Yoga

I build systems for yoga studios and wellness centres: batch scheduling, memberships and class packs, attendance, teacher payouts, workshop and retreat management, and gentle follow-up that a considered brand can live with.

Why do good studios run on goodwill and spreadsheets?

Because the people who open them are teachers first, and the operations grow by accretion. Batches overfill or run empty because capacity is a guess. Class packs expire untracked, producing awkward conversations neither side wanted. Teacher payments mix salaried and per-class arrangements into a month-end puzzle. And retreats — reliably the highest-revenue events of the year — get managed like weddings, in a WhatsApp group, with the founder as the database.

Shanti in the shala, chaos in the spreadsheet. And the cost is not only administrative: a studio that cannot see its own retention cannot tell whether a new teacher is working, whether the 6 AM batch deserves to exist, or whether last year’s growth was real.

What does the system cover?

  • Batch and class scheduling. Capacity, waitlists and substitute teachers handled explicitly, so a covered class still records who actually taught it.
  • Memberships and packs. Validity, freezes and balances visible to the member — which removes the expiry awkwardness at its source.
  • Attendance. Tap-in, with absence nudges written with grace rather than urgency.
  • Teacher payouts. Per-class, per-head or salaried, computed from attendance.
  • Workshops and retreats. Registrations, instalments, vendor costs and per-retreat profit — the trip-accounting bones applied to a wellness product.

The tone question, taken seriously

Most retention automation is built for gyms, and gym-tone in a yoga studio reads as pushy — which does real damage to a brand built on calm. So the defaults here are deliberately different: fewer messages, longer gaps, language that informs rather than urges, and no countdown-timer discounting.

That is not a cosmetic choice. A studio’s differentiation is atmosphere, and atmosphere includes what your software says on your behalf at 8 PM. The measurable version of the same idea: absence nudges work better here at a slower cadence, because the audience responds to being noticed rather than being chased.

The retreat side is where the money is least managed and most recoverable — per-retreat profit, computed from real vendor costs, usually reveals which format is worth repeating and which one everybody enjoys at your expense.

/industries/fitness — the higher-intensity sibling · /industries/salon — capacity and rebooking economics · /industries/travel — the retreat-accounting parallel · /products/whatsapp-automation — gentle, consent-first reminders

If pack expiries are awkward conversations

They are an information problem, not a policy one — and information problems have cheap fixes. /contact — om shanti, spreadsheet shant.

Questions I actually get

Online and hybrid classes?

Links, recordings and hybrid attendance are handled — a member attending remotely still marks against the batch, so capacity and retention numbers stay honest. Hybrid became table stakes after 2020 and most studio software still treats it as an afterthought.

We run donation-based classes.

Tracked without being crass: contributions logged, receipts offered, no aggressive prompting. The system records what happened rather than pushing for more, because a studio's culture is part of its product and software should not undermine it.

How are teacher payouts handled?

Per-class, per-head or salaried, computed from attendance rather than reconstructed at month-end. Substitute teachers are recorded against the class they actually taught, which is where most payout confusion originates.

Instagram is our main funnel.

Booking links that land directly in the batch calendar, so a story tap becomes a filled slot without a DM conversation. The upstream social work sits on its own page; this side just makes sure the booking does not leak.

Retreats and workshops?

Registrations, instalments, vendor costs and per-retreat profit — a retreat is a tour with pranayama, and it deserves the same trip-level accounting rather than being run out of a WhatsApp group.

How are class packs handled when they expire?

Balances and validity are visible to the member throughout, so expiry is never a surprise conversation. Most awkwardness around packs comes from asymmetric information, not from the policy itself.