Easy access to wellbeing for all.

Yoogaia provides live, interactive yoga classes in the comfort of your home. Yoogaia is already available in Finnish and English (beta). Now it's time to launch Yoogaia in English in full-scale.

The opportunity

Yoogaia is the only interactive online yoga studio in the world. The innovative and tremendously user-friendly concept has been developed, tested and validated in Finland. Now it's time to go international. We have a wonderful momentum going for us at the moment. True to the nature of Yoogaia (being a truly everyone's service), we are now presenting you with the opportunity to be part of the future success of Yoogaia. You can join us on this magnificent venture to create something that never existed before but will, without any doubt, be mainstream in a few years time.

Two ways to contribute

To provide everyone with an opportunity to contribute, we are running two campaigns in parallel. The page you are at the moment is for the equity-based campaign. You are welcome to contribute to both campaigns if you wish. If you are interested in the reward-based campaign, please have a look here:

http://www.fundedbyme.com/en/campaign/3874/yoogaia-live-yoga-classes-at-your-home/

We welcome and cherish every contribution, no matter how big or small, with our sincerest gratitude.

The story

One winter morning Mikko, our founder, having woken up before six in the morning in order to leave home before the kids wake up and to drive to the yoga studio in time for a yoga class starting at seven, rush to the shower after class, get in the car to sit in the agonizing morning rush hour to get to work just after nine o'clock, started to think whether there might be a way to attend a yoga class without all that trouble, commuting, planning and time consumption. Getting to the calming, stress relieving yoga class had actually become a stressful event. This made Mikko think.

Upon finding a surprisingly clear gap in the market, Yoogaia was founded in October, 2013. We immediately started to test and validate our assumption that there indeed was a larger demand for a service that provides live, interactive exercise (e.g. yoga, pilates, kettle bell, core…) in an online environment. There was.

We've since developed our video technology to enable a much larger amount of people to participate in an interactive online yoga class in the comfort of their home. We are already running our 3rd generation service in only seven months. Naturally, we've developed a million of other things, too. And there's a million more things that need to be developed in the years to come. We are in a path of learning and what a path it is!

The team

At the moment we are a team of four and very fortunate to have a network of kind-hearted, talented individuals on various fields, helping us on a number of issues that need expertise outside our scope. There is a group that should be mentioned specifically, that on a number of occasions has offered invaluable input, ideas and support helping us get better. That group, of course, is our customers. If there is one thing we should be especially happy about since starting the venture, it is the relationship we have with Yoogaia customers. We cherish that relationship now and forever.

Wellbeing for all

Our aim is to provide our customers with an offering that truly changes their life. And it already does. Even though we've had a successful start, we don't take anything for granted. We are humble by nature and want to keep it that way. There is so much joy, passion and love in what we're doing that we wish everyone had a chance to be part of it. Being inclusive is really important to us, as opposed to being exclusive. We are open for everyone.

Therefore we now want to openly invite you, who wishes to help yourself and others feel more balanced, fit and healthy to join us and make it happen. Together we can do a lot of good.

Value proposition

Are you 100% happy with how you've managed to balance your life? Well, neither are we. Work. Family. Home. Friends. Me. You name it. A myriad of things we need to attend on daily basis. In time, we tend to get used to a compromised lifestyle, sacrificing our own wellbeing amidst the overly busy everyday life. It's easier to skip going to the gym than picking up kids from school, as you know.

Yoogaia is an online service that makes your life easier to manage, more fulfilling and more balanced, while getting you in shape - both physically and mentally. With the ease of a couple of clicks.

Not only yoga

Yoogaia provides live, interactive yoga classes in the comfort of your home. As opposed to current online services, Yoogaia does not offer pre-recorded videos. All classes are live sessions that enable the instructor to comment the attendees’ practice on individual basis, provided they have allowed for the optional 2-way connection. There is no upper limit to the amount of participants on any given class, so everyone always fits in!

In addition to yoga, we currently offer pilates, core and kettle bell classes, and are expanding to other forms of exercise soon.

Yoogaia is already available in Finnish. Now it's time to launch Yoogaia in English, too!

The problem Yoogaia solves

The overly busy lifestyle we are accustomed to doesn’t allow for enough time to exercise. Now that Yoogaia brings the instructor in the living room, the time required to attend a live class is substiantally less than before, leading to a less stressful and more balanced lifestyle. As opposed to current online substitutes, there's no trade-off as the Yoogaia classes are always live and interactive, emulating a real exercise at a gym or yoga studio to the full!

