15:16Payal Kadakia | Hustle Con 2017
From My First Million · Published Jul 6, 2018 · Watch on YouTube
TL;DR
Payal Kadakia, founder and executive chairman of ClassPass, recounts her entrepreneurial journey from consulting to dance to building ClassPass. The core theme is making hard decisions: quitting a stable job, pivoting from a failed search engine to a subscription model, raising prices, eliminating the unlimited plan, and eventually switching roles from CEO to executive chairman.
Key insights
- Kadakia’s first startup (ClassTivity) was a search engine for fitness classes that had press and buzz but no bookings — a “beautiful website” with zero user adoption.
- To validate demand, she and her team manually made the first 20,000 reservations themselves by booking classes and emailing customers, refusing to build products people didn’t want.
- The Passport product (49 for 10 classes) attracted users who loved variety so much they defrauded the system to sign up multiple times; 95% of members said they would use it again if they could revisi
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