On October 1, 2011 at 8:30am, Maile checked the first person into the first class at Tula Yoga Studio using Tula Software, which was also the first attendance recorded in our system.
Today, a little more than three and a half years later, we have officially logged our one millionth attendance. Yep that's right, 1 million individual instances of a human walking into a yoga class, and having their attendance recorded with Tula.
In the months leading up to her opening, we were rushing to get something functional up and working that Maile could use from the start. It was a super minimum product, but it worked, and we had Tula up for her first class.
We thought our idea would work. Our intuition was that the poor software options available, and the pain they caused studio owners, would be felt by others. But we couldn't know for certain whether or not the market would actually respond. The only way to know was to make it, keep building upon it, market it and sell it.
Today we know it's working. Every day there are people deciding between our homegrown software and larger companies that have millions of dollars in funding, and every day people decide to use us instead of them because of the quality of our product and the superior service we're able to provide.
As a private company we don't often celebrate milestones publicly, but we thought 1,000,000 attendances was worth a big hearty thank you to all of our customers - and especially our very earliest adopters - for giving something new a try in an industry that dearly deserved something better.
To everyone that's helped make Tula possible - but especially to our customers - thank you!