The challenge
Mindbody is the dominant software behind yoga studios, gyms and wellness businesses around the world. It handles bookings, payments and memberships for a huge number of studios, and that scale makes it the default choice. It also leaves room for a challenger. Studio owners and teachers often find incumbent platforms expensive, complex and built for the business rather than the people booking a class.
Outclass set out to compete directly with Mindbody. The founders wanted a product that studios and teachers would actually prefer, with a modern experience for students and a fairer model for the people teaching.
That ambition brought some hard technical requirements. Outclass needed marketplace payments, with money flowing between students, teachers and studios, which is far more complex than a simple checkout. It needed full cancellation flows, because classes get cancelled and rescheduled all the time and every change has to be handled correctly. It needed to message users reliably. And it needed all of that to work from launch, because a booking platform that loses payments or confuses bookings doesn't get a second chance.
As a startup, Outclass also needed to get to market quickly. Competing with an incumbent means proving traction fast, so the product had to be designed, built and shipped without the long timelines of a traditional build.
Our approach
Design the whole product
We worked with the founding team from first design through to a complete product, shaping the experience for students, teachers and studios together.
Get the money right
We built peer-to-peer marketplace payments on Stripe Connect, so payments move correctly between every party, along with full cancellation flows that handle changes cleanly.
Build fast and ship
We built the platform on Bubble, with Twilio for messaging, which let us deliver a full end-to-end product quickly and launch it with the team.
The results
Outclass processed 10,000 transactions in its third month after launch. For a greenfield product competing with a global incumbent, that is a strong early signal: studios and students were using it, and payments were flowing through the marketplace at real volume.
The payments foundation made that possible. Marketplace payments are one of the hardest parts of any platform to get right, and building them properly on Stripe Connect from the start meant Outclass could grow volume without rebuilding the core. Cancellation flows that work reliably also protect trust, which is everything in a booking product.
The speed of delivery mattered just as much. Because we handled design and build together, decisions moved quickly and the product reached market while the founders' momentum was high. Outclass had a complete, working product in front of customers, instead of a long build that would have delayed learning from the market.
For Lightning Ventures, Outclass is a clear example of what a founding team can achieve with a single partner for design, payments and build.
What this means for your business
If you're taking on an incumbent, your product has to be better from day one and you have to reach market fast enough to prove it. Marketplace payments, bookings and cancellations are where challenger products most often stumble.
We design and build marketplace and booking platforms end to end, with payments done properly from the first release. We move quickly so you can start learning from real customers sooner. If you're building the challenger in your category, let's talk about getting it to market.
