Playbooks · 5 min read
Yoga Studios: Point at the Timetable, Never Recite It
Half a yoga studio's DMs are one question. "What time is the morning class?" "Sunday ko class hai?" "Is the 7am beginner or general?" "Kal evening wali kaunsi hai?"
It is the most automatable question in the account and it is also the one that will make your automation lie to people, because the timetable is the least stable thing you own and templates do not know that.
Your schedule changes more often than you think it does
Write the week out and it feels permanent. Then: a teacher is travelling and the Thursday 6:30 becomes a different style. A public holiday closes Monday. The prenatal class moves because two people in it are due. A workshop takes the studio on Saturday morning. Someone covers a class and the register changes without the time changing.
None of that is unusual. It is a normal quarter. And every one of those changes silently breaks a template that has "6:30am Ashtanga, Monday to Friday" written into it — which then keeps telling strangers something untrue, from your account, at three in the morning, for as long as you forget it is there.
A timetable inside a template is a copy of the truth that nobody ever remembers to update.
One source of truth, and the template points at it
The rule that makes a yoga account work is small and it fixes almost everything: the automation may point at the timetable, never state it.
Practically that means every schedule-shaped reply ends at the same place — the booking page, the pinned highlight, the app your studio uses, whatever single surface you already keep current. When the Thursday class moves you change it once, there, and every automation you have ever written is correct again without you touching any of them.
- Pick the one surface you will actually maintain. Usually the booking app or a pinned story highlight. If you would not update it on a Sunday night, it is the wrong surface.
- Write templates that describe shape, not times. "We run mornings and evenings on weekdays, and one weekend class" survives a reshuffle. "6:30 and 7:45" does not.
- Name the style and level in the reply, because those are stable. What Hatha is, whether beginners can join the general class, whether you need to bring a mat. None of that moves when a time does.
- Send the link. Every time, in the first message, because the DM window may not be open when they come back to ask.
- Capture the enquiry. Which post produced it tells you which style people are actually shopping for.
Workshops and retreats are temporary automations
The exception that catches every studio once. You build an automation for the weekend workshop post — WORKSHOP gets the details, the fee page, the what-to-bring list. It is perfect for eleven days and wrong forever after.
Anything with a date in it goes into a temporary automation with a switch-off date in the same checklist as the actual event. Sold out, moved, postponed, done — the automation comes off at the same moment. Do not delete the post; retreat carousels keep being found and are half your marketing. Swap the reply instead: same trigger, new words, telling people this one has gone and asking to be told when the next is announced. Somebody who typed RETREAT under a Rishikesh post nine months late is a genuinely good lead.
Trials, passes and the question of whether a body can do this
The rest of the safe volume: whether there is a trial class, what a drop-in costs versus a pass, whether passes expire, whether you have showers, whether men attend, whether the class is in Hindi or English, whether mats are provided. All fixed, all templates, all free.
Then there is the other category, and it is the one to be careful with.
"Can I do this with a slipped disc?" "I'm four months pregnant, which class?" "I had a knee replacement last year." "Meri cervical ki problem hai."
Those are not enrolment questions. They are health questions, and the honest answer is that the teacher needs to know the person before anyone says yes. An automated reply here is a stranger's body being cleared by software.
The same restraint applies to outcome claims. Keep "cures", "fixes your back" and anything about weight out of your templates entirely — not because of a rule, but because a promise sent automatically to a stranger whose body you have not seen is one you will have to stand behind.
The clocks, and evening enquiries
Official Graph API. Seven days to reply to a comment, twenty-four hours inside a DM thread, restarted only when they message again.
For a studio the awkward one is quiet hours against the twenty-four hours. Somebody deciding at 10:20pm whether to start yoga on Monday is deciding now, with three studio accounts open. A reply landing at 8:03am arrives after they picked one. Late night genuinely off is right; a blanket 9pm cutoff is probably costing you the hour in which people decide to change something about their life.
Cost and limits
Templated replies are free and unlimited; a credit is spent only when the AI writes a new reply. A studio whose inbox is six repeating questions may spend very few. Free tier is 100 credits, no card; packs start at ₹499.
It cannot see or book a class, take a payment, hold a mat, or message anyone who has not messaged you first. It does not post or schedule. It does not do WhatsApp, and leads leave as a CSV.
Build the timetable pointer first, then read what got blocked in week one. If your studio also runs one-to-one work, what a trainer has to qualify for applies to that side of the business.
