Strategy & Planning

How to run competitive research as Fitness Studio Founders

Strategy & PlanningFor Fitness Studio Founders3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

You know SoulCycle opened three miles away and a new Pilates studio just popped up on Instagram, but your 'competitive research' is scrolling their feeds on your phone between classes. You have no systematic read on their class pricing, intro offer structures, instructor rosters, schedule gaps, or review velocity. Mindbody and ClassPass don't hand you a competitor report — they hand you your own data. So you're making pricing and scheduling decisions based on vibes and whatever a member mentions in passing. That's how you underprice a Saturday morning HIIT slot that sells out in two minutes, or over-schedule Tuesday evenings that die every week.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Strategy & PlanningFor Fitness Studio Founders3 apps10 steps~20 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A weekly competitive snapshot that pulls class schedules, pricing pages, intro offers, and Google/Yelp review counts from every competitor within your zip code — automatically, through browser automation, no API needed.

An X Mentions Tracker that logs every time a local competitor, your studio name, or a class format you offer gets mentioned, so you catch sentiment shifts and viral moments before they affect your bookings.

A living research doc in Knowledge Management that accumulates each week's findings so you can actually see trends — 'their drop-in rate went up $4 in six months' — instead of re-researching from zero every quarter.

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

X Mentions Tracker Knowledge Management Growth Analyst

Data sources & config

Competitor booking pages (Mindbody studio profiles, independent studio websites, ClassPass listing pages) are all pulled via browser automation — no API needed. X Mentions Tracker uses browser automation to log daily mentions. Knowledge Management connects directly to Notion if you already use it as your team wiki (Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule); otherwise Starch hosts the wiki natively. Growth Analyst connects to PostHog from Starch's integration catalog, queried live, if you want website traffic layered into the weekly digest.

Prompts to copy

Every Monday at 7am, visit the Mindbody booking pages for [Competitor A], [Competitor B], and [Competitor C] in my zip code. Pull their current class schedule, any listed drop-in price, intro offer text, and the total number of Google reviews and current star rating. Save the results as a structured weekly snapshot.

Track daily X mentions of [Competitor A], [Competitor B], my studio @handle, and terms like 'yoga [my city]', 'pilates [my city]', 'crossfit [my city]'. Log each mention with date, handle, follower count, and full text.

Each week, add the new competitive snapshot to my Knowledge Management wiki under 'Competitive Research > Weekly Snapshots'. Flag any change greater than 10% in price or any new intro offer that wasn't there last week.

Every Friday, email me a short digest: which competitors changed their pricing or schedule this week, what the X mention trends look like, and the top three things I should consider adjusting at my studio based on the data.

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 List every studio you actually compete with — not just the obvious ones. Include the yoga studio that started offering barre, the gym that added group fitness, and the ClassPass-only spots that poach your trial members. You need names and their booking page URLs.

2 Open Starch and describe the browser automation you want: 'Visit each of these URLs every Monday morning and extract: class schedule, drop-in price, intro offer, and current Google review count and rating.' Starch automates this through your browser — no API or partnership with Mindbody required.

3 Install the X Mentions Tracker from the Starch App Store. Configure it to track your studio's handle, each competitor's handle if they have one, and generic local intent terms like 'best yoga [your city]' and 'pilates [your city] review'.

4 Set up a Knowledge Management wiki (Starch builds this from a natural-language description — 'create a competitive research wiki with sections for each competitor, a weekly snapshots log, and a pricing history table'). If your team already uses Notion, Starch syncs your Notion data on a schedule so the wiki lives wherever you already work.

5 Wire the weekly browser automation to auto-write each snapshot into the wiki. Prompt: 'After each Monday scrape, append the results to the Weekly Snapshots page and update the pricing history table for each competitor.'

6 Set a change-detection alert: 'If any competitor's drop-in price changes by more than $3, or a new intro offer appears that wasn't there last week, send me a Slack message immediately.' Starch connects to Slack from its integration catalog and queries it live when the automation fires.

7 Configure Growth Analyst if you have website traffic data: connect PostHog from Starch's integration catalog so the weekly digest can cross-reference competitor activity (e.g., a competitor's promo week) against your own signup and trial conversion trends.

8 Set the weekly digest automation: 'Every Friday at 8am, read this week's competitive snapshots, X mention trends, and any change alerts that fired. Write me a 200-word email summary: what changed, what it might mean for my schedule or pricing, and the one thing I should consider doing differently next week.'

9 After four weeks, prompt Starch to run a trend analysis across the accumulated snapshots: 'Compare this month's competitor pricing and schedule data against last month. Which studios raised prices? Which added or dropped class formats? Which are getting more reviews faster than I am?'

