You just signed up 15 new students this month. Great news, right? Not if 12 of them quit within 90 days. Student retention is the silent killer of martial arts academies.
Mindbody serves 60,000+ fitness businesses worldwide. Kombat Evolve is built specifically for BJJ and martial arts academies in Europe. Here's how they compare.
Running a successful Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu academy is about more than just teaching technique. Between chasing down payments, tracking belt progressions, managing class schedules, and monitoring competition teams, the administrative side can quickly overwhelm even the most passionate instructors.
Last month, a black belt instructor contacted us in panic. He'd just promoted 8 students to blue belt... and couldn't remember the exact dates for their certificates. His Excel spreadsheet had crashed, and three years of promotion history vanished.
Every martial arts academy owner knows the painful truth: 90% of students quit before earning their blue belt. The problem isn't your teaching. It isn't the quality of your program. The problem is invisible progress.
The standard answer: 18-24 months. The real answer: most never find out because they quit first. Here's the data, the drop-off phases, and how to survive to blue belt.
The standard answer is 18–24 months of training. The real answer is that most students never find out because they quit first. Here’s why 70% never make it to blue belt—and how to be in the 30% that does.
You're a coach, not an administrator. Yet every class starts the same way: you're mentally tracking who's arrived, trying to remember who checked in, keeping an eye on trial students, and somehow expected to start teaching on time while managing all this in your head.
Running a BJJ gym requires more than great coaching. You need systems to track belt progression, manage payments, and keep students from quitting. Here's how Kicksite and Kombat Evolve compare.
You're researching BJJ gym software. MAAT promises 'simplest way to run your academy.' But managing operations doesn't solve the €25,000 problem: student churn.
Choosing gym management software is confusing. PushPress and Kombat Evolve both appear in searches for 'BJJ gym software' - but they solve completely different problems for different sports.
Here's a number that should terrify every academy owner in Europe: 90% of BJJ students quit before blue belt. For every 10 white belts who walk through your door, only 1 makes it to blue. The other 9? Gone.
Competition day. Your heart's pounding. Adrenaline floods your system. You step onto the mats and suddenly—your mind goes blank. Every technique you've drilled for months? Gone.
If you've ever wondered why BJJ students quit after just a few months, this is exactly what's happening in your gym right now. Marc came to your academy every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday morning. Four months in, he was progressing well. Then he started missing Wednesdays.
I'm not a tech entrepreneur who researched the gym management software market and found a gap. I'm a BJJ coach who got frustrated with messy Excel spreadsheets and decided to learn to code.