La Scimmia Yoga built Italy’s leading online yoga community

In 2012, Sara Bigatti propped open her laptop in a co-working space in Bali and recorded a Vinyasa yoga class for beginners. She had no studio, no local students, no recurring revenue. She was a trained graphic designer from Milan’s Politecnico who had discovered yoga while traveling through Mexico, and she was about to spend the next fourteen years building something she couldn’t have found on a shelf: an online yoga community platform that would reach 583,000 subscribers, span seven countries, and turn a solo practice into a team of twelve instructors.

This is the story of how La Scimmia Yoga went from selling individual video lessons one at a time to running a membership community with a 67% trial-to-paid conversion rate. And how the platform Sara built became the home her audience didn’t know they needed.

About La Scimmia Yoga

Sara Bigatti’s path to yoga was not a straight line. She studied industrial design at Politecnico di Milano, worked as a furniture designer, spent time at Harrods in London, then taught herself web design and became a digital nomad. Yoga found her during her travels in Mexico around 2010, and it stuck.

“Yoga gradually entered my life and not only put me back on the path of balance, but opened me to a new way of living and enjoying life,” Sara has said.

She started teaching from Bali in 2012 while working at a co-working accelerator, uploading free classes to YouTube under the name La Scimmia Yoga. Over the next fourteen years, she lived and taught across seven countries: Mexico, Indonesia, Taiwan, India, Spain, the Netherlands, and Italy. Her YouTube channel grew steadily, eventually reaching 583,000 subscribers, 167,000 Instagram followers, 82 million total views, and 680 published videos. She wrote six books. She built a team of twelve instructors covering Vinyasa, Hatha, Yin, Odaka, Pregnancy Yoga, and meditation. She incorporated the business as La Scimmia Yoga B.V. in the Netherlands.

What started as one teacher with a laptop became Italy’s most recognized online yoga school.

The Challenges

A Nomadic Yoga Teacher Cannot Build on Location

The traditional yoga business model depends on a physical studio, local classes, and walk-in students. None of that worked for Sara.

She was a digital nomad, moving between countries every few months. She could not hold a regular weekly class because she was never in one place long enough to build local consistency. And yoga is deeply personal. Students form bonds with their teachers. They return to the same class because they trust the instructor, because the practice feels safe. Building that kind of relationship when you are never in the same city for more than a few months is genuinely difficult.

Sara needed a way to teach students regardless of where she physically was. Her life made a brick-and-mortar studio impossible. Her audience was global, but she had no permanent home for them.

Selling Individual Lessons Does Not Scale

For years, Sara sold individual videos and lessons without a membership structure. Every sale was a one-time transaction. No recurring revenue. No automation. No scalability. Every payment was manually processed, consuming time that should have gone into creating content.

The frustrating part was that the audience was growing. YouTube was working. Sara’s free content was building trust with hundreds of thousands of viewers. But trust alone does not pay the bills, and the business model she was using could not keep up with the demand. Free content earned attention. Converting that attention into sustainable income required a completely different approach.

“Having a membership based business means recurring revenue, automation, scalability.”

Sara Bigatti (Paid Memberships Pro case study, August 2023)

The Solutions

YouTube as the Trust Engine, BuddyBoss as the Home

Sara’s strategy was clear from the beginning. Her approach centered on “diffusing this practice and entering contact with people sharing passion… earning trust from my tribe.” Free YouTube content was the top of the funnel: 583,000 subscribers, 82 million views, 680 videos, all building trust through consistent, high-quality Italian-language yoga instruction over fourteen years.

But YouTube viewers are not community members. They watch a ten-minute class, then they leave. They do not build relationships with other students. They do not track their progress. They do not return to a structured curriculum. YouTube built Sara’s reputation. It could not build her business.

BuddyBoss Platform gave Sara the infrastructure to convert passive viewers into active community members. The platform delivers community activity feeds where students interact with each other and with instructors, direct messaging for personal connection, and group discussions organized by yoga style and experience level. Courses are delivered through MasterStudy LMS, giving students structured learning paths rather than a random library of videos. GamiPress adds gamification through points, achievements, ranks, and medals, so students can track their progress and celebrate milestones.

“People shouldn’t buy blindly. They should understand what they’re investing in before purchasing paid courses,” Sara told Sapore di Cina. That philosophy shapes the entire model. Free content on YouTube earns trust. The membership community deepens it with structure, accountability, and personal connection that a public video platform simply cannot provide.

The tech stack works together seamlessly. BuddyBoss Theme with a custom child theme (la-scimmia-yoga) ensures the platform matches Sara’s brand identity. Paid Memberships Pro handles subscription billing and free trials. MasterStudy LMS delivers structured courses. GamiPress keeps students engaged with visible progress tracking. It is a full yoga school, not just a video library.

And the breadth of instruction reflects that. The platform covers Vinyasa, Hatha, Yin, Odaka, Pregnancy Yoga, and meditation, taught by twelve instructors, each with their own specialization. This is not a single teacher selling a single course. It is a comprehensive yoga education platform.

A Mobile Experience Built for the Mat

For yoga, mobile is not optional. Students practice on a mat with their phone propped up beside them, not sitting at a desk. The experience has to work on a small screen, and it has to work reliably.

Alongside the BuddyBoss-powered web community, La Scimmia Yoga offers a dedicated mobile app on iOS and Android where members can browse video lessons, create playlists, and access guided meditation sessions. The combination of a full community platform on the web and a focused practice app on mobile gives students access to everything they need, wherever they are.

When a student opens the La Scimmia Yoga platform, they are in Sara’s world. Not a social media platform. Not a third-party marketplace. A branded experience built specifically for yoga practitioners.

A Membership Model with a 67% Conversion Rate

The membership runs at EUR 18.91 per month with a 7-day free trial. The numbers tell the story.

Two-thirds of trial users convert to paid memberships. A 67% trial-to-paid conversion rate. For context, that is an exceptional number for any subscription business, and it speaks directly to the quality of what members experience during those first seven days.

Since switching to the membership model, La Scimmia Yoga has seen 10x (1,000%) customer base growth. New courses are added at least once per month, giving members a reason to stay and a reason to recommend the platform to friends. Sara’s stated goal in 2023 was to double the membership within two years, and her long-term vision is clear: consolidate her audience from social networks onto the owned platform where she controls the relationship.

“I wanted to make yoga accessible through simple, short videos,” Sara told ReYoga. The membership model makes that vision sustainable. Free content brings people in. The community keeps them.

Conclusion

Follow the thread from 2012 to today and the arc is unmistakable. One Vinyasa class uploaded from a laptop in Bali has become Italy’s leading online yoga community platform.

The numbers: 583,000 YouTube subscribers. 167,000 Instagram followers. 82 million total views. 680 videos. 12 instructors. 6 published books. A native mobile app. A registered company. Monthly memberships with automated billing. A course library that grows every month. A gamified community where students earn achievements and track their progress across multiple yoga disciplines.

But the real story is not about the numbers. It is about ownership.

Sara owns her platform. She owns her member data. She owns the relationships she has built with her students over fourteen years. No algorithm change can bury her content. No platform policy shift can cut off her revenue. No third-party marketplace takes a percentage of every transaction.

The platform Sara could not find as a digital nomad in 2012, she built. She built it on BuddyBoss.

“If I can do something I thought impossible on the mat, I understand I have no limits,” Sara once said. Her platform is proof of exactly that.