3. BEFORE CLASS
– Payal Kadakia is a first-generation
American, her parents were both
immigrants from India.
– She graduated from MIT in Boston in
2005.
– She worked as a consultant at Bain
and Co.
– She started the Indian Dance Troupe
on campus and then started dancing
for a company called Bollywood
Axion.
4. FIRST PERIOD
– ClassPass was born out of Kadakia’s frustration with finding an activity of her
own.
– While working in the digital strategy and business development division of
Warner Music in 2010, Kadakia—a dancer since the age of 3—spent an
afternoon tumbling down an Internet black hole, searching for a ballet class to
attend that evening.
5. SECOND PERIOD
– Kadakia founded Classtivity in 2010, a kind of Open Table like system for
reserving spots at fitness classes.
– While trying to market the company, she met her eventual co-founder Mary
Biggins, who previously built marketing campaigns for brands including the
National Football League and Disney .
– Classtivity, is a search engine for fitness studios in New York City. The Passport
was then offered which offered ten fitness classes at multiple studios in a
prepaid package.
6. RECESS
– In January of 2011, Payal sent off a farewell email to her coworkers at Warner
Music Group.
– Vice Chairman of Warner Music, who promptly responded and asked Payal into
his office, wanting to chat about her plans moving forward.
– He ended up being her first investor, which eventually led to Classtivity’s
acceptance into the TechStars accelerator program.
7. THIRD PERIOD
– Classtivity Passport launched in January 2013 and offered 10 classes for
$49/month on a one-time basis and was meant to feed back into Classtivity’s
search-based model, wherein classes cost between $20 and $25.
– Passport wasn’t delivering the loyalty promised to studios, and users were
actively trying to fraud both Classtivity and the studios by re-buying the one-
time Passport.
– By June of 2013 she decided to switch to a subscription business and launched
the Classpass, $99/month for 10 classes.”
8. CLASSPASS
– Subscribers pay $99 a month to be able to take classes at dozens of different
fitness studios in a given city, like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
– The company enforces a cancellation fee of $20 for missing classes.
– For $99 a month, members can go to unlimited classes within a network of
5,000 boutique studios and gyms. The startup pays studios about 50% of the
regular class price.
– The company receives a bulk discount on classes—some of which can go for
upwards of $35 each—from their providers in exchange for helping them reach
new customers.
– They have done more than one million registrations last year.
9.
10. RESULTS
– ClassPass received seed funding of $2 million in March 2014.
– Then attracted $12 million in Series A venture capital funding from
entrepreneur Fritz Lanman in September of 2014.
– It has raised $30 million in venture capital, led by Google Ventures.
– In 2015, it closed a $40 million round of Series B funding from General
Catalyst and Thrive Capital.
– The company was valued as being worth more than $200 million according to a
report in the Wall Street Journal.
