OUR STORY

It started with an empty dojo.

Katatude exists because I watched a very good instructor struggle to fill a room, and decided to find out why.

DUBAI, 2013

We opened a dojo. For months, almost nobody came.

My dad is a sensei (the greatest I know). He'd spent his whole life teaching karate. When we opened our own dojo, the instruction was never the problem.

But the mats stayed empty. A handful of students who knew him from where he'd taught before, and that was it. Five nights a week, waiting for a door that didn't open.

Nobody knew we were there.

So I started learning marketing. Not as a career plan, our dojo was empty and I wasn't going to watch it stay that way. Ads, landing pages, follow up, all of it, mostly by getting it wrong first.

We filled it. Then we grew it. It's still open thirteen years later.

That's why Katatude exists.

I know what an empty mat does to a studio owner, because I watched it happen to my dad. And I know what fixes it, because I'm the one who had to work it out. Thirteen years later, that's still the whole job.

Training sinceAge 5, still on the mat

Rank4th dan karateka

Marketing since2013

Family dojoDubai, open 13 years

WHY WE BUILT IT THIS WAY

Built for the studios agencies turn away.

If you've ever been quoted by an agency and quietly decided not to reply, this section is about you.

Most agencies want two or three thousand a month before they'll take your call, plus a setup fee, plus a minimum ad spend on top. For a single location studio with one or two instructors, that isn't a marketing decision. That's a mortgage payment.

So the studios that need help most are the ones who get quoted, go quiet, and never call back. Or get told outright that they're too small to be worth onboarding.

We've been that studio. When our dojo sat empty, the people who could genuinely have helped us were the people we couldn't afford, and the ones we could afford weren't worth paying.

That gap is the entire reason this exists.

The studios who need this most are the ones priced out of it.

Honestly, we do this because we care about what these places do. Someone walks in unfit, or anxious, or convinced they're too old, and eight months later they're a different person. That's worth more than most of what marketing gets used for.

So the model is built backwards on purpose. We build your first month before you pay anything. Ads, pages, automations, the lot. By the time the first invoice arrives, students who weren't there before are already walking in.

No setup fee. Nothing to pay before anything is built.

No minimum contract. Month to month, from the moment you start paying.

Nothing owed until it runs. Month one is on us, whatever happens next.

And yes, the name is a pun.

Kata is the form you drill until you stop thinking about it. Every movement in order, every time, until your body knows it better than your head does.

The other half is what you bring when it's your turn on the floor.

Put them together and you've got what we're actually trying to build for you. A system that runs without being thought about, with enough edge that people stop scrolling.

As for the cat, that one's simpler. Every person in my immediate family has one, including me. Once the name landed, the logo was never going to be anything else.

LET'S START

Every studio is different. So is the plan we'd build you.

Thirty minutes to talk through how your studio actually runs, what's been frustrating you, and where you want it a year from now. You'll leave knowing what we'd do first and why.