The people behind the tech

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.

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. 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. It was 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.

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.

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 here, getting his first Tiger white belt). The experience changed everything, and it's why they share what they built.

Revenue records are 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.