How Studio Bloom Scaled to $1M+ Annual Revenue by Transforming its Tech Stack

In 2009, Brooke Cates, a certified personal trainer specialized in pre and postnatal care, noticed a gap in the market: there were no fitness programs for women during pregnancy and after giving birth. 

Fast forward to 2024, Brooke and her team have successfully filled this gap with their at-home fitness membership app, Studio Bloom. The Studio Bloom team went on to create the perfect fitness content library with over 600+ classes spanning across multiple categories, collections, and experiences. 

With 5100+ paying subscribers and a 76% watch time in the past six months, the Studio Bloom membership app has empowered women at every stage of motherhood, helping them experience a stronger pregnancy and post-partum journey.  

The key to Brooke's success? 

Creating a highly tailored solution for her niche audience and delivering it in a way that’s easy to consume, engage with, and fall in love with. 

But Brooke's journey wasn't without challenges. As she expanded her business, she needed to continually adapt to the evolving needs of her members and team. Initially, Brooke tried using platforms like Intelivideo and Vimeo OTT to support her membership business. Although these platforms provided valuable features, they ultimately fell short in meeting the unique and growing demands of Studio Bloom’s expanding community and diverse content offerings.

“Women love options. And sometimes there are some stigmas that can be attached to pre and post-natal fitness. We tend to push the boundary with those stigmas because we are very innovative in our methodology and we believe that women can move their bodies however they want to move their bodies as long as they implement a certain foundational piece of core and pelvic floor awareness.” 

-Brooke Cates, CEO and Founder, The Bloom Method 

Like most creators with membership businesses, Brooke’s growth wasn’t as simple or linear as it might look. 

Two months after launching the mobile app Brooke became a new mama. 

Running brick-and-mortar studios in Boulder and Denver while also managing a new app was becoming overwhelming. After over 10 months, Brooke decided to prioritize the mobile app and made a strategic decision to close the brick-and-mortar store. This step would enable her to seize better monetization opportunities, reduce time commitments, and accelerate business growth faster. 

“We were a bootstrap company leading with a passion that we wanted to put out in the world. And there was so much trial and error. We went from one camera to two cameras, boom mics to actual mics. I mean, it's just do it like just put it out there because as you grow, you can always kind of like perfect the experience that you want people to have.”

-Brooke Cates, CEO and Founder, The Bloom Method 

While the large content library hosted on Vimeo OTT ticked all the boxes from a membership business perspective, it posed the challenge of overwhelming members due to its volume. Coupled with an ever-growing membership on Studio Bloom’s app, the team kept going back to the whiteboard to figure out: 

• How can they improve their content library's navigation and thus the member experience?
• How to find a platform that’s truly tailored to their business’s rapid growth and scalability?

Brooke wanted to focus on member experience and as part of that, she needed to find a platform that enabled her to make her prenatal and postnatal programs more accessible for new mamas. She also wanted more control over how she packaged content so it looks and feels more cohesive and delivers it in a way that maximizes member engagement and retention. 

Everything from the ability to create Collections within collections, to allowing for more efficient categorization and navigation of her extensive guided programs. 

With Uscreen, she streamlined her members’ access to her Bloom Method programs, fostering a loyal community keen on health, support, and shared learning experiences.

Since migrating her membership from Vimeo OTT to Uscreen in June 2020, Brooke has driven thousands of members to her fitness mobile app and increased her annual recurring revenue.

“With both Intelivideo and Vimeo, they may have had the desire to support us as clients and their other clients, but they weren't scaling and growing and truly listening to their clients the way that Uscreen does. Neither one of them ever developed and continued developing all of these new things in a way. As fast as Uscreen does it and that has been mindblowing to us, it feels so supportive.” 

-Brooke Cates, CEO and Founder, The Bloom Method

One of the most important goals for Brooke was to make her membership app as accessible as possible for her members. For this, she needed to strategically organize her video content library so her members could easily navigate around the 600+ classes she and her team had built over the years. 

She soon migrated to Uscreen to develop all 6 available mobile and TV apps: iOS, Android, tvOS, Android TV, Roku, and Fire TV. She also launched her white-labeled Apple Watch fitness tracker app using Uscreen. 

With the Studio Bloom app available across different channels, members now have an easy, user-friendly way to use the app wherever and whenever they like. They can access customized training programs, meditations, and guided challenges on any device, and even chat with guest speakers, coaches, and other members in the community forum. 

“Uscreen is so on it in development and scaling evolution, like in an evolution for your clients. Ultimately for our members, sometimes we get the feedback and I don't even have to tell you guys to think about it before you're already doing it. That’s a big one.”

-Brooke Cates, CEO and Founder, The Bloom Method 

“The success of the apps showed me I could have more freedom for myself and my family and a greater reach for my business,” Brooke explains. “They did laps around what we could do financially with in-person studios and allowed us to reach a global space.”

With Uscreen, Studio Bloom has been able to cater to its evolving team’s and members’ needs. Not only that, the business has grown significantly after migrating to Uscreen. 

“We had already left Vimeo six months before our contract ended with them because we were so impressed with Uscreen and we knew that we needed to break free from the confines of what at the time Vimeo was as an LTT platform and we wanted the freedom that Uscreen really offered us.”

-Brooke Cates, CEO and Founder, The Bloom Method

One of Brooke’s favorite Uscreen features is Community. It gives her complete control and flexibility to set up public and private channels, limit community access, and moderate conversations in the community. 

Best part is, the community is fully integrated within Studio Bloom’s app, allowing them to drive mobile app engagement with push notifications while giving fans easy access 24/7. Brooke also uses a third-party tool called Videoask to offer a deeper level of support to her members via audio and video chat. 

“I think Uscreen is a cleaner, less clunky interface than other platforms we've used in the past.”

-Brooke Cates, CEO and Founder, The Bloom Method 

Calendar for web, mobile apps, Roku

Brooke shared that her members’ favorite feature is Calendar. It allows members to understand what to watch and when. This is especially helpful for the Studio Bloom apps given they host a large catalog of content (600+ classes), which can be difficult to navigate for members. 

In this video, Brooke shares her methodology for growing her membership:

Story Written By: Aarushi Singh