Published: February 15, 2019
14 min read
Last updated: June 21, 2022
Contents
1
🧘♀️ Yoga App Users: Their Pain Points and Your Solutions
2
🏬 Why Build an App for a Yoga Studio?
3
👨💻 Why Develop an App for a Yoga Startup?
4
📱 Top Yoga App Features to Consider
5
⚙️ Tech Stack For Yoga App Development
6
📚 Case Study: Pocket Yoga, Find What Feels Good
7
💰 Cost to Make a Yoga App
8
💡 Takeaways
Nowadays, yoga has turned from an exotic Brain-Mind-Body practice into one of the most popular well-being routines. When combined with mobile technologies, which is another trend that started in the last decade, it usually results in tremendous success.
Moreover, it looks like the popularity of yoga apps will only grow and get more stable.
During the COVID lockdowns, billions (and we’re not exaggerating) of people all over the world had to stay home for months. For most of them, mobile applications turned out to be universal helpers in everything from food delivery and entertainment, to online education and home yoga classes.
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That’s why mobile-centric companies experienced worldwide lockdowns as an opportunity to grow and scale, while for traditional online businesses, the lockdowns have become one of the biggest challenges of the XXI century so far.
How do you know it’s not idle talk? Check Google Trends! You can see huge leaps in Google searches for yoga apps worldwide at times when the most strict measures were taken regarding coronavirus.
The same idea is evident if we take a look at these statistics):
It shows us that yoga app development has a great potential that isn’t going to decrease soon. What happened over the past several years boosted the popularity of yoga apps. In fact, it’s going to be and already is more stable.
If you are thinking about building your own yoga application, you can probably find yourself in one of these 2 categories:
Before we dive into the details of developing a yoga application, let’s imagine the portrait of typical yoga practitioners, their pain points and ways you can help them.
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If you want to successfully target those yoga students who have high chances of becoming your paying customers, it’s important to outline their key characteristics. Here they are:
🧘♀️ Typical Yoga Practitioners
Age | Millennials (between 20 and 35 years old) | ||
Sex | More preffered by women but it’s getting more balanced with time. | ||
Paying Ability | Have a stable income & the audience is "ready to buy." | ||
Traits | Healthy lifestyle fans, communicative, social media fans. |
What pain points do they have and what solution can you offer them?
Problem ❗️ | How you can help 💡 |
---|---|
They want to practice yoga at home (for example, because they just don’t have enough time to visit a studio — just like mothers on maternity leave) but need some guidance. | You can offer them yoga video classes that they can either watch online or offline. |
They are about to try yoga for the first time and have no idea how to do it right. | You can use a built-in chat and build a bot to provide users with consultations on different yoga types (for example, how to choose between Iyengar, Ashtanga Vinyasa and Jivamukti), how to make sure the technique is right, etc. |
Offline customers of your yoga studio would like to have more possibilities to interact with your brand online. | You can let them pay for the club membership, talk to teachers, see the training schedule and play online lessons — all through the app. |
So what are the reasons to develop an app for yoga? Take a look at the reasons below and the answer will appear on its own!
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A mobile application can be a powerful enhancement to your business. The best thing about yoga app development for your existing business is that it can be used for both acquiring new customers and retaining existing ones.
Thus, your target might be:
Customers (or potential customers who are considering this opportunity right now) that are looking for a deeper and more personal interaction with your teachers/studio, and people that match your buyer portrait but are located in other cities and regions.
It's important to clearly understand what your mobile audience looks like (image by WANZHI)
Developing a yoga application opens a new window of opportunities for you: it can make it possible to provide your services to people who can’t visit your studio physically (for example, because they live in another city) but who are willing to watch your online classes, have an ability to chat with your teachers, etc.
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Therefore, the main reasons to create a yoga app for your studio are:
Just like for classical businesses, it’s quite reasonable for Startups to create an App. The stats from the Yoga Alliance’s Report prove this idea:
As a Startup, you could target, for example, the following audience:
Individual yoga practitioners of a beginner/intermediate level who do yoga on their own 2 times per week and seek professional guidance and tips.
