Yoga is the ancient Indian way of life, infusing health with spirituality. It has now become, like everything else, a business franchise. Now, there is nothing wrong in earning money from spreading knowledge that would otherwise be forgotten with changing times, but there are a lot of snake oil peddlers packaging garbage under the garb of “authentic” Yoga. If you are paying for it, then you have the right to be imparted with the complete breadth of this fundamental wisdom under the tutelage of an experienced practitioner.
NomadYOGI is a web app that aims to make Yoga accessible globally. It is a platform for students to connect with great teachers; for teachers to easily schedule meet-ups; for businesses to conduct simple and transparent transactions, and for everyone to motivate each other for inspired living through the power of social community.
About the Startup
The founder of NomadYOGI, Joseph “Yos” Goodman, is a committed Ashtanga (a style of Yoga) yogi (practitioner) with a sense for business and a desire to unite a fragmented marketplace. Yos has an MBA in Business Ethics from the University of Denver and this intent of creating an ethical business model is at the core of NomadYOGI as much Yoga. Says Yos, “I wanted to help my fellow Yoga teachers focus on their practice and spread their knowledge easily to the students, rather than see them mired in the difficulty of managing a Yoga studio and the hustle of attracting new students to upcoming retreats/workshops.”
Yos had the idea back in 2009, but he was faced with the challenge of building a software solution cum business platform for yogis who are neither very tech-savvy nor very business-minded, “We took great care in building out the Q&A, Knowledge Center, and putting help tips all over the site.” Yos also had to search for the right team, and it was only in 2012 that they started doing hardcore development: designing, programming, testing, bug fixing, reiterating. He is excited about the current status of the service which is in open beta, “We have many more features to add, but all the glitches and bugs have been squashed and the service is finally at a point where it’ll be of tremendous value for students and teachers.”
NomadYOGI is like Yelp, Facebook, and Quora — all rolled into one user-friendly site. It offers Yoga themed retreats for those looking to mix travel and learning their favorite style of Yoga from their favorite yogi. The company is steadily creating a unified network of traveling Yoga teachers for conducting workshops in urban, suburban, and exotic environments.
“The best Yoga teachers may not be the best marketers, simply because they are spending their time practicing, meditating and reading. Thus, our goal is to connect these amazing teachers with aspiring students, creating a social network where our pursuit of yoga can thrive. We are helping teachers and studios streamline their marketing activities, retreat schedules, payment receipts, and student relationships, in one cloud solution that’s exclusively focused on Yoga”, adds Yos.
About their Plans
Their competition is from Yoga themed travel booking services (EventBrite, MindBody), an online yogis directory service (YogaTrail), and marketing focused services (SeekRetreat, YogaTravelTree). The USP of NomadYOGI is that it combines all these features and no one is yet offering such a complete package.
The service is targeting Yoga students, teachers, studios as well as hotels and retreat centers from all over the world. On the future of the service, Yos says, “We’re building NomadYOGI as THE place to find anything the global Yoga community is doing. Whether it’s reading a new Q&A article and connecting with yogis beyond your local studio, to booking your next retreat at an amazing hotel in Thailand, we make it easy and unified.”
NomadYOGI will soon offer monthly subscription plans but is currently pay-to-play. They charge 3% of the ticket price maxed at $29.95 per event ticket. Event Creators decide how this fee is collected – they can cover it, split it, or add it to the student’s bill at checkout.
For more details visit: https://www.nomadyogi.com/
