The people behind the tech
Our founders built MyStudio to solve their own problems as studio owners — and scaled five studios to $1M each doing it. Now it exists to help other martial arts and enrichment schools do the same.
What shapes our approach
The beliefs, jobs, experiences, and lessons that decide what MyStudio builds — and what it doesn't.
What we believe
Our clients are contributing positively to society - educating our youth, instilling confidence in people of all ages, making meaningful relationships. We respect and admire who we serve with our software.
That belief impacts how we show up for our customers, what we build, and how we shape our company culture.
What we're hired to do
We believe that our customers hire us to help them build a stable, growing, respected school that doesn't consume their life.
We take this job seriously and it shapes everything we do at our company.
What we've lived
Our founders have 30+ years in the martial arts as athletes, instructors, owners, franchisees, licensees, and coaches. They still own their studios.
That helps us build from understanding and empathy, not theory.
What we've learned
World-class business education (Harvard, Kellogg) shapes how MyStudio thinks about systems, growth, and operational rigor.
We want to pay it forward by making our learnings accessible to our clients, by infusing them into the platform and the content we share.
The ceiling, the consultant, and the company
How a taekwondo instructor and a management consultant broke the invisible cap on a martial arts studio, then packaged the way out.
The invisible cap
Tu started taekwondo at 13, was a pre-olympic athlete, and eventually bought his first studio from his instructor at 25. He loved teaching students and making a difference for families in the community. But paper sign-up sheets, manual follow-ups, and manual billing consumed his and his team's evenings and weekends.
Tu enrolled at Harvard Business School, and there he quickly realized that with all the studio's manual work, there was an invisible cap on how much they could grow.
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The secret shopper
Then Tu married Linnette, a management consultant who helped the world's largest companies out-innovate disruption. She studied their studios the way she'd study any client — secret-shopping the student experience and observing operations — and together they upgraded how things worked.
The birth of InCourage
Best practices replaced busywork. The studios ran more efficiently, students had a better experience, and the team's time went to teaching. When their 10-year franchise commitment ended, they launched their own brand: InCourage Martial Arts.
The breakthrough
They found they were stitching together disjointed tools to run the business — inefficient, expensive, and full of gaps. No software on the market could do what they needed to break the ceiling on growth. So they built it themselves. MyStudio was born.
Proof, before they asked anyone else to trust it
The year they launched MyStudio, Tu and Linnette opened their third InCourage location in Fairfax, VA to test a theory: could one full-time instructor run a successful school with MyStudio doing the rest? They could. Eight years later, that studio is approaching $1M with just two full-timers — a fraction of what most schools that size require.
The ultimate test
Then life stopped. Their newborn was diagnosed with cancer, and they spent the next nine months living at the hospital. For most studio owners, that would have ended the business. "I didn't have to choose between being there for my child and keeping our business afloat," Linnette says. "I could manage much of our business from his bedside. Our teams had what they needed."
Tough times find every owner eventually. We want every owner equipped when they do.
Our why
Their son made a full recovery (he's pictured below, getting his first Tiger white belt). The experience changed everything, and it's why they share what they built.
Today, Tu and Linnette's five locations average $1M+ each with an average 30% net. No sacrificed weekends. Healthy wages and benefits for everyone. And revenue records broken every year, because the team focuses on students instead of admin.
As one MyStudio customer put it: "MyStudio gives me my life back, while also making it so I can make a living." That freedom is the whole point.
Build a studio that supports your life
The systems that carried our founders through their hardest year are built into MyStudio. See what they can do for your school.