Born at the front desk of a small gym.

The studio

My wife is a fitness instructor. She runs a small gym: her own classes, her own members, and a timetable that changes with the seasons. Like most studio owners, she is the instructor, the receptionist, the bookkeeper and the marketing department, often all before the first class of the day.

Evenings were for admin. Bookings came in by message, class packs were tracked by hand, and every week someone asked whether a spot had opened up in a full class. None of it was hard, but all of it took time away from what she actually loves: teaching.

The search

So she went looking for an app. We tried a lot of them together. Some were built for big fitness chains, with prices to match. The affordable ones did bookings, but not memberships, credit packs and waitlists, so she would have needed two or three tools stitched together. Others did everything but looked like they were designed twenty years ago, and her members would not have enjoyed using them.

She wanted something simple: one place for classes, bookings, memberships and her members, that looked good on a phone and cost what a small studio can afford. It didn’t exist.

Twenty years of booking systems

I have spent more than twenty years in technology for hospitality, golf and spa: systems where a hotel room, a tee time or a treatment slot is booked, changed, cancelled and filled again, all day long. I have seen what good booking software does for a business, and what bad software costs it.

A fitness class is not so different from a tee time. It has limited places, a waiting list, rules about late cancellations and a guest who expects booking to just work. So at the kitchen table one evening, we decided to build it ourselves.

Tested in a real studio

MOTVIVO is built in her studio. She is our first customer and our toughest critic: every feature is used in her classes, with her members, before it reaches anyone else. If something takes three taps at the front desk when it should take one, we hear about it the same day.

And because we know what a small studio’s budget looks like, MOTVIVO has a free plan that is genuinely usable, and paid plans priced for the studio down the street, not for the chain.

Roman Horwarth
Founder, MOTVIVO · LuxArte Ltd, Cyprus