How the MINDBODY app is changing business technology for the wellness industry

Dive Brief:

The fitness industry is looking for ways to connect services to clients and mobile software is changing the game. MINDBODY, the fitness studio scheduling app, hones in on "business owners with a high probability of success" in the fitness vertical, which helped it increase its software average monthly revenue per subscriber by 28%, said CEO Rick Stollmeyer during the company's Q2 2018 earnings call. The app saw a 48% year-over-year increase in subscription and services revenue.
In March the company announced it acquired Booker Software, a cloud-based business management platform for salons and spas, all part of the app's goal of connecting business to a larger consumer audience. The acquisition led to 184 million bookings worth about $4 billion, according to the earnings. In Q2, products from Booker accounted for $6.9 million in MINDBODY's revenue.
On the B2B software side, MINDBODY is already integrated with Booker, but on the consumer side, it has yet to integrate Booker's inventory on the app, said Doug Hecht, SVP of Consumer Products at MINDBODY, in an interview with CIO Dive. Once that process is complete, the company expects to see more expansion across its respective industries.

Dive Insight:

CIOs are often tasked with conveying the company message through technology and the fitness industry is not any different.

The MINDBODY app offers a variety of software categorized by fitness businesses, yoga studios, personal training, wellness centers and others. Since its launch in December 2015, the app aided 40 million consumers in booking 600 million classes and appointments by 2017.

Consumers have already embraced technology with their fitness, like using YouTube videos for workouts, posting results on Instagram and monitoring biometrics with wearables. "It's not different than the mobile trends we've seen everywhere else," Hecht said.

The visibility has improved a consumer's access to companies in the wellness industry. Businesses, especially boutique studios, want the ease of technology to be a part of their identity to consumers and don't have the resources to build in-house some of these applications.

Other club management software solution apps, including Zen Planner and Simply Book.me, use the cloud for an easy way to manage memberships and member data. The purpose of these apps is to eliminate the managerial and manual labor of tasks like scheduling.

For example, Planet Fitness is working to install "digital plumbing" across its franchises to change how it collects and uses data to connect with its members. The gym wants to understand the "high churn" rate of gym memberships, which includes understanding why consumers stop using the gym.

This is largely the purpose of MINDBODY and the technology it's designed on. The decision to "workout can be highly influenced by their pocketbook, calendar and even mood," said MINDBODY SVP of consumer products in a company post. The app is designed to accommodate those swings in finance and moods, therefore breaking down the barrier between consumers and wellness.