How a booking form replaced a studio's DM back-and-forth

The DM back-and-forth

Before the booking link, every appointment started the same way: a message. A customer would DM asking for a slot, the studio would check availability and reply, the customer would confirm, and the specifics — which class, any health notes, a phone number for reminders — would get typed into the same thread as everything else. None of it lived anywhere a business could search later. A canceled class, a rescheduled session, a follow-up question — all of it meant scrolling back through chat history to find the one message that mattered.

What a custom-fields link changes

sched.fyi's booking form isn't a single fixed set of questions — it's an ordered array of fields a business configures once, and every field on that list can be one of six kinds: short text, long text, email, a single-select dropdown, a waiver (with a checkbox or a drawn/typed-signature variant), or a payment placement marker. A business can set up to 12 fields, mark which are required, and choose whether each one is answered during the booking or collected afterward on the confirmation page — a health note before a Pilates class, for instance, versus a payment reference that only makes sense once a booking exists to attach it to.

The effect is that the questions a business used to type out by hand, once per DM, are now asked once — as part of the link itself. A customer opens the page, picks a class and a time, answers the fields the business configured, and the intake is already in the record before the appointment happens.

Confirmations that don't need a reply

Once a booking goes through, sched.fyi sends an SMS confirmation with a reference code, plus a calendar invite that works with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, and Outlook. Neither side has to keep the thread open waiting for a "see you then" — the confirmation is automatic and the record is already saved.

One link that asks the right questions

The DM thread hasn't gone away entirely — customers still ask questions, businesses still chat with regulars — but the booking itself no longer depends on it. One link asks the right questions up front, and the confirmation handles the rest.

Planning the same move for your studio? See how sched.fyi handles group, private, and clinical Pilates bookings, class packs, and waivers.