GuavaPass is a monthly fitness membership that lets people attend a wide range of gyms/ fitness studios in their cities, with just a single pass.
Singapore based founders, Rob & Jeff realised that they were at the brink of an opportunity, when they experienced that they couldn't get a quality fitness experience, despite the city having many good fitness centres.
Thus GuavaPass was born, to put an end to all less-than-amazing fitness experiences.
Starting Out
GuavaPass, like all marketplaces, had to first build their supply to market their product. Hence they were signing up fitness studios of all shapes and sizes as partners.
As the business model began getting popular and people developed a liking towards the concept of non-boring workouts, GuavaPass realised they had to scale fast. They were looking at expanding quickly to different countries and cities across Asia and the Middle East and signing up more members.
GuavaPass's core monetization was the subscription fee, where users paid a fixed rate for a monthly pass.
The Challenge
To manage their subscriptions, GuavaPass had built a homegrown billing solution on top of a payment gateway. The subscription module, although pretty basic, was sufficient for them to get up and running.
But soon they understood it was a mistake.
As they were scaling rapidly and adding more memberships, the need for more advanced features popped up. The basic payment gateway which couldn't support most of these features out-of-the-box meant they had to build it themselves.
With subscriptions at the heart of their business and growing billing needs, they realised that their homegrown billing solution wasn't built to handle these features.
Discovering Chargebee
When they were on the lookout for a solution, they came across Chargebee. The flexibility of the API and the readymade coupon management system stood out to them.
They were happy with what they saw, but there was a catch.
Since a membership subscription model was the core to GuavaPass's business, switching their billing solution with active subscriptions was like changing the engine (not the tyres) of a moving car.
GuavaPass was apprehensive about porting their subscriptions because:
- Existing subscriptions should continue to renew.
- GuavaPass should continue on-boarding new customers.
- Payment information of existing customers should remain intact.
Although this seemed like a herculean task, Chargebee had hand-held many such tricky migration processes before and in no time, GuavaPass had all their existing subscriptions ported to Chargebee.
Now GuavaPass manages its new and existing memberships completely with Chargebee, having let go of their homegrown system.
How they use Chargebee
It's not just the daily ops of GuavaPass that got better after switching to Chargebee, expanding globally has gotten easier too.
With Chargebee's array of features built for global businesses like them, expanding to new countries has most definitely been a breeze for GuavaPass.
While stepping into a new region, all their team does now to handle billing is choose the payment option, configure the corresponding country's currency and that's it.
Here's a quick look at how GuavaPass's team uses Chargebee.
GuavaPass's Account Managers manage subscriptions by logging directly into Chargebee's interface. They use it for managing coupons, extending trials and other day to day operations.
The Operations team uses it for handling their revenue and checking the payouts. The dev team did use Chargebee for the initial integration, but don't use it anymore.
Features they love
Handling & Webhooks
with trials
Switching to Chargebee for managing subscriptions has helped GuavaPass scale rapidly, saved time and effort on their part, thus enabling them to focus on what they do best: Making more people to achieve their fitness goals!
Smart teams like GuavaPass use Chargebee to handle their billing needs. Sign up for a free trial with Chargebee and explore what it can do for your business.
P.S. If you're based out of Asia, try GuavaPass and knock the boredom off your workouts :)
Coupons & Discounts
Coupons and coupon sets are extensively used to setup flexible campaigns and run promotions. Learn more about Discount Management
Trials Management
Experimenting with trials to onboard more customers in different geographies is important. Learn more about Trial Management
More Payment methods
With a global customer base, Chargebee enables various payment methods like Card, Paypal, ACH, SEPA etc. Learn more about Payment Options