Jimenez Julien, founder and product lead of TutuTerm

Why I built TutuTerm

TutuTerm started with a shoebox. A studio owner in Delaware County, Pennsylvania hired me to fix a website, and while we talked she pulled out the box where costume measurements lived: index cards, three text message screenshots printed at the library, and one envelope with a girth number written on it in eyeliner pencil. She had 187 dancers, a recital in eleven weeks, and a costume vendor cutoff she was going to miss. Nothing about her situation was disorganization. She was running a business with a season shaped like nothing else in software, and every tool she had been sold treated her studio like a gym with a class calendar.

I spent that spring watching what actually happens between June and the last curtain call. Placement is a judgment call that depends on a teacher's memory. Costume sizing is a data collection problem disguised as a craft problem. And the recital fee is not really a price, it is a cash flow event that hits families at the worst month of the year and takes dancers out of the routine when it lands wrong. Those three things, in that order, decide whether a studio ends the season with a surplus or with a stack of uncollected balances. So I built for those three things and refused to build a general purpose booking product around them.

The first version ran a single studio through a fall term in 2021. It was rough. Placement letters went out with the wrong studio room on them, and I drove up to apologize in person. What I learned that week has shaped everything since: in this trade, the software is standing between a woman and the families who trust her, so it has to be quiet, correct and easy to explain over the front desk. A director should never have to say the words "the system did that" to a parent.

Experience and expertise

I have spent fifteen years building operational software for owner run businesses, the last five of them entirely on dance and performing arts studios. Before TutuTerm I built scheduling and billing systems for small clinics and trades where the operator is also the person doing the work, which is exactly the constraint here: whoever uses this product is teaching a class in forty minutes. I read costume vendor order specifications the way other founders read competitor pricing pages, and I keep a working knowledge of how the major houses want a size run submitted, because that file is the difference between one order and three.

• Sat in on 300 or more enrollment weeks with studio directors in 43 states since 2021
• Rebuilt the measurement form four times based on watching parents fail at it on a phone
• Wrote the level ladder engine so that no studio has to adopt anyone else's syllabus names
• Handle escalated support personally between June and October, the months that matter

How this product is built and maintained

TutuTerm ships small changes weekly and never ships anything that touches placement, sizing or billing during a studio's open enrollment window without telling the affected accounts first. Every release note is written in plain English and sent to the address on the account, not buried in an app notification. I do not run advertising trackers on this website, and the product does not use your family data for anything except running your studio.

Editorially, the standard is simple: nothing on this site is claimed unless a studio has told me it happened. The numbers on the home page come from studios that completed a full fall and spring season on the platform and compared their own books. When a figure changes, the page changes. When a feature is planned but not built, it does not appear on the site at all, in any tense.

Roadmap decisions are made against a list I keep of what directors ask for during the season, weighted by how many hours it saves in the enrollment window. Features that only help a large multi site chain wait until they also help a single studio owner working from her office off the lobby.

Contact the author

Write to me at jimenezjulien42@gmail.com. If you are mid season and something is broken, put the word "season" in your subject line and it moves to the top of my morning. I answer every message myself, and I am happy to look at your class grid before you have any intention of buying anything.