Mobile Yoga Startups are mostly based on the idea of providing guidance to yoga practicioners (image by Anton Mikhaltsov)
The key challenge here is your USP (Unique Selling Point). In other words, what you’re going to offer your audience, so that you stand out from what your competitors already provide, and why your audience is going to pay for your product.
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No matter what audience you want to target, it’s still important to build a good (from the technical perspective) product. What features should be on your list? Let’s find out!
Whoever your users are, they most likely expect to get personalized content. Also, registration is especially important if you plan to implement some in-app purchases (for example, online yoga courses/videos). It will help to link a specific user to their purchases, so they don’t get lost if they uninstall the app or switch to another device.
Registration may be useful but don't do it mandatory (image by Michelle Thayer)
However, don’t forget that users are usually annoyed by a long and complicated registration process. A Social Login Feature, also known as a Passwordless Email/SMS Sign Up is something that can help: it allows reusing data from social media networks (like Facebook or Twitter) to create the in-app profile or just receive a “magic” link to your email, which redirects you back as a registered user once clicked.
Apart from that, it’s reasonable to integrate Google Account and Apple ID sign-ins using the APIs we linked. As for the Social Media Logins, you can enable such using APIs like authO.
Additionally, don’t make the registration mandatory. We recommend leaving an option to skip the registration and come back to this process later, once you really need some data from the user (e.g., for payment).
This is one of the key yoga app features that your audience expects to see. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to provide such content:
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Based on our experience, we recommend you to make own yoga app with the first option. Why? Because it looks more natural, provides more value than a simple animation or a static image and promotes you or your teachers to the audience. Moreover, it initiates a deep connection between you and your audience, as they see a real person speaking on their screens.
It's possible to arrange the Sessions Screen in many different ways (image by Justice Caring)
What is also great about the Yoga Sessions feature is that you can organize it in any convenient way. Here are a few ideas for you:
Finally, don’t forget about Push Notifications. There are plenty of ways to use them as you develop an app for yoga. For example:
Push Notifications are a powerful retargeting tool, so we strongly recommend you to add it to your yoga app features MVP list.
Push Notifications help to interact with existing users and return the old ones (image by akash chandra)
You can also use push notifications to send users reminders and take some moments to breathe deeply during the day and take a couple of mindfulness breaks to support their mental well-being. In case you’d like to learn more about building an application for mental health, feel free to follow the link:
Read also:
How to Develop a Mental Health App
The yoga industry is much wider than just exercises and meditation courses. For example, people also need comfortable outfits, yoga mats, bags, towels, blocks and straps, meditation seatings, and so on.
So, although it’s not really an MVP-feature, if you’re selling some of these goods, it’s possible to create a yoga app that will also work as an online marketplace. According to some studies{target=_blank rel="nofollow noopener"}}, mobile apps are even a better solution for retail purposes than a website since:
Therefore, you can greatly increase your key sales metrics.
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Usually, this feature doesn’t fit into the usual MVP list, so we’d recommend keeping it for the coming updates after your app gets a Proof of Concept. The good news is that it can be useful for both types of projects. Why?
Because people enjoy interesting and useful content. No matter if you plan to build an app for a yoga studio or a Startup with online yoga courses, your audience is likely to get more info on different techniques and methods, news, etc., through a blog.
Blog isn't a must-have feature but it provides additional value to your customers (image by Merve Guneyhan)
What is also great about the Blog Feature is that nowadays, people are open to share things they like. It means that they can repost your blog posts on their social media pages and become your brand promoters among friends and relatives.
This is also where the Social Media Login can come in handy. To make sure that users also benefit from connecting their media accounts to your app, you can offer them bonuses like discounts for paid content or unique avatars for their accounts.
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We see this feature as a part of your possible monetization strategy since it provides your audience with some advanced possibilities (this is especially true for Startups). Yet, if you’re developing a yoga application to complement your offline business, it may be reasonable to consider it free-of-charge and use it as a powerful tool to build a strong relationship between your studio and customers.
Many users expect the option to talk directly to yoga coaches, so provide them with it! (image by Andrei Ponivesc)
This feature can be a chat with a yoga coach that can help with exercise technique or answer some organizational questions related to your studio.
