Researching the number of gyms using MindBody SaaS

Activore is considering API integration partners. Web-based member management software is a natural fit.

An advanced google search of the clients.mindbodyonline.com site for gym, fitness center, crossfit, or club resulted in a very thin few pages of results.

Turns out this is mostly because MindBody is doing an atrocious job showing its members any search engine love. Seriously, i wonder if it is intentional search engine anti-optimization, but i don't know why. As a health club i'd be happy if people found me through my schedule instead of my web site directly if the schedule came up first.

Using the MindBodyOnline client finder at least it returns more than 420 results for clients with the word "gym" on their schedule page, so probably in the title, since precious little customization of text, pictures, or other content occurs on MindBodyOnline scheduling pages.

This is still very few for a world-wide result set. Drilling down to Massachusetts, which is possible to do at the clients.mindbodyonline.com/ASP/finder.asp page, results in just four results— not four pages, four gyms.

Looking in New York City is hard because it seems MindBodyOnline doesn't provide a location taxonomy but lets studios put in their own, hence there's Manhattan, Brooklyn, New York City, and New York (as a city) and neither of the latter are supersets including the former.

Based on searching "gym" and "club" there does not appear to be a single full-service gym using MindBody in New York City. The closest i ran across, at least, the place with the busiest schedule, was an all-Zumba place, ZclubNY.

Searching for "fitness" returned a lot more results. Among those that look like reasonably full-service gym / health club / fitness center type places are:

• Five Points Academy (schedule)
• Three Blink Fitness locations including Chelsea (appointment scheduler), Murray Hill, and Penn Plaza

And, uh, that's it. Yikes. Absence of results doesn't prove absence of gyms, but it seems pretty clear that there aren't enough out there to do trials even with the idea of going national or expecting market share to grow.

On to the next membership management software providing an API...