Questions we get asked

Academies big enough that keeping track has become hard. In practice, once you pass about 100 members.

If your staff doesn't know who walked in today, they can't go up to someone and say: here, try it this way. When you know roughly who is on the mat, and you have had a moment to read up on them, looking after people gets much easier.

Some of the people in front of you are on their second class ever. If you can see that, you can guide them like beginners.

While your roster is small, you can remember everyone. You don't need us yet.

Of course.

There was a reason we built it around jiu-jitsu. Compared with other martial arts, jiu-jitsu academies seemed more willing to take on something new.

Which means the opposite is also true. Whatever you teach, if you want to bring in something new, we would like you to have this.

If paper and Excel are working, staying with them is absolutely the better choice.

But as the roster grows, you end up having to learn Excel itself: how to remove a member, add one, find one. With DOJO CORE, you decide the shape of that. Tell us you want it to work differently, and we change it.

Until now, people had to bend to the software. Development has become fast enough that software can bend to people instead. That is the kind of company we are. We will bend as far as you need.

Honestly, we have not gone through other services in detail.

What we did notice was how few of them we liked the look of. That bothered us enough to build our own.

An academy where most members don't carry a smartphone. There would be no way to use it.

The membership card and the member's own page both assume a phone.

If you ask us to change something later, we charge $50–100 per request. We send you a quote before we start.

We think that is on the cheap side.

Yes. It is based on your member count.

As it stands: up to 300 members is $100 a month, and above 300 members it is $200 a month.

One month. It is a month-to-month contract, so you can stop whenever you like.

Credit card, normally. We use Stripe for payments.

As a rule, no. The contract runs month to month, so billing simply stops from the month after you leave.

It is different if the fault is ours. If within 30 days of going live you tell us the system is not what we described, we refund every monthly fee you have paid. If a failure on our side keeps the system unusable for more than 48 hours in a month, we refund that month.

The Refunds and Cancellation page has the details.

First, let us ask you some questions. What you need, what you don't, how you want to work.

From there we reshape what we already have to fit your academy. That part takes a day or two.

Then you use it, tell us what you want changed, and we change it. A week if things go smoothly, up to about a month at the outside.

That whole period of adjustment is included in the setup fee. We think it is cheap.

One thing: what comes out of those first questions can change the setup fee. If it does, we always give you the number and wait for your go-ahead before starting.

Email us the roster you have now, as it is: Excel (.xlsx), CSV, that sort of thing. We load it in.

If it is digital, this is easy. If all you have is paper, that is beyond what we can do.

No.

For a while you run your old way and DOJO CORE side by side. Give yourself a period of using both, confirm nothing is missing, and then retire the old one.

An internet connection, and something with a screen.

You can run the admin side from a phone, but a computer is easier. If someone on staff is comfortable with a computer, all the more reason.

You also need something at the front desk to read the QR code. A phone or tablet is fine, or a dedicated QR reader, which runs about $50 on Amazon.

Yes.

Permissions are split between admin and staff, and the staff screen is built to work entirely on a phone. They only see what they need.

The admin screen opens on a phone too, but it handles more information, so a computer is easier to read.

As a rule, yes.

What we won't do is say yes on the spot. Give us time to check whether it can be done. Then we come back with a price and a timeline.

An hour if it is simple, up to a couple of days.

It depends on what it is. We check first, then tell you how long.

It can.

Be aware that WhatsApp or your booking service may require a paid plan on their side. Those contracts stay with you.

Whatever your members already use to talk to you, the idea is the same.

We do not collect money on your behalf.

What we can do is connect DOJO CORE to the system you collect with. Stripe, for instance.

There may be services better suited to collecting tuition in your country. We will look into that. If you already use one, tell us.

Yes.

We also run a video subscription service called SubPro — anyone can build their own video subscription on it.

Connect it to the DOJO CORE member page and your members watch your review footage and technique videos from the same page that holds their card.

You can charge separately for that footage, which makes it a new source of income for the academy.

Our view is that most jiu-jitsu academies are still thin on online support. Closing that gap makes members happier.

We set it up to suit you, and it is priced separately. Ask us.

Visit SubPro ↗

There is no app.

The membership card goes into the wallet already on their phone — Apple Wallet or Google Wallet — and they open it from there.

If you don't even want that, a printed QR sticker or a card works just as well. That part is up to you.

They can't use the member page, but they can still have a card.

Print the QR card on your side and hand it to them. Check-in at the front desk works exactly the same.

You do, please.

We give you the manual, and you use it to guide your members. We do not take enquiries from members directly.

Questions from the academy are a different matter. Those we answer.

The QR code holds one unguessable string and nothing else. No name, no member number.

Lost a printed card — reprint it from the admin screen and hand over a new one.

Lost the phone itself — reissue that member's QR from the admin screen. The old code stops working the moment you do, so whoever finds the phone cannot get in.

Changed phones — open the card page on the new phone and add it to the wallet again. No reissue needed.

Child members are built to be held by a parent.

You link the child to the parent's account, and the parent sees the child's card and attendance from their own page.

This can be shaped around how your academy works, so tell us what you need.

On Cloudflare's servers. It is infrastructure used all over the world.

Each academy gets its own separate database, so your data is never sitting in the same place as another academy's.

