About Jimenez Julien, the author behind MatCount

Why a yoga studio scheduling product

I did not come to this trade from a mat. I came to it from a spreadsheet. A studio owner in Somerville asked me to look at the file she used to pay her teachers, because it had grown to nine tabs and she no longer trusted it. It held every class taught in a year, four rate tiers, workshop splits, a head count bonus that started at fourteen students, and a column of handwritten corrections in a different color. She was rebuilding that file by hand every month, at night, after her last class. That file is the reason MatCount exists.

What struck me was not that the spreadsheet was complicated. It was that the hard part happened before the spreadsheet. Every line in it started as a message: who is free Thursday, can anyone take the 6:15, did you actually teach the restorative or did Priya cover it. The pay problem was really a coverage problem wearing a different hat. So I built the coverage side first, made it record what happened, and let the pay run fall out of that record instead of being reconstructed from memory two weeks later.

What I learned about this trade

Three things, quickly. First, a studio roster is not a staff. It is a group of independent professionals with their own schedules, their own studios elsewhere, and their own reasons for saying no on a Wednesday. Any tool that assigns classes instead of offering them creates friction and, in some states, a legal question the owner does not want. So MatCount offers. A teacher claims, or she does not, and nothing about that is automatic on her behalf.

Second, the phone is the device. Teachers open this thing in a hallway between a 9:30 and an 11:00, with a bag on one shoulder. If a task takes more than three taps it will not get done, and the owner will end up texting anyway. Every screen on the teacher side is built to that constraint, and I test it standing up.

Third, owners are not asking for more analytics. They are asking for the evening back. The measure I care about is not dashboard engagement, it is whether the coverage message you used to send at ten at night still gets sent. On the studios I check in with, it mostly does not, and that is the whole point of the product.

How I work with studio owners

I run the onboarding calls myself for the first months of any studio's life on MatCount. That means I have watched a lot of weekly grids get imported and I have heard a lot of rate rules explained out loud, including the ones that only make sense once you know the owner promised a teacher something in 2019 and intends to keep it. Those conversations shape the roadmap far more than any feature request form does. When three owners in different states describe the same friction in different words, that becomes the next thing I build.

I also stay out of the parts of the business that are not mine. MatCount does not touch student bookings, memberships or card payments, and it does not file anyone's taxes. Your booking platform and your CPA are better at those than I would be, and pretending otherwise would put your studio at risk to make my product look bigger.

Experience and expertise

Founder of MLJ, SASU, the company that publishes MatCount and operates it as a live service for studios across the United States.
Fifteen years building operational software for businesses that run on rosters, shifts and variable pay rather than fixed salaries.
Direct onboarding work with independent yoga studios in Illinois, Texas, Oregon, North Carolina and Massachusetts, including two location operators sharing one teaching pool.
Hands on with the accounting side: pay run structures, contractor rate rules, head count bonuses, workshop revenue splits and the CSV formats payroll providers actually accept.
Accessibility and performance practice: every page of this site and every screen of the product is built to work on an old phone on studio wifi.

How this product is built and maintained

MatCount ships small and often. Changes to anything touching pay go out behind a review with at least one studio owner reading the numbers before the release, because a rounding error in a pay run is not a bug report, it is somebody's rent. Schedule and coverage changes ship weekly. Every rate edit, request, claim and decline is written to an audit record that owners can read, so a disagreement about who was asked to cover a class is settled by the log rather than by memory.

The editorial standard for this site is the same standard. Every number on the home page comes from the operating roster of studios, not from a projection. The testimonials are from named owners at named studios who agreed to be quoted. Pricing on the pricing table is the price you pay, with no setup fee hidden behind a call. When a figure changes, the page changes with it, and the last updated dates on the legal pages are real.

What I am accountable for

Uptime, accuracy of the pay run, the security of studio and teacher data, and answering the support address within one business day. If a class goes uncovered because a notification did not send, I want to hear about it directly and I will tell you what happened. If MatCount is not right for your studio, I would rather say so on the first call than sell you a year of it.

Contact the author

Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com for anything: a question about the product, a correction to this site, a press request, or a walkthrough of your own schedule. You can also start from the request form on the home page if you would rather answer a few questions first.

Jimenez Julien, the person behind MatCount