Work, Life, Yoga

OK, It took us a while, but we added a weekly tracker. After long debating an integration into other trackers, we decided to take the first cut in a native format. One of the main reasons for doing it on our own is the kind of information that our users are interested is not avaialable on high level trackers like dailymile, dailyburn, google health etc. We will still integrate with them at a future date to add high level info and then drill downs will direct them back to yogatailor.

Some cool stuff about the tracker

• Integrated facebook comments – users can discuss their progress on the website and discussions will be automatically reflected on their facebook walls (if they so please)
• Info about workouts – Duration, Date, Video link, Sequence done, Benefits
• If the user likes a particular workout, they can go back to it and repeat it from here

Yoga Journal reports

“While people everywhere are struggling to make ends meet yoga businesses continue to thrive, according to a recent report by CNNMoney.

Low operating costs and growing demand are fueling the success of yoga studios, many of which are mom-and-pop operations that simply want to share yoga with their communities. Of course, the still-struggling economy and high unemployment rate are also good reasons for people to look for ways to manage stress and do some soul searching.

The yoga and Pilates studio industry is expected to hit $6.5 billion by the end of this year, which is an expected annual sales growth of 9.5% between 2006 and 2011 according to reports by market research firm IBISWorld.”

http://blogs.yogajournal.com/blognew/mt-tb.cgi/2366

CNN reports

http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/18/smallbusiness/yoga_pilates/

“A big world of small businesses: The yoga and Pilates studio industry is expected to hit $6.5 billion in 2011, according to IBISWorld. Between 2006 and 2011, the expected average annual sales growth is 9.5%, the report said. And the number of yoga and Pilates studios will reach 25,558 in 2011, representing a 7.5% estimated annual growth rate.

“The large majority of yoga and Pilates studios are just one location,” said Caitlin Moldvay, an analyst at IBISWorld. One of the biggest players in the market is CorePower, which has 50 locations across five states. But even CorePower only accounts for 0.5% of the market overall. Other larger players include Dahn Yoga and YogaWorks.

Otherwise, “you have entrepreneurs, mom and pops, who are very much wanting to share” their love of yoga, said David Surrenda, CEO of Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Stockbridge, Mass. And “it tends to be small groups that they share it with. It is not like going to Yankee stadium where you have 50,000 people.”

A gigantic Wal-Mart-size yoga studio undercuts the intimacy that makes a studio attractive. “One of the things that really drives a studio is that sense of community,” said Micah. “You can’t cookie-cutter it.”

Also, because yoga is such a personal practice, the quality and commitment of the teachers are very important. “You realize the teacher is actually someone who cares about your inquiry, your personal journey, and is really there to assist you and facilitate you in that journey — that is what really touches you” said Surrenda.

With the right culture, yoga can both inspire its students and make money: Kripalu expects to see about $32 million in revenue in 2012. As one of the larger yoga centers, it offers 850 workshops yearly and has about 400 people on its payroll.”

 

Today(Aug 26 2011), facebook announced that they are shutting down their daily deals. Now, I am sort of involved in this in three ways. I was a buyer of a sweet facebook deal for flying in Palo Alto. I had a bad experience with that, with facebook charging me in British Pounds, but that’s another story. I was a seller on facebook. We did a yogatailor deal on facebook recently. And, I have delved in the daily deal space trying to get a fledgling startup mobchase.com up and running.

So, here’s why I think it failed

The Numbers just don’t work in facebook’s favor

Let’s quickly review the revenue model of the daily deal business. For example, let’s take JaneTheYogini, owner of a yoga studio in San Francisco. A month’s membership is say $100. If she approaches Groupon or any of the deal sites, the typical discount is 50% and then the revenue is split 50-50. So, if she sells 100 vouchers, total revenue will be $50*100 = $5000. She keeps $2500 and the Daily Deal Site keeps $2500. This is all well and good. Seems like a good amount of money to be made.

Now, let’s consider facebook. facebook has another BIG channel of making money and that is display ads. If Jane was to run display ads on facebook to sell 100 vouchers, how much would she spend? Let’s assume a very healthy conversion of 5% of clickthrus- meaning 5% of people who come to the website purchase the deal. Now, with specific area and demographic targeting, ClickThru pricing is pretty high on facebook. I would say it will be around $3 per click in the SF area. So, Jane would be paying facebook $3 * 100 /0.05 = $6000 !