First, the system is built not to leak. Separate databases per academy, passwords stored in a form that cannot be turned back, and very few people with access to production.

If it happened anyway, here is what we do. We contact you as soon as we know. We tell you what leaked and how far it reached. We stop the cause, and reissue whatever needs reissuing — member QR codes, passwords. We prepare the material you need to explain it to your members. If the law requires a filing, we hand over everything we know and help you through it.

We will not hide it.

It is. Cloudflare's mechanism lets us restore the database to any point within the last 30 days.

Separately, marking a member as left does not delete anything. They come off the roster, but the records stay. If you mark someone left by mistake, you can put them back.

Yes. Roster, attendance history, belts, competition records — we hand them over as CSV.

We do not hold data hostage.

If you are moving, the same contract carries on.

A second location is priced per location. We can also give you one combined view across both, but it is still billed as two.

Email us.

We answer questions on weekends and at night.

We reply to enquiries within 48 hours, weekends and public holidays included.

Bear in mind that we work on Japan time. For academies abroad, our waking hours are roughly the opposite of yours, so expect that much of a gap.

We give you a manual. We have tried hard to make it clear, so start there and we think it will make sense.

If something is genuinely confusing, we will walk you through it on video.

The thing that matters most, we think, is that your academy keeps running.

It will not stop working one day without warning. We tell you in advance and give you time to move.

Everything we hold, you get back. Roster, attendance history, belts, competition records, handed over as CSV. You can go back to paper and Excel, or move to another service. Billing stops at that point.

And if we do wind the business down, we will release the source code of this system as open source. The system itself will not vanish. If you decide to, you can have another engineer keep it running for you.

Under a normal contract we do not hand over source code. We publish it only if the company is going away.

We do not hold data hostage. That holds whether the company continues or not.

There are two kinds of thing on signage: what we can make, and what we can't.

What we can make — stills with little illustration in them, and in-house notices. Screens assembled from your data, like the next class or who is in today, we build those too.

What we can't make — video. We also turn down anything that needs illustration.

If you bring in a designer and have them take it most of the way, we can finish it off and put it on the signage.

We spell out exactly what we can and can't make before you sign up.

As much as is within reach, we build.

If it gets too elaborate it becomes difficult, and in that case we say plainly: that one is beyond us.

If you bring in a designer, we can take it as close to your taste as you like.

The way it works is that they take it most of the way, and we finish it and fit it into the system.

Yes. We build it to sit comfortably next to your site.

That is not something we can make.

You do, please.

Signage is mostly a matter of playing video. It can also cycle through a few stills, but either way the material comes from your side.

We can't make video, and we don't shoot it.

Hand us the finished video and we will get it playing on the signage.

A Fire TV Stick, a monitor and an HDMI cable will run it.

The monitor can be a television or a computer monitor.

Yes. You change it from the admin screen.

You do not have to come back to us each time.

It can.

The card is where we put the most care. Making a members' card that people actually want to carry is where DOJO CORE started, so we build that part properly.

Any language.

The admin screens and the member-facing screens are both built in whatever language your academy uses.

As a rule, no.

If it is a matter of combining material that already exists, we will sometimes take it on for a separate fee. Building one from nothing is beyond us.

There is a second reason. We are a Japanese company, and printed material made to feel right in another country tends to come out slightly off. Working that out takes time, so we leave this part to you.

Both are possible. But the cost climbs steeply.

Anything contained inside our own service, we can look after down to the corners. Once it reaches across into another site or another domain, verifying problems on our side gets hard, and that effort goes straight onto the price.

Honestly, we don't recommend it. Using it the way we hand it to you is the cheapest and the most reliable.

The system assumes an internet connection.

While the line is down, it is unfortunately unusable.

It counts once.

Attendance is built around one per day. However many times the same person scans on the same day, the record is one.

Some academies may want attendance per class. For now, the count is once a day.

How you run holds and departures is entirely your call.

Stopping a member on hold from getting in with their card already works. Set their status to on hold, and the card no longer passes at the front desk.

Stopping their tuition payment at the same time is something we can build. But money is the one place you cannot afford mistakes, so connecting to a payment service and testing it properly takes time. That pushes the setup fee up. If you still want it, we will take it on.

You can stop them. There are two ways.

Connected to a payment service — the moment payment stops, membership lapses, and the card no longer passes at the front desk. That part is automatic. We build this connection to suit you.

Not connected — switch the member's status on your side and it stops the same way. You run that by hand.

There is.

It is kept apart from the admin screen, and staff only see what they need: who is attending the next class, what is coming up on the schedule, that a private lesson request has come in. They cannot go through everything in the admin screen.

Anyone who needs admin rights as well can have both.

As it comes, trials and visitors are not counted.

If you want them counted, we can build that. We can also put trial and visitor sign-ups online and count those.

But once sign-ups have to be embedded in your own site, separate work appears. That raises the cost, so we don't especially recommend it.

Belt promotions are better entered on your side.

Competition results can be entered by the member. That is how the academy we are currently building for does it. With a large roster it is hard for the academy to keep track of everything, and the member themselves can remember how a given competition went.

For larger academies, let us decide this part together.

We can also count stripes automatically from attendance. If the standard you grade by can be put into numbers, we will build it exactly that way.

If part of your judgement is a feel rather than a number, we can give you a gauge you fill in yourself.