🥂 Ready 2021: Three live events to help you prepare for the new year

At the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent shut-downs, we held a few online events for our customers to help them use our broadcast links feature to quickly bring their businesses online. It was a lot of fun to get together with our customers and we received a lot of feedback that it was helpful for a lot of people.

As we head into the new year, I thought it might be useful to again make ourselves available to share more about the product decisions we’ve made, talk in more detail about some of new feature’s we’ve built, how they align with what’s happening in the industry at large, and generally help our customers get the most out of everything we have to offer for the year ahead.

Each event will take place at 10am ET, on each day of Monday the 28th, Tuesday the 28th, and Wednesday the 30th. I’ve broken the events down into three high level categories, but the format will be casual with plenty of time for open discussion and Q&A.

The event topics will give us a high-level framework to guide discussion more than anything. The schedule will be:

• Monday 12/28: Hybrid - The Holy Grail

• Tuesday 12/29: Memberships, Recurring Revenue and On-Demand Offerings

• Wednesday 12/30: Your website, custom domains, student apps and more

One of my favorite weeks of the year is the week between Christmas and New Years Day - a time to hang on to the things that are working, let go of the things that aren’t, and the hope for a better year ahead.

As we say goodbye to a difficult year, join me to prepare for what we believe will be the brightest days ahead for independent studio owners.

To register for an individual event, please visit our calendar. Alternatively, you can also register for all three events using this link.

We hope to see you there!

Apple and Google's App Store Policies are Outdated in a Covid + Post-Covid World

The policies of both the Apple App store and the Google Play store are outdated in today’s economy because both fail to recognize that we no longer live in a “digital” world or a “physical” world; we now live in a hybrid world.

As I mentioned in my post about Apple’s tax on events, the app store commands a 30% commission on all in app purchases that give users access to “premium content”. (Apple has temporarily delayed this, and Google seems to be waiving this fee for now).

But for physical goods, things like food delivery, in-person yoga classes, appointment scheduling, etc. they are not entitled to this 30% commission.

So traditionally, if you had an app in the app store that allowed people to book a spot for a yoga class, you didn’t need to use Apple’s in-app payments system, even if your app allowed payments. But now, to access a livestream or on demand class, Apple (according to them) is entitled to their commission per their policies as mentioned above, which requires using their payment system.

But now that we live in a Hybrid world where these physical and virtual designations are meaningless for your typical consumer, what happens when a ten-pack or a membership can be used BOTH for in-person studio classes?

Well if you use Tula Software you’re all set - your students get the best of everything you have to offer right in the browser via our widgets hosted on your domain AND the student url (essentially a broswer based app) hosted on your domain.

But if studio owners using our competitors aren’t careful they’re going to find themselves paying 15% of ALL their revenue to Apple and Google, or they’re going to be forced to break out their offerings completely, to their own detriment, to fit into Apple’s and Google’s outdated economic model.

The hybrid model that we’re suddenly moving to, which I wrote about extensively in The Path Forward post, is providing independent studio owners with a massive opportunity to offer their customers the holy grail of in person, live stream and on demand classes, all with a single pass.

It’s interesting to think that our economy is evolving so quickly, that the economic model of the software stores of two of America’s largest corporations are both now outdated in some very important ways.

Avoid the Apple Tax with Tula Software

Apple recently announced that they were reducing their commission for app developers from 30% to 15% for businesses with less than $1M in annual revenue. What has been less discussed is that this change seems far more likely to be about online events, and taking a cut from struggling brick and mortar businesses adapting during a pandemic, than it is about app developers.

Apple has made it clear that they intend to subject traditional brick and mortar companies to their 15-30% tax on revenue when an event sale happens through an app, because an online event is considered “premium content”.

No matter the platform, whether it’s Facebook, one of our competitors, your own custom branded app powered by a platform, or anything else, Apple’s position is if a sale can happen in an app, then it MUST happen through their payment system, and they MUST get a 15% to 30% cut.

Fortunately for customers of Tula Software, we stopped trusting Apple years ago back when they stopped accepting branded applications under the same developer account. Since then we’ve invested heavily in ensuring that our customers, and their students, would always have an excellent experience in the browser, free from Apple’s grasp.

Most recently this philosophy was demonstrated with our update that allows our customers to host our website integration widgets on their own domain, along with the student url on their own domain.

Ultimately, our implementation will save our customers well over $1,000 per month when compared to the implementation of our competitors, who are seemingly going along with Apple’s program.

The beauty of our Livestream and on-demand options for our customers is that it’s all powered by the browser and we aren’t beholden to any particular platform. If zoom starts any shenanigans, our customers can seamlessly move to Google Meet. If they start doing anything fishy, they can move to Vimeo.

The reason our implementation is so different than all of our competitors is for the same reason we’ve always been different then our competitors: We always start with the question “what is best for Tula Yoga Studio?” and we go from there.

For almost a decade we have been writing about the importance of operating your business on your own domain and the dangers that marketplaces pose to your independent business.

Now, in the middle of a global pandemic with a quarter million Americans dead, as the worlds wealthiest company is coming to take a revenue cut from small business owners closed by their local governments, we see this reality more than ever.

Fortunately, you are not beholden to Apple thanks to the free and open internet, your domain name, the web browser, and Tula Software.

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Do you own or run a class based business? Get in touch with our sales team to learn how you can avoid thousands of dollars a month in fees by switching to Tula Software!