Running a startup…it’s hard. PracticeNow is no different.
Building the product isn’t easy. Selling it is even harder. It’s a risky, years-long marathon.
But when customers send us messages like the following, it makes it all worthwhile.
Hi Vaidy and Team,
To begin with, thank you for continuing to provide such prompt service whenever needed and giving us a hassle-free interface for our classes.
I signed up for classes where teachers were using other software and I must say that PracticeNow is so much more user-friendly for the students and teachers.
But there are times it gets even better.
It’s a creator’s delight when we experience our own product and notice that it has changed our own life, in a positive way.
That’s what happened to me.
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PracticeNow, as you may know, is an operational management platform for teachers…we make tedious tasks like class schedules, subscriptions and payment reconciliations painless.
But why is it called “PracticeNow”? Because the mission is to help the teachers’ students stay consistent with their practice.
To help with this, students can login at any time and check their own attendance and subscription status.
That simple feature helped me achieve a major goal that I set for myself early this year.
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Back in Dec 2023, I had a pretty bad neck sprain – which forced me to stay off the Yoga practice for a full month
Fast forward to mid-Jan: I’d recovered well enough to step back on the mat. Here’s how my subscription looked then:
As you can see, I would need to complete 76 classes by May 11. The snapshot was taken on Jan 15, which meant I had 117 days (~17 weeks) in total to consume all of my remaining classes.
This meant that I would need to attend 5 classes every week to ensure that I finished all my classes.
My teacher takes 6 classes a week. So, in theory, this was still possible.
In practice, it meant a couple of things:
- I would need to upgrade my weekly practice goals: from the earlier minimum of 4 days a week, to a minimum of 5 days a week.
- I would need to adapt my practice schedule based on other commitments I’d already made. The most significant commitment that could disrupt my practice was this: a month-long vacation I’d already scheduled in April – in a very different timezone!.
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Upgrading weekly practice goal:
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- To do this, I made it like a game for myself. Where I would check my subscription details almost on a daily basis – and enjoy the sight of the “number of classes left” coming down each time I’d finished my practice. With PracticeNow, this is super easy. I can login in anytime as a student and check my subscription status.
Adapting practice schedule: For this, I used two more features of PracticeNow:
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- Class time flexibility: My teacher teaches the same class 4 times a day (6AM, 7AM, 8AM and 3:30PM). This suits the timezones and schedules of various students, across the world. And he has configured PracticeNow so that it allows me to keep changing which of these 4 classes I choose to attend each day. So, for example, if I had an early morning meeting, I could still catch up with a live class later in the morning.
- Class Recordings: What about the days, where I couldn’t attend any of the 4 classes? I was going on vacation for a whole month in April. With timezone changes and constant travel during the vacation, it would have been near impossible to attend my teacher’s live classes. But PracticeNow has a pretty neat class recordings feature..my teacher has set it up so that the recordings are always for just 24 hours after each class. Perfect for me to attend the classes at my own convenience – but also just enough time after enough class – to ensure I still stayed consistent on a daily basis.
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The end result? Here’s the screenshot of my subscription on May 5 – 1 day before it was scheduled to expire:
Needless to say, I practiced the last class the next day and successfully consumed all classes in my subscription, almost a week ahead of time.
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Back in 2016, when I first had the idea for PracticeNow, my desire was to build a product that would help people grow..by staying on the path of their practice long enough.
The practice could be in any field – health/wellness, music, dance, art…but I felt this deep urge to help students stay on this path.
Little did I know that many years later, I would benefit immensely from building my own dream project.
I’m delighted to report the following:
- Since I was forced to upgrade my practice schedule to 6 days a week, for 4 months (from Jan to May) – that has now become my new personal standard. Now, I find it difficult to practice less than 6 days a week.
- The even better part? This increased standard is now spilling over to other parts of my life: in my work, in my commitments to my family, even in the way I organize my time during the day.
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As Mahatria says: Each time we choose “right over easy”, we grow in our eyes. And when we start growing in our eyes, we start looking up to ourselves.