How a former MindBody consultant opened her new hot yoga and Bikram studio on OfferingTree

Highlights

Problem

• Running her previous studio on a three-tool stack: MindBody for bookings, BrandBot for marketing automation, Weebly for the website
• Paying for MindBody features she didn’t need at boutique-studio scale
• Wanting one platform that could handle a Spanish-speaking student base in a tourist-heavy international market
• Looking for a partner small enough to know her name, not a vendor she’d be a number to

Solution

OfferingTree’s Studio Max Plan, chosen before opening day so the studio could launch on it from scratch

Results

• Sold a wave of early memberships before the studio opened, using OfferingTree’s site and email
• Email open rates that outperformed what BrandBot delivered in the States, even with a WhatsApp-first local culture
• 100% class capacity within two years, forcing them to add more classes
• Traveling teachers trained themselves on the platform, no hand-holding required

Overview

Kay Afif co-owns Hot Yoga Playa with her husband in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. It’s a boutique Bikram yoga studio that fits 12 students per class, with 15 weekly classes across three instructors. They’ve been open just over two years, and they recently hit 100% capacity for long enough that Kay added more classes to the schedule.

Before opening in Mexico, Kay and her husband ran a studio in the States for years. She also spent time as a MindBody consultant and later as a business coach helping other studio owners pick and set up software. That background made her the rare new-studio owner who’d seen the industry’s platforms from the inside before choosing one. Today her husband handles the KPIs and deep monthly reports, Kay teaches one or two classes a day, and a small team of traveling teachers and desk volunteers keeps the studio running.

The challenge

Three tools doing one job

Kay’s old studio in the States ran on the standard boutique-fitness stack of the time: MindBody for bookings, BrandBot for marketing automation, and Weebly for the website. Each piece worked, but the costs added up and so did the logins.

She actually liked MindBody. That’s part of what makes the story unusual.

“I really liked MindBody, actually. However, with this new studio, we wanted to try something different. Being smaller, I didn’t feel like we needed all of the things that maybe we had with MindBody before. And the cost difference is huge.”

MindBody had also added their own marketing suite by then, which closed some of the gap that BrandBot used to fill. But for a 12-person boutique studio opening in a new country, the whole enterprise-software apparatus still felt like overkill. The cost-versus-feature math is what trips up most boutique studios on MindBody, and it’s a story we’ve heard from others moving in the same direction.

A new studio in a new country

Opening in Playa del Carmen added a layer her old studio never had. The local culture runs on WhatsApp, not email. Many students speak Spanish, not English. The community is a mix of long-term residents and short-term tourists. Anything Kay chose had to work across all of that, and ideally consolidate the moving parts down to something one person could actually manage between teaching classes.

The solution

The expert picked the boutique option

Kay first came across OfferingTree through her business-coaching work, when Sinead from OfferingTree reached out about a partnership. She filed it away. When the time came to evaluate platforms for the new studio, she did demos with Momence and looked at Walla as well. She’d seen enough of Wellness Living through her coaching clients to rule it out completely.

“At the time, they didn’t seem better than OfferingTree. And they also didn’t seem as cozy. It wasn’t like this small team that I can just talk to. These people know my name and where my studio is. The others seemed like a bigger operation where I’d be a number. And the cost was vastly more.”

OfferingTree was also a single tool instead of three. That mattered.

I just love everything being in one spot. If I need to make a simple change on the website, I’m already in that software every day anyway, so I just click over and I do it. Before, it would be easy for me to put off updating the website because I’d have to go, I forgot my password, and log into this whole other thing.

The results

Memberships before the doors opened

Hot Yoga Playa launched on OfferingTree before its first class. Kay built the site, set up an email list, and ran a pre-opening campaign that turned curious locals into paying members before the studio physically opened.

We just set up the website at the beginning before we were open to collect people’s emails. And we did a whole early membership campaign. So we sold a bunch of memberships before we opened, and that was all using OfferingTree and email.

Two years later, email is still doing surprisingly heavy lifting for a market that doesn’t traditionally favor it.

“It’s a local culture where people don’t really check their email as much as they check WhatsApp messages. It seems that our emails, the open rate is much higher in general than it was in the past with BrandBot in the States, which is weird to me, because in the States people tend to check their email more.”

That deliverability is part of the email and marketing automation built into the platform, the same tools that powered the pre-opening membership push.

A platform her team trains itself on

Hot Yoga Playa runs lean. One instructor besides Kay, plus traveling teachers who rotate through. Most of those traveling teachers are deeply familiar with MindBody and not much else. Onboarding them onto a new platform could have been a recurring headache.

It hasn’t been.

OfferingTree is not exactly like MindBody, but it’s intuitive in the same way. The check-in process, all the badges and stuff in the roster are really helpful for teachers to know the important information about their students. We have a traveling teacher now and I didn’t even train her on how to sell things. She figured it out. 

That ease of training matters more than it might sound. The roster surfaces the things teachers actually need to see at the door: whether a student is in their first class, whether they’re on the intro pass, whether they have an injury the teacher should know about. Kay set up color-coded badges for all of that with help from OfferingTree’s Eszter, then asked the team to make the first-visit badge automatic so she wouldn’t have to set the automation for it. They added it.

A team that actually answers

Kay’s strongest praise is reserved for the human side of the platform. Coming from MindBody, where support means a queue and a script, the contrast was immediate.

What I love is that I can contact support and there’s actually a real person on the end. After I get through the little robot that asks if they did a good job and I always tell them no, it sends me to a real person. The real person actually looks into the problem.

That access reaches all the way up. When Kay has submitted issues that turned out to need a fix in the platform itself, OfferingTree co-founder Arvind has personally responded and resolved them. Esther helped her set up the badge automations. When she asked for waitlist visibility in the roster, so she could see when someone got added to a class just minutes before it started and reach out to confirm, that shipped too.

I think really every month there’s new improvements. I really like that.

Built for the long haul

Kay is thinking about Hot Yoga Playa’s future on two timeframes. Near-term, the studio is outgrowing its 12-person room. Adding more classes only goes so far when every existing class is already full, so a bigger space is probably the next move. Longer-term, she and her husband are open to eventually handing the studio off to someone else.

Both of those plans got easier when she chose OfferingTree.

It’s a really good asset in handing over the reins to the next person. We have all of our KPIs and all the stats about the business ready at hand for a prospective buyer or somebody. And it’s easy to train a new person on how to use it.

Her advice to other studio owners considering a switch comes from someone who’s seen enough of the alternatives to know what she’s comparing against:

Having everything in one place is really helpful. Just do a demo and meet the people. That’s a huge thing. We’re not tech experts. We’re not software programmers. If we need help with something technical, with OfferingTree, I can contact support, get a response in a really timely manner, possibly even get the actual people who are creating the software to help me solve the problem.

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