And therein lies the dilemma for facebook! The daily deals would have cannibalized their cash-cow, display ads. And the way the numbers work right now, it just doesn’t make any sense.

Now, it would make sense to do daily deals on higher priced items. But, the average daily deal is about $40. And at this level, the numbers don’t work out. They would much rather you spend your money on display ads.

Also, the margins are going lower on daily deals. its 50-50 now. I know many vendors who are squeezing out 70-30 deals with the daily deal sites.. It will probably settle somewhere at 10-20%.

So, in short, I think this was doomed to begin with. Didn’t facebook do the numbers beforehand? I wonder

“How many yoga videos do you have on yogatailor?” – we get this question a lot. My short answer – thousands. My long answer – it depends. let me explain. As you probably already know, yogatailor.com creates custom yoga sequences based on the user’s settings. For example, a user might select 45 minutes of view time, beginner ability. Another user might be an expert with only 20 minutes of time. We customize the sequences based on individual settings. Now, each sequence is designed to fit yogic guidelines and also tries to maximize the benefit within the constraints specified.
Now lets do some number crunching. Say a sequence has only one asana(yoga pose). And say we have 3 variations of this asana. Then we get 3 possible videos. Now say we have 2 asanas and 2 variations each. How many sequences are possible? 2×2= 4.
This keeps getting more interesting as the number of asanas in a sequence increases and the number of variations increases. Say we have 5 asanas, with 3 variations each. so thats 3x3x3x3x3 = 243 different sequences possible.

A typical half hour session will have about 10 asanas with 3-5 different variations for each asana. So the number of sequences becomes mind-boggling. Hence the more complicated answer – “it depends”

According to a new comScore adMetrix report advertising-market-delivers-11-trillion-impressions , facebook now serves more than the 3rd of the display ads. Here is the report

This leaves companies like mine, yogatailor.com, seriously rethink our ad strategy. Should we bet more on facebook? From what I can tell, these numbers are a bit mis-leading. Apparently they do not include the ads being displayed on google.com itself! Also, google still has the largest revenue based on ads.
Based on experience on yogatailor’s add campaigns and anecdotal evidence based on talking to other small internet startups, facebook ads do seem to have better ROI in terms of “real” people who sign up. Google ads have a tendency of being spammed by ghost clickers.

Let me know what your experience has been

Got this from Google today:

Google rarely contacts Gmail users via email, but we are making an exception to let you know that we’ve reached a settlement in a lawsuit regarding Google Buzz (http://buzz.google.com), a service we launched within Gmail in February of this year.

Shortly after its launch, we heard from a number of people who were concerned about privacy. In addition, we were sued by a group of Buzz users and recently reached a settlement in this case.

The settlement acknowledges that we quickly changed the service to address users’ concerns. In addition, Google has committed $8.5 million to an independent fund, most of which will support organizations promoting privacy education and policy on the web. We will also do more to educate people about privacy controls specific to Buzz. The more people know about privacy online, the better their online experience will be.

Just to be clear, this is not a settlement in which people who use Gmail can file to receive compensation. Everyone in the U.S. who uses Gmail is included in the settlement, unless you personally decide to opt out before December 6, 2010. The Court will consider final approval of the agreement on January 31, 2011. This email is a summary of the settlement, and more detailed information and instructions approved by the court, including instructions about how to opt out, object, or comment, are available at http://www.BuzzClassAction.com.

David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut — and it may just change the way we see the world.

I went to listen to Guy Kawasaki at the UCSC talk on Entrepreneurship. In this exclusive event brought to you by our Green Entrepreneurship program, Guy sat down for a “fireside chat” with renowned tech interviewer Alison van Diggelen.

For those of you who dont know Guy-

Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of nine books including Reality Check, The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

Guy was his usual flamboyant self at times, but he was very good at pointing out some things. Some things I took away from the talk

1. Nowadays, building a working verion 0.1 of a web app is cheap. Approaching an investor without a working version nowadays is futile unless you have some feathers (like google, youtube, twitter) in your hat already
2. Be lucky – not much you can do here
3. Be persistent

Watch the complete video here , courtesy of UCSC Guy Kawasaki talks about starting up

Randy Komisar says boot-strapping is doable

From one of my favorite websites, Venture beat’s Entrepreneur corner

Venture capitalist  Randy Komisar suggested today that Web startups may not actually need his money — at least, not right away.