You can also do it via the video sessions and surely would need a special features for that. It should be:
People love challenges. For you, this means that you can use challenges to keep users interested in frequent interactions with your brand. Providing the audience with a feeling of accomplishment is one of the best ways to keep your retention and engagement rates high.
Gamification (image by Trang Tran)
A great way to implement this feature is to reward users with badges as they get certain achievements (complete a course, workout a few days in a row, etc.).
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If you regularly hold yoga training, chances are high you also organize some offline events like outdoor sessions, practices with invited yoga gurus, etc.
Therefore, you can make own yoga app that will keep users informed about such activities. As a result, more people will know about your initiatives and join which means that your customer base will remain active and enthusiastic.
Yoga practicioners usually actively participate in different yoga-related events (image by Abhishek)
However, this feature may be also useful for Startups that want to build a strong community around their apps. Just like the Nike+ training — they have nothing to do with the official Nike representatives and are completely based on the enthusiasm of local users.
Here are some technical tools that your Tech Partner can use to keep the good price-quality ratio and deliver your application on time:
Before we finish, let’s review a few yoga app examples to see how the mentioned above theory meets practice.
This Startup is a perfect example of how you can connect instructors and learners by developing a yoga application.
The Pocket Yoga application application is designed for those who want to practice yoga. The most remarkable features are:
The Pocket Yoga App (image from AppStore)
However, there is even more than this! They’ve also delivered the Pocket Yoga Teacher app. As you can guess from its name, the application is designed for yoga instructors. What are they able to do within the app?
Their monetization model is paid downloads. They have two versions of the app - for practitioners and teachers that also differ in price.
The Pocket Yoga Teacher App (image from AppStore)
The FWFG application is a great example of how you can build an app for a yoga studio or your own brand. Adriene is a yoga instructor, actress and co-founder of this online yoga library. Her whole app is built around the idea of creating a strong and successful community that connects health experience to real faces.
The FWFG Yoga with Adriene App (image from AppStore)
The monetization strategy is based on the subscription model: from $9.99 a month to $99.99 a year with a 7-30 days free trial period. For this money, people can access the following functionality:
As you can see, the set of features is quite basic. Yet, the app has an average rating of 5 stars (the best possible) based on 2200+ ratings.
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Here is the estimate of costs to build a yoga app from the Stormotion Team:
MVP Features Estimated in Hours
Using React Native
⚙️ Features | ⏳ Min Hours | ⏱ Max Hours |
---|---|---|
🛠 Setup Technical Foundations | 6 | 10 |
👋 Onboarding | 8 | 12 |
🔐 Sign Up Flow | 44 | 54 |
Provide personal data | 14 | 18 |
Social sign up | 20 | 24 |
Forgot password | 10 | 12 |
👤 Profile Management Flow | 88 | 110 |
Workout calendar | 20 | 26 |
Workout history | 18 | 24 |
Dashboard | 50 | 60 |
🧘♀️ Yoga Sesions Flow | 54 | 66 |
Feed | 30 | 36 |
Video collections | 24 | 30 |
Watch the video | 48 | 50 |
Save workout | 16 | 20 |
Saved workouts screen | 18 | 24 |
🔎 Search Flow | 42 | 52 |
Collections | 30 | 36 |
Filters | 12 | 16 |
🔔 Push Notifications | 24 | 30 |
👍 Extra features | 176 | 210 |
Blog | 54 | 60 |
Events Announcments | 12 | 16 |
eStore | 70 | 90 |
Chat with a coach | 40 | 50 |
⏱Total Hours | 442 | 550 |
💵Approximate costs | $19,890 | $24,750 |
So, the yoga app development costs are between $20-25,000 including the extra features and about $13-18,000 without them.
We used an average rate $45/hour that is quite standard for Eastern Europe. If you want to get a more accurate estimate of costs to develop a yoga app, provide us with the details of your project by hitting the button at the end of the article.
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Yoga app development is a good idea for both Businesses and Startups operating in this industry:
Looking for the perfect Tech Partner that will help you to deliver your Yoga App? Contact Stormotion by hitting the button below and we’ll shake the yoga industry together!
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