Built for businesses that run on classes.
Dojos, dance studios, pilates rooms, language schools. We've seen the same pattern in all of them.
Three things every class based business runs on.
The discipline changes. The maths doesn't. These three are the first things we look at, whatever it is you teach.
Trials
Nobody signs up cold. They come once, feel the room, and decide. Everything before that first class is marketing, and everything after it is the studio.
Schedules
You sell time slots. Some are full, some are half empty, and the empty ones cost exactly the same to run as the busy ones.
Retention
Growth is people staying, not people arriving. One member leaving is real money, and you feel it the month it happens.
What this looks like for you.
Open the one that's yours. If we've got it wrong, tell us on the call and we'll say so.
Karate & Taekwondo Family programs, belt cycles, after school
Your year is carried by September and January. The rest of the time it's siblings and word of mouth, and the quiet months are quiet for no reason anyone has ever explained to you.
The parent deciding is rarely the person training. They're weighing you against swimming lessons and a soccer league, and what they actually want to know is whether their kid will stick with it and whether you're good with children.
So: ads that run through the slow stretches instead of only when you remember, follow up that catches the parent who enquired in March and then went silent, and email that brings back the family who stopped coming after their kid earned a yellow belt.
BJJ & MMA Adult intros, fundamentals tracks, open mat
Mostly adults, and they research you for weeks before they ever walk in. They read your reviews, watch clips of your classes, and quietly compare you against two other gyms nearby.
Half of them are nervous. They think they're too old, too unfit, or that they'll get hurt on day one. The marketing that works says the quiet part out loud instead of showing highlight reels of people getting choked.
The job is being visible during that research window, then having something ready when they finally fill in a form at 11pm on a Sunday. A reply that lands in a minute beats a better gym that answers on Tuesday.
Boxing & Kickboxing Class packs and membership tiers
Fitness first crowd. They come for the workout and stay if the room feels right. That means high trial volume and high drop off, plenty of first classes and far fewer second ones.
You're also competing with every gym and bootcamp in a five mile radius, which means the offer matters more here than almost anywhere else.
Ads that sell the first session honestly, follow up built to get them back through the door for number two, and email that catches the ones who quietly stopped showing up around week four.
Dance studios Recital seasons, term enrolment, kids' programs
Everything hangs on term dates. Miss the enrolment window and you're waiting months for the next one, with the same overheads either way.
Which means the marketing calendar has to match your calendar, not run on a generic monthly schedule. Registration opens, you need volume that week, not the following month.
Campaigns timed around your terms, waitlists that fill the next intake before it opens, and email to last year's parents while they're still deciding whether to sign up again.
Yoga & Pilates Intro offers, reformer waitlists, class packs
Intro offers get people in the door. Almost nobody converts to a membership unless they're asked, and most studios never ask.
Add to that the split where reformer sells out while mat classes sit half empty, and you've got a business that looks busy on paper and isn't.
The work is filling the quiet slots, and turning a three class intro pack into a standing weekly booking before the pack runs out.
Small group fitness Bootcamps, semi private, personal training
Small rooms, tight margins, and the whole model lives on retention. One person leaving isn't a rounding error, it's real money off the monthly.
You also have two enormous windows a year, January and September, and what you do in those weeks sets the rest of the year.
Ads for the rush, follow up for everyone who enquired and never booked, and email that keeps the people already paying you feeling like they're part of something.
It doesn't have to involve movement.
If people book a spot, show up on a schedule, and either renew or drift away, we know how to fill it. The words change, the structure doesn't.
Different disciplines. Same problem: getting them through the door and keeping them there.
When we're not the right fit.
The things studio owners say that are worth talking through before we start, not three months in.
I just want someone to run the ads.
We'll do it. But the ads underperform when the follow up behind them is broken, and we'd rather fix both than take the money for half a job.
I need students by next week.
Setup takes time. Accounts, pages, automations and tracking all get built before a single ad runs, and cutting that short is how campaigns end up leaking. Start now and you'll be ready for the next intake rather than scrambling for this one.
I'd rather not talk to anyone until they show up.
The automations will do most of the chasing for you. But a two line reply from an actual person beats a perfect sequence more often than you'd think, and the studios who send it convert noticeably better. A little human touch goes a long way.
We don't really do classes.
Class based businesses are where we're strongest, so that's what we build for. Still worth reaching out though. Tell us how yours works and we'll say honestly whether we can help.
Just send me a list and I'll get to it when I can.
This is the one that quietly breaks things. If access takes three weeks to arrive, launch moves three weeks with it, and everyone ends up frustrated. It works as a partnership. We move quickly, and we need you to move quickly on the handful of things only you can do.
None of that sound like you? Then we should probably talk.
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.
- We build your first month before you pay for anything
- Month to month after that. No lock in
- Ad spend goes to the platforms, never through us
FAQs
Do you only work with martial arts studios?
No, though it's where we're most fluent. Dance, yoga, pilates, boxing and small group fitness are all built the same way underneath, and we work across all of them.
We're a small studio with one instructor. Are we too small?
Probably the opposite. Small studios usually have the most obvious leaks and the fastest wins, because nothing has been set up properly yet. What matters isn't your size, it's whether you've got the capacity to take on more students if we bring them.
We're opening soon but haven't launched yet. Is it too early?
It's actually good timing. Building the ads, the page and the follow up before you open means you launch with people already booked instead of an empty first week. We'd want six to eight weeks before your doors open.
Will you work with a studio down the road from us?
No. If we're running your ads we're not running theirs, in your area and your discipline. You shouldn't have to compete against your own agency.
What if we teach online rather than in a room?
Tell us about it on the call. The trial and retention logic still applies, but the way people find you and decide is different enough that we'd want to understand it before promising anything.
Where do you work?
Globally. Most of this runs remotely and we're used to working across time zones. The only thing that really changes market to market is which platforms are worth being on.
What if we have a really small budget?
That's most of why Katatude exists. Most agencies want a few thousand a month before they'll pick up the phone, and that's before ad spend, which puts them out of reach for exactly the studios that need help most.
We know because we've been on that side of it. When we were growing our own dojo, the people who could actually have helped were the people we couldn't afford.
So we built the first month in before you pay anything. The setup happens, the ads run, the follow up starts working, and by the time the first invoice arrives you've already seen what it does. There's still a floor on ad spend, and we'll be straight with you on the call about whether you're above it.
Growth marketing for dojos, studios, and anything else that runs on classes. Built by a 4th dan karateka who grew her family's dojo from empty mats.
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