- Manual song mapping was the biggest time sink in my class prep.
- Pre-mapped timestamps can dramatically reduce prep time.
- On the Beat focuses on reducing manual song mapping.
- Struct Club and On the Beat solve different parts of class planning.
Disclosure: I'm the founder of On the Beat and previously used Struct Club as an indoor cycling instructor. This comparison reflects my personal experience with both products.
Why I Needed a Better Way to Map Songs
When I first started teaching indoor cycling, I spent hours obsessing over my notes. I eventually moved to Struct Club, and honestly, I loved it at first. Struct Club was a big improvement over Google Docs and paper for me.
It gave me a much cleaner place to organize classes. Where it stopped solving my problem was song mapping.
In my workflow, I still found myself listening through songs and manually mapping the moments I wanted to use in class. For me, the most time-consuming part of prep was still there: listening through the music and deciding where my drills and transitions should happen.
Where On the Beat Changed My Prep
I built On the Beat because I was burned out on that manual process. Yes, I am obviously biased, but I wanted to solve the actual bottleneck in class prep.
For me, the biggest bottleneck in class prep wasn't organizing the notes. It was finding the drops and mapping drills to the music.
I realized that instructors everywhere were sitting in their cars or on the train seeking back and forth to find the chorus, wasting unpaid hours doing the exact same work. For songs already mapped in On the Beat's catalog, that step is done for you.
We provide the pre-mapped timestamps for the catalog, so you skip the tedious part and go straight to building the ride. For mapped songs, On the Beat gives you timestamps and suggested drills tied to the structure of the music, which you can edit to fit your class.
The Real Challenge: Beyond Just Organizing
A digital notepad only solves half the problem. If you still have to hand-map every drill and transition, you are just moving your unpaid work to a smaller screen. The real challenge is getting your prep time back so you can actually focus on the people in the room.
Instructors are chronically underpaid for prep time. Many instructors are expected to build polished, rhythm-based classes without being paid for all the prep that happens outside the studio. When you have the timestamps handed to you, you stop dreading the playlist creation.
You get to teach more, bring more variety, and actually enjoy the 40 minutes on the bike.
So, Which One Is Better for You?
Struct Club made the most sense to me when I wanted a digital place to organize and build my own class plans. On the Beat is built around a different problem: reducing the amount of manual song mapping required before you can build the class.
If you enjoy mapping every song yourself and mainly want a place to organize your programming, Struct Club may fit your workflow well. If finding timestamps, drops, and musical structure is the part of prep you want to spend less time doing, that's the problem I built On the Beat to solve.
Look, we all want to deliver a great class without giving up our entire weekend to prep. Find a system that actually does the work for you, not just one that stores it.