Komisar, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, reached that conclusion in a roundabout way during a question-and-answer session at the Startup Lessons Learned conference in San Francisco. His main point was a piece of common entrepreneurial advice: To paraphrase Komisar’s new book on the topic, startups need to “get to plan B.” They need to cycle through different ideas with as little time and money as possible to discover which of their assumptions are wrong. For startups in fields like biotech or cleantech or enterprise technology, that process may take months or years of work, and it probably requires sizable funding. But at a consumer Internet company, things should be much faster and cheaper.

“So why do we need venture capitalists?” Komisar asked. “They may not be as important.” That means he might tell an early-stage Web startup looking for funding, “You get my money later, at a higher valuation, when you need to accelerate a good idea to a great one.”

Another interesting — and quotable — part of the discussion covered Komisar’s idea of a startup’s “analog” and “antilog.” Every startup idea involves a few “leap of faith” assumptions. As entrepreneurs explore those assumptions, he said, they should look for companies that successfully built on those ideas (analogs), as well as companies that used those ideas and failed (antilogs).

But what if your idea is a completely revolutionary breakthrough?

“Every idea is ‘revolutionary,’” Komisar said, laughing. “If I see that word in another pitch. … Everything is derivative, and if you don’t think so, examine your idea very, very carefully. Everything is derivative, and that’s not a bad thing.”

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs is the king of the big, disruptive idea, Komisar said, yet Jobs has also said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas.” So you can look at a disruptive technology like the iPod and see that it had an analog in Sony’s Walkman, which established that people are willing to listen to music on headphones in a social setting.

Towards the end of the conversation, Komisar also turned philosophical. For most entrepreneurs, creating a startup is not a good way to make money, he said. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.

“It’s a great way to live your life,” he said. “Entrepreneurship is a manifestation of the best things in the human condition: Creativity, creating value, sharing that value. To me, it’s a noble profession.”

wordpress firefox redirect loop

As I mentioned in my previous post about installing wordpress, the installation itself was effortless. But, when I pointed my browser to http://www.yogatailor.com/WorkLifeYogaBlog and expected to see the all too familiar WordPress’s “hello world” screen, I was shocked. Firefox came back with a rather ominous error – “Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete”

As any geek worth his NaCl would do, I googled the sucker. I got a some great pointers. One of them is wp-member’s blog about the same error. This was a good pointer but did not solve the problem for me. This blog mentioned that some times, plugins mess up redirects and that could cause this problem. But, this is obviously not the problem on my blog. Number of plugins that I have = zero

Mind you, I have other blogs here. For example, the yogatailor blog is hosted at the same place. After a little bit of digging around and doing my morning yoga session, the answer dawned on to me. I tell you, yoga rocks, man..

What Was Happening

Here’s what had happened. A few weeks ago, we had started doing SEO/SEM on our website. I will blog about this on separate posts but, lets not get ADDed. One of the most common advices that seems to be floating around the reliable internet is that google is stupid and actually thinks yogatailor.com and www.yogatailor.com are two different entities. Now, the guys at google make much more money than most of us, but, once an SEM expert tells you something, it gets you thinking. So, our over-zealous web-master put in a “302 redirect” from yogatailor.com to www.yogatailor.com . The concept is self-explanatory , enough said.

So, when wordpress got installed, it was installed as yogatailor.com/WorkLifeYogaBlog … But, the re-direct would move this to www.yogatailor.com/WorkLifeYogaBlog. The WordPress software itself thinks its installed at yogatailor.com. So it starts reading stuff at yogatailor.com/WorkLifeYogaBlog. This causes an .. ahem.. infinite loop

The Solution

The easiest solution is to log in as admin on wordpress and change the URLs to the Blog in the Settings to the correct ones. But, since you cannot even log in, this will not work.

Before you go any further, see if you have any re-directs on your website. On GoDaddy.com, you can check this on the Hosting Control Panel (or just call them, who knows, Danica might answer). If you have re-directs in place, that could be the culprit. Disable the re-directs temporarily.

Now, go to the admin page of your wordpress blog. If you are still not able to go there, the problem could very well be an erratic plugin. If you are able to log in, your re-direction was the problem. Go into Settings and change the URLs. For example, in my case, I just prefixed www. to yogatailor.com.

Now go back and add the re-direct back

Check your blog. All should be good. If it isn’t, email me or comment here.