Belt testing and curriculum tracker for martial arts schools

The idea

Testing fees at 40 to 100 dollars per student per test are one of a martial arts school’s biggest revenue lines, and most owners track eligibility on index cards or memory. Students who should have tested months ago drift, parents wonder why their kid has stalled, and the family quits, so bad tracking costs both the testing revenue and the membership. Kicksite and the other dojo suites technically cover this at 99 dollars and up, but bury it under billing and marketing features.

The wedge is the Ready to Test list as the home screen: attendance plus time-in-grade rules the owner defines, computed continuously, so running a profitable test cycle becomes a matter of clicking through a pre-built list rather than remembering who exists.

Who pays

The school owner pays 49 dollars a month, repaid by a single additional student per test cycle who would otherwise have been forgotten. Owners of single-location taekwondo, karate, and BJJ schools are the target, reachable through martial arts business Facebook groups, the MAIA/school-owner podcast circuit, and r/bjj school-owner threads. The parent-notification emails double as retention marketing the owner did not have to write.

MVP scope

• Belt ladder with per-belt curriculum and eligibility rules
• Front-desk attendance check-in feeding eligibility automatically
• Ready to Test list grouped by belt
• Testing events with Stripe fee links and paid status on the roster
• Tablet test-day mode with pass/fail and automatic parent emails
• Skip for v1: membership billing, class scheduling, belt inventory, multi-location franchise views

Build TestReady, a belt testing and curriculum tracker for martial arts schools. Stack: Next.js (App Router), Supabase (auth and Postgres), Stripe for testing-fee payments.

Core flow: the owner defines their belt ladder (name, order, colour) and, per belt, the curriculum items required (forms, techniques, sparring rounds) plus eligibility rules: minimum classes attended since last promotion and minimum weeks at current belt. Students are entered with belt, promotion date, and parent email. Attendance is the input that drives everything: a class check-in screen (tap names on a tablet at the front desk, or bulk-mark after class) increments each student's count. The dashboard's centrepiece is the Ready to Test list: every student whose attendance and time-in-grade rules are met, grouped by belt. From that list the owner creates a testing event with a date and fee; selected students' parents get an email with a Stripe payment link, and paid status shows on the test-day roster.

Test day runs from a tablet: the roster per belt with each student's curriculum checklist, tap-through pass/fail per item, an overall pass/fail, and notes. A pass promotes the student (resetting counters) and automatically emails the parent congratulations with the new belt and next milestones; a fail triggers a gentler templated email the owner can edit before sending.

Pages: /dashboard (ready-to-test list), /students, /students/[id], /curriculum, /attendance, /tests/[id] (test-day mode), /settings.

Pricing: 49 dollars/month per school. 30-day trial.