10 Use the Knowledge Management wiki as your source of truth before any pricing decision, schedule change, or intro offer redesign. Prompt: 'Based on the last 90 days of competitive snapshots, what's the current market range for drop-in prices in my area, and how does my pricing compare?'

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

March 2026 competitive sweep — boutique Pilates studio, Austin TX

Sample numbers from a real run

Competitor A (Reformer Pilates, 0.4mi) drop-in price	42
Competitor B (barre + Pilates hybrid, 1.1mi) drop-in price	35
Your current drop-in price	36
Competitor A intro offer (3 classes)	59
Competitor B intro offer (unlimited 2 weeks)	49
Your intro offer (first class)	20
Competitor A Google reviews (March 1)	214
Competitor A Google reviews (March 31)	241

The Monday browser automation ran for four consecutive weeks. By March 31st, the wiki showed Competitor A had quietly raised their drop-in from $38 to $42 — a $4 increase the owner never would have caught from Instagram scrolling. Competitor B held at $35 but launched an unlimited two-week intro offer at $49, which the X Mentions Tracker flagged as getting heavy local pickup: 23 mentions in six days, including two micro-influencers with Austin fitness audiences. The Growth Analyst digest on April 4th cross-referenced this: your own trial signups dipped 18% in the last week of March, directly overlapping with Competitor B's promo push. The Friday digest suggested raising your own intro offer from 'first class free' to a three-class package at $55 — still below Competitor A's $59, but giving new members enough exposure to actually convert. The owner updated the intro offer on April 7th. None of this required a single CSV export or a Sunday-night spreadsheet session.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Competitor drop-in price delta vs. your own (tracked weekly)

Competitor Google/Yelp review velocity (new reviews per month)

Local X mention share — your studio vs. named competitors

Your trial-to-membership conversion rate in weeks when competitors run promos

Class format overlap score — how many of your top 5 classes does each competitor also offer

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Manual Google + Instagram research on a spreadsheet

Free but takes 2-3 hours per week, produces no trend data, and only runs when you remember to do it — which is never during a busy week.

SEMrush or Similarweb

Good for website traffic intelligence but tells you nothing about class pricing, schedule gaps, or intro offers — the actual competitive levers in a fitness studio market.

Mindbody Business Insights

Shows you your own studio's data in aggregate but has no view of what competitors are charging or how their schedule is changing; you'd still need a separate research process.

Hiring a marketing assistant to do weekly comp research

A part-time hire at $18-25/hr doing 3 hours/week is $2,500-4,000/year for a task Starch automates end-to-end on a schedule.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — x mentions tracker, knowledge management, growth analyst all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Mindbody doesn't have a public API for independent studios. How does Starch actually pull competitor data from it?

Starch automates it through your browser — no API needed. The same way you'd navigate to a competitor's Mindbody booking page and read their schedule yourself, Starch does that on a schedule and extracts the data. If it's on a webpage you can load in a browser, Starch can read it.

Will this work for competitors who use MarianaTek, Wodify, or their own booking system instead of Mindbody?

Yes. Browser automation isn't limited to Mindbody — it works on any website. You give Starch the URL of each competitor's booking or pricing page, and it navigates and extracts. The platform they built on doesn't matter.

Is Starch SOC 2 certified? I'm cautious about connecting anything to my studio's accounts.

Starch is not SOC 2 Type II certified yet. Worth knowing if your studio has compliance obligations. For competitive research specifically, the browser automation is navigating public-facing pages that any visitor can access — you're not connecting your Mindbody account or handing Starch your login credentials for competitor systems.

I don't use PostHog. Can Growth Analyst still be useful for this workflow?

Growth Analyst as a pre-built app is built around PostHog. But you can describe a custom version to Starch — 'read the competitive snapshots in my wiki each week and write me a digest with the three most important changes' — and Starch will build that as a custom automation without needing PostHog at all.

What happens when a competitor changes their website layout and the scraper breaks?

Browser automation is resilient to most layout changes because it's using AI to extract meaning from the page rather than a brittle CSS selector. But major site redesigns can break it. When that happens, you'd re-describe the page to Starch ('their pricing is now under a tab called Rates, not on the homepage') and Starch adjusts. It's not zero-maintenance, but it's far less fragile than a traditional scraper.

How far back does the competitive history go?

It starts from when you set the automation up. Starch is designed for live data surfaces, not long-horizon data warehousing — so if you want a 12-month historical record, start now. The wiki accumulates each week's snapshot, and trend queries work across whatever you've collected.