A letter from our founder, Alicia Ulin, on how Dibs started
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to work closely with boutique fitness studio owners setting up fitness events. I got to see firsthand the many challenges that studio owners face. Unlike gyms that have predictable, recurring revenue, boutique studios make money if and only if clients come to class.
In New York City, where I live, it seems like there’s a studio on every corner. Since studios don’t require memberships, it’s easy for clients to jump back and forth between studios when they’re offered a better deal. Studios get stuck in a vicious cycle of losing customers, offering deals to win customers back - only to lose them again once their competitors offer their own deals. The cycle is endless.
From a studio’s perspective, how can you maintain a healthy client base and still make money if you have to offer deep discounts all the time? There has to be a better way. My background is in computer science & data analytics, so I knew that if we studied the data, we’d be able to find a better, more sustainable solution for both the studios and their clients.
In 2015, I started Dibs with the goal of proving that clients would remain loyal under the right conditions, thereby making studios more money. If competitive pricing and an abundance of deals were disincentivizing client loyalty, could we use pricing to do the opposite? Through several years of research, we learned that just like airline customers, fitness customers will remain loyal as long as you make it slightly easier for them to do so. You just have to counter any competitive market incentives that discourage loyalty. That’s what Dibs does.
We started as a pricing strategy business. Over the past 6 years, we’ve helped studios increase their revenue using a mix of dynamic pricing and personally targeted incentives. Now, we’ve released a new booking system that incorporates everything that we’ve learned over the past 6 years. Our booking system analyzes booking data in real-time to find the best opportunities to increase your revenue. It’s like having your own data analytics team on staff. It could be anything from implementing dynamic pricing and distributing flash credits to converting specific clients to recurring memberships. The point is that our system recommends solutions that are personally tailored to your studio based on real-time data analytics. And most important, they’re easily actionable.
We hope that you’ll join us in welcoming the next generation of software for boutique fitness studios.
Cheers,
Alicia Ulin