THE CHALLENGE

Connect yoga instructors to their students using a new, secure, and more reliable communication strategy

Once their user base grew, the team at YogaTrail knew they needed to find a better way to bridge the communication gap between yoga instructors, and eager-to-learn students.

Instructors were struggling to connect with their students on a more personal level, and engagement suffered as a result. Users were frustrated with the long journey it took for them to just send messages and ask questions from their instructors.

These problems were only exacerbated by issues with their industry-specific needs, as yoga communities require a more human, personal touch that isn’t always available in the world of advanced messaging.

Since YogaTrail is a community-powered platform, reaching out to not just individual students, but a wide a large group of people at one time, was a necessity, not a luxury.

Teachers needed to communicate in a more broadcast-friendly way that could address multiple people at once, while avoiding the “group chat” scenario that would prompt too many voices to speak at the same time.

Eventually, Sven Ernst, CTO of YogaTrail, decided that in order to fix these issues, they needed to figure out how to incorporate direct messages, major announcements, inquiries, and more conversational topics to be addressed through one-on-one real-time communication.

Once they defined this issue, Sven and team ran into another problem: to build their solution by themselves in-house, or outsource a real-time chat platform.

After extensive research and testing, they realized that trying to build everything themselves would take much more time, end up being way more expensive, and take considerable development effort that needed more flexibility for other tasks.