Being too busy is not the only reason to fall in love with Yoogaia, though. We have a large amount of regulars that are unfortunate (or fortunate) enough to live far away from a yoga studio or a gym. It is of tremendous value to actually being able to participate on a live, interactive yoga class despite the distance. Then, of course, there are the dog owners. And mums with small children. We see a lot of dogs and children on our classes. And then there are people that do not, for whatever reason, want to attend a yoga class with a group of sweating strangers.

Interestingly enough, Yoogaia is used quite internationally already. Many a Finn living in a foreign country finds joy in accessing live yoga classes in Finnish. Our evening classes are morning classes in California, as one of our customers has pointed out. Similarly, those that travel for work like to maintain attending Yoogaia classes, regardless of where they are. It is not untypical to see hotel rooms in the background of our customers.

The market size

Yoga is one of the spearheads of the growing wellness trend. According to the 2012 Yoga in America report, there are over 20 million yogis in the USA and 100 million ”aspirational yogi”, in other words people that would like to try out yoga but so far haven’t. In recent years, the image of yoga has shifted from eccentric, spiritually driven discipline to a trendy fitness and mental exercice that fits the modern lifestyle.

The market size for yoga services/products combined with health clubs and gyms is approximately $100B. Lululemon, a Canadian yoga apparel brand is valued at over $10B. In the USA, the average yoga practioner spends 400+ €/year on yoga related services and equipment. The Yoogaia market potential is made even more attractive for Yoogaia by the fact that 47% of yoga practitioners in fact prefer practising at home environment.

The competitive advantage

Yoogaia is the first interactive online yoga studio in the world. In addition to that, our competitive advantage consists of a proven highly rewarding customer experience and a high velocity team. We have a seasoned and agile 4 person core team, that has extensive experience on all the key competence areas: branding, marketing and PR, business strategy and development, R&D and growth, yoga content, digital design, back-end development and front-end development.

Our performance so far

Yoogaia has been commercially available since January, 2014, having attracted 1200+ customers with 56 % retention rate and 13€ customer acquisition cost. The conversion rate on the website (purchasers out of visitors) is 4% and The Net Promoter Score, which rates how willing our current users are to recommend Yoogaia to their friends or family is an outstanding +67 (the range is from -100 to +100). Yoogaia offers 20 live classes a week with 25 attendants per class on average.

Should you want to see our performance in more detail, kindly get in touch so that we can chat.

Partnerships

We encourage partnerships on all levels. Ideally, we're looking for partnerships that have a huge benefit for us, for the partner AND for our customers. As an example, we are partnering with Heiaheia to cater for the motivational and social aspects of using Yoogaia that add value both for our users and our B2B customers as well. An example of a different type of partnership is the one we have with Casall, a Swedish sports apparel and equipment manufacturer. Our instructors wear Casall clothes while Casall apparel and equipment is promoted by Yoogaia. On the other hand, co-marketing campaigns where Yoogaia is available for our partners' customers are encouraged, too. As an example of a straightforward marketing effort, we've campaigned with Terveystalo, the largest healthcare service company in Finland.

Partnering wisely goes a long way. While our partner gets associated with a funky new online wellbeing service innovation, we get access to an audience of an established brand otherwise not easily reached for a start-up.

Our growth strategy

Our growth strategy is based on two pillars. While developing and expanding the Yoogaia online service we are also developing proprietary video technology that will be available as a white labeled online video platform for a the international wellness market. Please have a look at the accompanying Pitch deck to see the strategic outline in more detail. We'd be happy to discuss this further, should you want to.

Yoogaia has filed trademark applications in the EU and the USA.

Why are we raising money?

Yoogaia is currently funded by private investors and Tekes (The Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation). We are now seeking investment to launch Yoogaia internationally.

The money is required to

Launch Yoogaia commercially in English (summer/autumn 2014)

Commercialize Yoogaia B2B offering (summer/autumn 2014)

Develop a Yoogaia white labeled video platform that enables a separate B2B revenue model (autumn 2014)

Develop a Yoogaia iOS app to enable participation anywhere (autumn 2014)

Naturally, the money will also be used towards constantly improving our service on all fronts. We have a ton of useful improvements and features in the pipeline, a lot of which have been suggested to us by our users.

The minimum investment is as little as 190€ so that hopefully everyone may be able to participate. We see Yoogaia as a service for everyone, and our investment round is no exception. Hope to see you on board!