ClassPass: Payal Kadakia

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 June 2020

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In the late 2000s, Payal Kadakia was working a corporate job and running an Indian dance company on the side. When a search for a ballet class yielded a confusing jumble of computer tabs, she had an idea: create the Open Table of the fitness industry – a search engine where users could sign up for classes in one streamlined place. When that idea failed, Payal pivoted multiple times, eventually landing on the subscription service ClassPass. Today, ClassPass connects users to hundreds of thousands of fitness classes around the world. It was valued at $1 billion earlier this year, but when the pandemic hit, it flattened the fitness industry, forcing Classpass to pivot yet again. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	New Year's is here, and with it brings the possibility of change.
0:13.0	As one behavioral scientist put it, first starts are really powerful.
0:17.0	So as you head into 2023, LifeKit is a great resource to help you plan your life and tackle changes, both big and small.
0:24.0	Listen to the LifeKit podcast from NPR.
0:27.0	Hey there, it's Guy here, and really quick before we start this brand new episode of the show,
0:32.0	how I built this isn't just a podcast, but also a book.
0:37.0	A book filled with stories and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs about the gift of failure, the beauty of ideas, and the path to building something meaningful.
0:48.0	You can pre-order the book right now wherever you get your books or by visiting gyros.com.
0:58.0	One of the best ways we would get customers to sign up is we did this Lou Lemmon promotion, where people would get $100 gift cards,
1:07.0	Lou Lemmon, if they signed up for ClassPass and stayed with us for six months.
1:11.0	And one day I get to the office and there's a letter on my desk and I open it and it's a cease and desist from Lou Lemmon.
1:19.0	And I remember, my first instinct was like, oh no, should I be scared? But then I was like, oh my god, Lou Lemmon knows who we are.
1:27.0	Ramen PR is how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
1:42.0	I'm Guy Raazan on the show today. When Pyle Kadakia couldn't book a dance class online, she built her own solution, called ClassPass, a booking service for fitness classes now valued at a restaurant.
1:56.0	It's now valued at over a billion dollars.
2:04.0	The more complex your business idea, the more likely that it will take a lot of time to get it right.
2:11.0	Think about companies that depend on data to optimize their services.
2:16.0	DoorDash, for example, doesn't just deliver food, it's a logistics business.
2:21.0	Same with Amazon and even Peloton. All these companies provide services that require a lot of data to function effectively.
2:30.0	But to get there, to get to a place where they all worked more or less efficiently, required many years of pain.
	...

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