Payal Kadakia

REDIRECTClassPass

Background:

Payal is an American citizen born of two Indian immigrants in New Jersey. Her parents immigrated in the 70s and greatly valued education. They pushed Payal and moved into a school district which was #1 rated in the state. In her early life, she was an avid dancer and made fitness part of her life (Gelles, 2019). Following grade school, she went to M.I.T. due to her love of math and science. Once she graduated, she went to work for Bain. In her free time, Indian dancing became a large part of her life to the point where she was a professional. Throughout her dancing career, she met many who followed other forms of dancing. She found an interest in ballet, but learned it was hard to find available classes. If only it was easy to find and book dancing classes. Along came ClassPass.

Innovation: ClassPass is an online platform for booking exercise classes. Payal first thought of the idea when she went to San Fransisco to meet some friends who spent all their time designing apps. She came to understand the importance of online platforms, and when she found it hard to book ballet classes, the idea showed itself. The pain point was further explored when Payal discovered that there were many who had the same trouble as she did. Once she prototyped her site. Then, she went to work designing a search engine for classes which became Classtivity. This was an early version of ClassPass that failed. The pricing model was hard to understand for consumers and was expensive. When she launched ClassPass, she tuned the pricing model to follow what her target consumers wanted. In her first round of financing, Payal raised $350 million and was off to the races.