End-of-year announcements: Rebrand and new features

Happy holidays everyone! Things can get hectic around this time of year, and for us it’s no different. Today, I wanted to go over a couple of very important announcements:

Martial Arts on Rails is rebranding to Gymdesk

When we started our company, our goal was to provide the best software possible for martial arts schools. That was my background, having trained for over a decade in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and Judo.

As our product continued to evolve, we learned that the use-case of managing a martial arts school is not that different than that of running a fitness gym, a gymnastics gym, a yoga studio or any other type of membership club.

While we still have martial arts focused features, with our promotion / rank management and attendance tracking that are less common in other types of membership businesses, we now have many users that are not martial arts schools, and we want our brand to reflect that.

Going forward, we want to be as welcoming as possible to all types of gyms, clubs and studios – and to accomplish that we felt a name change was needed. And thus, starting on January 1st, our product will be called Gymdesk.

The previous maonrails.com domain will redirect to gymdesk.com automatically, so you don’t need to worry about updating your links (though you might want to eventually). Everything else will look and work exactly the same.

It might be a bit confusing initially, but I’m certain you’ll get used to the new brand name in no time.

Feature Updates And Enhancements

As usual, we have a host of enhancements for you – not as big as last time, but addressing several pain points and adding a new integration for access control.

Mass Membership Pricing Update

By default, when you change the pricing of an existing membership, members with that membership will stay grandfathered to the old pricing. We’ve added the option to update pricing for all existing members when you change membership pricing – a checkbox will show up when you change the pricing, asking you whether to update pricing for existing members with that membership.

Additional Leads Fields and Family Accounts

We’ve added optional address fields for leads – those can be enabled on the lead capture forms as well. We’ve also added the option to create family accounts for leads – similar to how you can do so for members.

Enhancements

• Clicking on the number of booked members in the gym schedule management screen will pull up the names of the booked members (similar to how it works from the dashboard)
• Implemented a fix for older devices (iPad 2 and older) with the front desk mode after the recent update
• Added ability to send booking confirmation Emails to leads or members only as opposed to everyone (in the booking settings)
• Added option to turn off Email notifications for incoming messages from members / prospects (in the members settings)
• Added a visual indication in the booking list to show whether the person actually checked-in to their booking (also added to the CSV export of bookings)
• We started tagging which staff member created a point-of-sale transaction, and will soon provide reporting on it so you can see which staff member is bringing in sales.
• Added the ability to control how many days prior to show upcoming tasks in the dashboard. Each user / staff member can change it for their own account by going to the “Account” tab in the main menu.
• Improve the look of our website widgets on Wix sites. Previously, the Wix site would put our widgets in a very narrow box, causing it render like it does on mobile devices. It should now be able to expand to fill up more space and use desktop styling when possible.

Building out our gym / school article library

As we previously mentioned, we now have a couple of consistent contributors on the topics of gym growth and management. To support the continued growth of our content library on those topics, we reorganized our blog to a library format, organized by different categories.

You can check out the library, titled “Resources” here.

Zapier Integration

We’ve been working on integrating with Zapier, a service that allows you to connect web services such as ours with other services (such as Email marketing and automation, scheduling, etc). More than 3000 web services are connected through Zapier, and now Gymdesk is one of them.

This integration is currently in beta as we establish exactly what kind of data and triggers are needed for our users. If you would like to participate, please reach out and tell us a bit about how you would like to use it, and we’ll get the conversation going.

Enjoy the holidays!

This was another dense update, so we appreciate you making it this far. We hope you have a great holiday season and looking forward to an amazing 2022!