Laura Munkholm, President & Co-Founder of Software Company Walla, is Making Studios Easier to Run

After living through the struggle of managing a studio, Munkholm understood the software difficulties that came with the job. She started Walla with the experience and industry insight to lead the change.

Walla is a software platform that helps studios run smoothly. It incorporates behavioral psychology into its offerings to help students understand how to stay motivated and studios understand how best to communicate with different audiences. Walla is on a mission to help studios more strategically and meaningfully connect with audiences. Laura Munkholm founded Walla after years running a studio, with a goal of making management easier. Athletech News (ATN) spoke to Munkholm about her experience founding Walla, its differentiation points in the industry, and her future goals for the platform.

ATN: What was your inspiration for founding Walla?

Laura Munkholm (LM): My inspiration for founding Walla really came down to two different dimensions. The first is the fact that our nation is struggling with health and wellness. For the first time in decades, life expectancy is actually going down. People are lonelier than ever. Stress and anxiety paralyze a large part of the population. I have experienced first-hand how a challenging yoga class—or laughing through the sweat during 60 minutes of indoor cycling—can impact health and happiness. I’ve seen lives change through group studio classes. I’ve witnessed connections made, and even couples who met in class get married.

I truly believe boutique fitness has a unique opportunity to turn things around. If we could make these studios easier to run, weave customized client communication into their platform, modernize operations, and make the booking process seamless for a student, I felt confident we could collectively help move the needle on the overall health of our country and local communities. 

Next, to be honest, is partly selfish. I have lived through the struggle of running a studio in real time. I have felt the exhaustion of late nights answering client support emails because they couldn’t log in or hours on the phone with tech support waiting for a resolution I would never get. I was frustrated by data I couldn’t trust. I was confused by outdated, glitchy software all the time. The software I used was supposed to help me make my studio run smoothly—and the platforms studios had to choose from were making life harder for everyone. So I knew something had to change. And I had the experience (and industry insight) to lead the charge. 

ATN: What do you think are the biggest pain points for studios today?

LM: When I think about the ideal Walla user, I think about the busy studio owner juggling a million plates at any given time and now has to log into a complicated, confusing platform that doesn’t work for a hybrid online and in-person business model. Now that’s a huge pain foundational paint point. I knew Walla had to make life easier for them because there are so many other things to manage right now. I understand that studio owners struggle to motivate clients to come back to class. Retention is always a challenge. Add that, coupled with today’s challenging employment environment and changing privacy laws, leave many studios wondering how they can be profitable and find sustainable success. 

The pandemic encouraged many teachers to go out on their own to start apps and lead classes from behind a screen. In turn, studio owners were left waiting for them to either fail and come crawling back, miss the in-person experience (returning to teach a class or two per week), or decide to find and train new teachers. Plus, there’s the ongoing struggle with iOS 14 and new privacy laws around ad targeting, and email/text communication. Many businesses are accustomed to acquiring clients for very little and flooding them with marketing offers via email and text. Now, the laws have changed, and multi-level opt-ins are a thing. The work that was entirely automated for the last five years has to be redesigned, and this is a very manual process. Add this to clunky, old-school FitTech software, and you can’t imagine the overwhelming feeling of frustration and potential defeat. 

ATN: What differentiates Walla from competitors?

LM: A few big things differentiate Walla from other studio management software. First, we incorporate behavioral psychology into our platform. We worked with leading researchers from MIT, Penn State, and other universities to design an industry-first personality test that allows students to understand how to best stay motivated to build a sustainable, goal-oriented habit with their studio. It also gives the studio insight into how to best communicate with different audiences, and we even allow them to segment email or text communication to each type of personality. Think smarter, more strategic meaningful engagement. Our industry is moving in the direction of customization, and we are giving studios a way to personalize communication and interactions in a way no one has before.

I have to also mention our interface. Our platform is modern, mobile-friendly, intuitive, and seriously easy to use. It’s beautiful. One studio partner said, “I feel like I’ve been working in a dark, dingy basement. Then I started with Walla, and it was like I walked into an airy, bright room with floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s like a brand-new Apple product.” We also wanted to give studios a beautiful birds-eye view of their entire business operation in one aesthetically pleasing place. 

Walla is modern. We make hybrid simple. Studios were so exhausted by the overwhelming list of to-do’s when it came to live streaming and maintaining a VOD library with memberships. We have VOD baked into any membership which lives on your website. We have a direct Zoom integration that automatically texts links for class. We have Apple Pay and Google Pay. Studios can convert a lead to a client in less than a minute with QR codes. It’s uncomplicated, quick, and seamless. 

Lastly, we know our clients. We understand our studio partners. We know the small details that make a studio successful. We get what it’s like to be behind the front desk checking in a busy class or be the teacher who wants to send a quick text to her class with a playlist. We get the intricacies that most other software platforms will never grasp because we’ve lived it. I worked with hundreds of studios before starting Walla and have incorporated that knowledge into every square inch of the product. 

ATN: What motivates you?

LM: What motivates me? Outside of winning? (I was a college volleyball player and never stopped competing—my kids can attest!) Seriously though, it’s the thought of a world where everyone has a space to connect and feel alive. To find wellness, whatever that means to them. That’s the big picture “why” for me. But day-to-day?  Whenever I talk to a studio owner who says they have gotten hours back in their day because of what Walla does for their business, it fires me up. 

I love knowing that I can do that for thousands of people. What would these passionate, community-minded people do with all that space created where there used to be frustration, burnout, tech friction, and drain? I can’t wait to see it! What will they do with all the newly motivated happy clients, the additional cash in the bank that’s consistent and flowing in with ease because of the behavioral psychology strategies we use to motivate their clients and positively impact retention? That’s what drives me.

ATN: What are Walla’s long-term goals?

LM: Walla’s long-term goal is to be the platform of choice for boutique fitness studios worldwide. We’ve started in the U.S. and have seen tremendous growth over our first year. Our clients send us new clients and continue to be happy with what we’ve built. They feel like they have a partner who supports them and isn’t trying to nickel and dime every interaction. Our goal is to innovate and grow our retention as a service side of the business where we can use our data and client personality types to predict potential churn, and help studios keep clients coming back. And then world fitness studio domination, of course. 😉