Why We Built Studio Run Book
After 20 years on the studio floor, our co-founder Courtney knew exactly what was broken about studio software. So we built the replacement.
By Courtney & Tom
The software was never built for us
Walk into any independent Pilates studio and ask the owner what they think of their management software. You'll hear the same answer everywhere: it works, but it wasn't built for us.
Mindbody was built for gyms. Pike13 was built for fitness chains. The independent studio operator — running one or two locations, teaching classes herself, managing four to eight instructors — was an afterthought. A market segment to be served by a stripped-down tier of enterprise software, not a customer worth designing for.
That's the gap Studio Run Book was built to fill.
What 20 years on the floor taught us
Our co-founder Courtney is a master Pilates trainer with two decades of studio experience. She has taught the classes, managed the instructors, handled the billing disputes, and watched clients drift away before anyone noticed they were gone.
That last part is the one that stays with you.
Clients don't cancel dramatically. They drift. They book less frequently. They stop rebooking at the end of sessions. Around weeks six to eight of a new client relationship, something shifts — and by the time it shows up in your revenue, it's already too late.
Every studio operator knows this pattern. No software was built to catch it early.
The 80/20 principle applied to studio operations
The other thing Courtney knew from the floor: operators use about 20% of their software's features to do 80% of their actual work. Scheduling. Booking. Memberships. Instructor management. Reminders. Client history.
Everything else is noise. Noise you're paying $200 a month for.
Studio Run Book is built on a simple discipline: do fewer things, and do them exceptionally. Strip the bloat. Keep what matters. Build the intelligence layer that no outside developer would have known to build — because they were never in the room.
What we're building
Six core features that replace everything you actually use in Mindbody. Six intelligence features that no competitor offers — because they require insider knowledge to know they're needed.
The Weekly Runbook. The Health Score. Retention Signals. Runbook Flags. Instructor Pages.
These aren't feature names. They're the things Courtney wished she had for twenty years.
We're in early access now. If you run an independent Pilates or boutique fitness studio and you're ready to cancel Mindbody, we'd like to talk.
Ready to cancel Mindbody?
Join the waitlist and be first in line when we open the doors.
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