Payal Kadakia
Founder and Executive Chairman, ClassPass. On 2 shows, 4 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveauthorentertainer@payalkadakia ↗LinkedIn ↗payalkadakia.com ↗
Payal Kadakia founded ClassPass, a fitness and wellness subscription marketplace acquired by Mindbody in 2021. She also established the Indian-American dance troupe The Sa Dance Company and authored the goal-setting book LifePass.
2shows
4appearances
39statements
4resolved
3supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
5said about them ↓ Everything Payal Kadakia said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kadakia: ClassPass Listed Fitness Studios Without Agreements to Prove Demand
“There were certain studios that we just put on the platform where we didn't have like full agreements with yet. Because we just wanted to test and, you know, we started sending them so much traffic that they would call us up and say, Hey, like, who are you guy…”
Kadakia: The fitness industry missed massive consumer demand for class variety
“That still is part of the core of what made ClassPass everything it is, is that people loved variety, and no one realized that. There was this market out there for dabblers when everyone was trying to push everyone to be, like, complete loyalists”
Kadakia: Classtivity was profitable early on because it didn't pay studios
“We actually were 100% profitable, because we weren't paying the studios.”
Payal Kadakia rejects work-life balance, favoring structured systems instead
“And look, I never believed in the word balance, and I don't think you can have it, but I knew I needed a system that the same way I was able to accomplish every dream I had professionally, I didn't understand why I didn't have that system. Personally.”
Kadakia: Fitness Booking Struggles Because Working Out Is Aspirational, Not Utility
“And so something with like airline tickets, like you already made the decision to go, or if you're going to go eat, you're going to eat. Eating is, is a utility. Like you're going to eat. Right. And that was the difference where working out and going to these …”
Kadakia: Aggregator CAC is More Efficient Due to Higher Lifetime Value
“The synergies, right, of a company like ClassPass being able to do customer acquisition for an entire industry, right, where a class is, you know, 25, 30 dollars is just obviously more efficient when we're selling a product that has a bigger lifetime, right? W…”
Kadakia: Announcing ClassPass's Series A spurred copycats in every market
“And then we announced our Series A, our total million dollar round, and it was a great moment, and always in hindsight, I'm like, I don't know if I would have done that, because what it did is it spurred competition in every market.”
Mindbody acquiring ClassPass was a matter of when, not if, says Kadakia
“So I do believe it was a matter of when, not if, these two companies would come together, and I think given everything that the industry had gone through through the pandemic, we kind of knew that this was the right time to join forces”
Founders should not start a company expecting a specific acquirer, says Kadakia
“And on the opposite of that, I would also say, don't start a company thinking it's going to be acquired by this company or that company, right? I think a lot of times people box themselves into that.”
Kadakia: Funding, press, and followers are false signals of product usage
“You can have funding, or press, or followers, and that still does not mean anyone is going to use your product”
Kadakia: Class reservations are the single heartbeat metric for ClassPass
“Over time, and I still always make this the most important number that my team sees, it's the reservation number, because that is the heartbeat of the company. That means our product is working. That means our partners are happy. That means our customers are e…”
Kadakia: ClassPass unlocked market growth by targeting non-enthusiasts
“And there were a lot of fitness products in the market, That were actually speaking to the one percent of people who already did fitness, and I realized I wanted to go and talk to the 99% of people who were like me, and who were scared to walk into a spin clas…”
Kadakia: ClassPass revenue dropped 95% within two weeks of COVID-19
“Mandated by the government, almost every studio was shut down, right, within two weeks of COVID starting. So that was like a 95% drop in revenue. It was just a shutdown completely”
Kadakia: Lower Pricing Tiers Cannibalized Profitable Users and Worsened Unlimited Margins
“When we started doing was introducing lower, lower packages. And then what happened was, you know, our really profitable users were obviously choosing the lower packs, which made the unlimited package even get worse in terms of our margin. Right. And the peopl…”
Kadakia: Founders Must Be Mission-Obsessed Rather Than Product-Obsessed
“I've learned this, you know, to be mission obsessed as a founder and not product obsessed. It's not my product that makes us, it's us actually creating a solution right to the problem.”
Kadakia: Unlimited Tier Cancellation Backlash Far Exceeded Actual Business Impact
“The noise was bigger than the impact it had on the business, for sure.”
Kadakia: A Marketplace's True Product Is the Offline Experience, Not Tech
“Our teachers are our product, right? I always say this. It's not, you know, our product is not this technology we built. Our product is this class that someone goes to, right? Offline. It's the experience they have with our instructors in our studios”
Kadakia: Classtivity generated only about 10 reservations a month at launch
“June of 2012, we launched Clastivity, finally opened to the public, we had thousands of classes listed, a beautiful design, and I would say we did about 10 reservations a month.”
Kadakia: ClassPass users churned when failing to hit arbitrary plan caps
“And we also started getting people who were sometimes churning saying, oh, I only went to eight. And I'm like, this is so interesting that people were, like, tying themselves to this number.”
ClassPass expanded into beauty and wellness during the pandemic, says Kadakia
“And then the other one, which actually did stick, which was something a part of something we had actually tried right before the pandemic was we went into beauty and wellness and that actually ended up sticking because what we realized is people were more comf…”
Kadakia: ClassPass spent $500k and one year building initial product
“I mean, the first product we built, we spent half a million dollars building it, a year in the making.”
Kadakia: ClassPass incentivized 6-month subscriptions with $100 Lululemon gift cards
“And so one of the things we did, and we figured this out early on, is we gave away Lululemon gift cards for anyone who joined and stayed for six months. So we said, hey, this is a 99 dollar product, you get a hundred dollar gift card if you stay for six months…”
Kadakia: Startup Raised $500,000 Before Entering Techstars Incubator
“I raised about a half a million dollars. This was before we got into Techstars, which was this big incubator.”
The other half of the tape: Payal Kadakia's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 5 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 5
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 5
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Payal's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder and Executive Chairman, ClassPass | 3 | 34 | 75% 3/4 | full record on How I Built This → |
 MASTERS OF SCALELEDGER | Founder and Executive Chairman, ClassPass | 1 | 5 | — | full record on Masters of Scale → |