Payal Kadakia: How a Dancer Built ClassPass Into a Billion-Dollar Fitness Empire

What happens when you give yourself just 14 days to come up with a startup idea? For Payal Kadakia, that self-imposed deadline led to one of the most successful fitness technology companies in history. ClassPass, the subscription platform that connects millions of people with fitness classes worldwide, was born from a simple frustration: Kadakia couldn't find a ballet class after work.

But the journey from frustrated dancer to founder of a billion-dollar company wasn't straightforward. It took three major pivots, countless failures, and the kind of resilience that only comes from knowing exactly what problem you're trying to solve.

From Bollywood Dreams to MIT

Payal Kadakia's story begins in the basement of her childhood home in Randolph, New Jersey. At three years old, she started learning Indian folk dance from her mother's best friend. Every weekend meant dance competitions and performances across the East Coast.

Growing up as one of the only Indian families in her town wasn't easy. Kadakia was often made fun of and felt like an outsider. When she performed an Indian folk dance for her school talent show, she was laughed off the stage and didn't want to return to school.

Dance became her refuge. In a neighboring town's Indian community, she found people who looked like her and understood her culture. "The dance training helped me learn about my culture because I was being born and raised in America, giving me a sense of identity," Kadakia has said. "At the same time, it provided expression and passion."

That passion followed her to MIT, where she studied Operations Research and Economics while founding MIT Chamak, the university's first Indian dance company. After graduation, she joined Bain & Company as an analyst—the expected path for an MIT graduate—but her heart remained in dance.

The Idea That Changed Everything

In 2008, while still working in consulting, Kadakia founded the Sa Dance Company to give Indian dancers a professional stage beyond wedding performances. The side hustle revealed a growing tension between the life she wanted and the path society told her defined success.

Then came the moment that would change everything.

One evening in 2011, Kadakia tried to find an after-work ballet class in New York City. What should have been a simple search turned into hours of frustration as she combed through countless websites with fragmented information. "If exercise is hard enough on its own," she realized, "why are we making it even harder for people to find classes?"

She gave herself 14 days to come up with a solution. That deadline pressure led to the birth of Classtivity—a search engine for fitness classes modeled after OpenTable and Zocdoc.

Three Pivots to Product-Market Fit

Here's where most startup stories skip ahead to success. Kadakia's journey shows what really happens.

Pivot 1: The Beautiful Failure

Classtivity launched with press coverage and backing from Techstars, the prestigious startup accelerator. From the outside, it looked like a winning formula.

Inside, Kadakia was facing a harsh reality: zero traction. Despite the beautiful website and media attention, no one was actually booking classes through the platform.

"I had to remind myself that press was not an indicator of what was actually going on with our company," Kadakia recalls. It was a humbling lesson that stuck with her: the only thing that matters is revenue coming in. Positive feedback and beautiful design mean nothing without actual customer behavior.

Pivot 2: The Passport Era

Rather than give up, Kadakia scrapped the search model entirely and introduced something new: the Passport. For $49, users could take 10 classes at different studios within 30 days.

This time, something clicked. The product generated 20,000 reservations in its first six months—not viral growth, but real traction.

Then customers started gaming the system. They created multiple email addresses to access unlimited studio variety. Instead of fighting this behavior with restrictions, Kadakia made a crucial decision: she listened to what customers were telling her through their actions.

The insight was profound. People didn't just want affordable classes. They craved variety. They wanted to try spin on Monday, yoga on Wednesday, and boxing on Friday—all without committing to any single studio.

Pivot 3: The Subscription Breakthrough

In June 2013, Kadakia launched a subscription model allowing members to attend unlimited classes at partner studios for a monthly fee. The cap was three visits per studio per month, preserving the variety customers loved while protecting studio relationships.

The results were dramatic. Within months, ClassPass went from 20,000 to 100,000 reservations. They had found product-market fit.

The Billion-Dollar Validation

ClassPass raised $549 million across nine funding rounds. In its Series E, the company was valued at $1 billion, making it the first unicorn of the 2020s in the fitness space.

By the time Mindbody acquired ClassPass in October 2021, the platform was live in over 2,500 cities globally, partnering with more than 30,000 studios and accounting for nearly 100 million reservations.

Nine Lessons for Building Your Business

Kadakia's journey offers practical lessons for any entrepreneur:

1. Fall in Love with the Problem, Not Your Idea

"An idea is important, but the problem you're trying to solve in the world is the most important thing," Kadakia emphasizes. When your first solution fails, you'll need that deep commitment to the underlying problem to keep going. ClassPass survived three major pivots because Kadakia never lost sight of her mission: removing the barriers that prevent people from staying active.

2. Measure What Matters

Press coverage, social media followers, investor meetings—none of these mean anything without actual customer behavior. Kadakia learned to distinguish between "steam" (customer-driven energy) and "wind" (external tailwinds like press). Only steam powers sustainable growth.

3. Let Customer Behavior Guide You

Instead of building extensive guardrails, ClassPass let users interact freely with the product. This organic approach revealed that variety was "unbelievably important to people"—an insight that became the company's core value proposition.

4. Start Small and Manual

Before building complex booking systems, Kadakia manually processed reservations herself. This hands-on approach revealed that 50% of cancellations happened within 15 minutes of booking—a crucial insight that shaped the platform's cancellation policies. "Your insights into customers are your solution."

5. A Good Offer Beats Slick Design

Kadakia learned that validating demand through direct outreach was more effective than polishing a website. When you're finding product-market fit, a compelling offer matters more than aesthetics.

6. Be Willing to Kill Your Darlings

When shifting to subscriptions, the team had to kill the search engine they'd built over two and a half years. It was painful, but necessary. "You have to lead with conviction rather than hesitation," Kadakia advises.

7. Find Your North Star Metric

ClassPass focused on reservations per person as their guiding metric. This single number touched churn, revenue, engagement, and customer satisfaction simultaneously. Find the one metric that captures everything important about your business.

8. Stay Humble at Any Scale

Even after partnering with 15,000 studios across 80+ cities, Kadakia maintained perspective. "We're still small in the scheme of the impact we want to have on the world. And I think you have to always keep that mentality."

9. Embrace Failure as Data

"First thing is you have to embrace failure," Kadakia says about pivoting effectively. Every failed iteration provided insights that shaped the eventual success. The DNA of ClassPass became one of iterating fast and pivoting—a skill that proved invaluable when the pandemic forced the company to transform its app into a video platform within a week.

The Dancer's Advantage

Throughout her entrepreneurial journey, Kadakia never stopped dancing. She credits her dance background for much of her success: "I truly believe it was the dancer in me that built ClassPass," she says, referring to her creativity, self-discipline, and community focus.

When the early growth phase got difficult—including being maced and mugged at a coffee shop—Kadakia channeled her experience into weight training. Getting stronger physically reinforced her commitment to the company's mission of helping others feel powerful through movement.

"We can only be creative when our minds and bodies are connected," she explains. Movement became her way of clearing her mind and solving professional challenges. Her greatest business insights often came during choreography and dancing.

From Passion to Purpose

In 2022, Kadakia published her book "LifePass," sharing the goal-setting method that transformed both her approach to business and to life. The core message? When you let go of the pressure to achieve a traditional kind of success and tune into your calling instead, remarkable things become possible.

ClassPass wasn't built by someone who saw a market opportunity and exploited it. It was built by a dancer who couldn't find a ballet class and refused to accept that problem as unsolvable.

That's the real lesson of Payal Kadakia's story. The best businesses don't just solve problems—they solve problems the founder genuinely cares about. When the inevitable failures come, that authentic connection to the mission is what keeps you going.

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