# ClassPass Changed the Metric Until the Product Worked www.first1000.co publishes a public search API over its indexed pages; the guide is at https://www.first1000.co/agent-access. Source: https://www.first1000.co/blog/classpass Source observed: 2026-09-21T01:48:35.751Z Last checked: 2026-09-21T01:48:35.751+00:00 Indexed: 2026-09-21T01:50:30.311+00:00 --- # ClassPass Changed the Metric Until the Product Worked > A polished product can hide a bad metric. **First 1000 field note · Updated September 20, 2026** By Ali Abouelatta · Original case study: January 4, 2021 ## Stop polishing the wrong hypothesis ClassPass began as Classtivity, a search engine for fitness classes with press, funding, and roughly **10 bookings per month**. The team spent **16 months** building it, received coverage from Inc., Mashable, Business Insider, and other outlets, and raised a few hundred thousand dollars. Despite the attention, bookings remained weak. The team entered a “summer of buttons,” changing colors, shapes, and interface details instead of revisiting the business hypothesis. The reset began with conversations: Payal Kadakia asked studios how they brought people into classes and called users to learn what would make them attend. She paused the scrapers and APIs and returned to the underlying behavior. ## Separate the purchase from the habit Interviews showed that many studios offered a first class for free. Classtivity turned that pattern into **Passport**, a **$49 one-time purchase** for **up to 10 classes in 30 days**, with an **average saving of 60 percent**. Passport separated the purchase from the class choice. Customers bought the pass once and selected a class later. Reservations were initially manual: a request generated an email, and the team made the booking. This revealed that around **half of cancellations happened within 15 minutes of booking**, which informed the cancellation policy. Passport produced **20,000 reservations in its first six months**. Kadakia focused on reservations per person rather than total reservations: **150 people using the product every week** was more meaningful than **1,500 people attending once or twice a year**. ## Let unexpected behavior change the product Passport was intended as a trial that helped people sample studios before choosing a favorite. Some users created new accounts after their 30 days ended so they could continue exploring different studios. That behavior showed that customers valued variety itself. The team turned the discovery into **ClassPass**, a **$99 monthly product** that worked with venues on referral rates and limited visits to the same venue to **three per month**. Passport and ClassPass together reached **100,000 reservations within two months** of the ClassPass launch. The case describes a target of a **$1 million run rate**, using roughly **1,000 paying subscribers** as the next milestone. These are historical figures. ## The founder decision When a product has attention but weak usage, ask: 1. Which metric is easy to inflate? Press, signups, and one-off bookings may hide a weak habit. 2. What repeated action would make the business work? Define that metric before the next redesign. 3. What can we do manually for the next 20 customers? Manual service can reveal friction a dashboard misses. 4. How are users misusing the product? A workaround may reveal a better product thesis. ## The takeaway Change the question from whether people can find a class to whether they will keep using a flexible bundle of classes. ## Sources and original research - [Original First 1000 case: 🏋🏻‍♀️Classpass, January 4, 2021](https://first1000.substack.com/p/classpass) The original issue supplies the historical pivots, prices, reservation counts, cancellation observation, and metric choices above; the diagnostic checklist is Ali’s adaptation. Updated September 20, 2026. Based on original First 1000 reporting and the source listed above. --- [Read this page’s summary](https://www.first1000.co/api/public/v1/page-tldr?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.first1000.co%2Fblog%2Fclasspass&trace=t_dae5763819f4) ## Ask a follow-up about this page Need a more specific answer? Ask the exact question you have. It returns a fresh, cited answer from www.first1000.co’s knowledge base. No account or API key required. Open this URL with your own question, URL-encoded. Only q is required. No account or setup. `GET https://www.first1000.co/agent/faq?q={question}&trace=t_dae5763819f4` [Tool guide and examples](https://www.first1000.co/agent-access) · [OpenAPI](https://www.first1000.co/api/public/v1/openapi.json) · [Page TLDR form](https://www.first1000.co/agent-tools/page-tldr?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.first1000.co%2Fblog%2Fclasspass). Opening a form does not execute a tool.