing to us. I was even speaking with a reporter about them the other day. I mentioned that while I haven't made up my mind about ClassPass yet, I looked at them differently than a daily deals site.
Why does ClassPass seem different to us?
For starters their members are limited to the number of times they can visit your studio each month, so they seem to have solved the firehose problem that the daily deal sites have. And while ClassPass does attract people that are willing to pay a monthly fee for their fitness routine, which are the best customers to have, they can't replace a membership at your studio.
I'm also particularly fond of the idea of how ClassPass can help introduce people with a fitness routine to the practice of yoga. I think getting more runners to learn about the benefits of yoga for example would be great.
Very most importantly though, we have customers that use ClassPass, who have decided it's good for their business, and their day to day routine of dealing with ClassPass registrations was more difficult than it needed to be.
So today we're happy to announce that if you use ClassPass, you can simply forward your registration emails into a custom studios address, we'll parse those emails, and we'll add the student to your registration list. It doesn't matter whether that person has a Tula account already or not, or whether they've been to your studio before.
We've leveraged the same powerful functionality that our payment matching and registration matching features use, and extended it so you can simply send your ClassPass emails to us.
Once your comfortable with the process, you might even want to consider auto-forwarding all the emails.
Your custom studio address is available use immediately, and you can determine it by taking your studio subdomain and creating the following type of address: yourstudioname@inbound.tulasoftware.com.
If you've decided ClassPass is good for your business, we're thrilled that we can now make your lives a little bit easier as you handle your incoming registrations. And as always, if you need a hand just shoot us an email at help@tulasoftware.com.