Alina Trigubenko is the founder and CEO of Profi, an end-to-end operating platform for coaching & consulting firms.
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Running a scaling coaching company is challenging enough as it's very much a care-focused business, but we also have to ensure our client experience is professional and top-notch. For that, we must be set up with the right digital enablement to run everything from scheduling, package admin, communications and service delivery experience and to provide our clients with a modern single login to track everything related to our engagements. This topic is close to my heart as I am a coach and have been building software products for six years.
Many coaches who are unsatisfied with the coaching solutions available on the market start considering building one for their organization. Building a tech solution that fits your needs seems relatively straightforward. You can envision what needs to be done and how it functions. Tell a developer your idea, and you get what you want back, right?
Not at all. The devil is in the scoping. It will hold the fortress of developers not being replaced by artificial intelligence (AI). Scoping means understanding all of the details of the project, which means designing for all possible logical workflows and optimizing for the intuitiveness of the client experience.
At my company, we often have this discussion with our prospects: advising scaling professional services companies (like coaching services) on whether they should buy, build or partner with a software company.
Throughout the years of seeing operators of coaching companies struggle to build their tech, one thing became clear: We all have to pick our battles. You are either building a coaching company or a software company. It is a set of entirely different skills—to run a software business with its cash flow and talent composition or a services company with its margins, specialty, rhythm and seasonality.
There are very few examples of successful software and services companies—most have less-than-perfect quality on one side or the other.
Before deciding on your coaching software journey, ask yourself:
1. What is my unique value that differentiates my coaching services?
2. Could I deliver more or less the same customer experience with the existing solutions?
3. Could I compete with the current software for market share and talent?
Buy
Buy for parity, speed to market and better margins. Buying also lets you wholeheartedly focus on driving value to your coaching clients. Hyperpersonalized care is the new currency of the modern world.
• Pay 1/100th of the cost with an almost instant market readiness.
• There is no headcount on your payroll that you don't know how to manage.
• There is no need to deal with a compliance nightmare—it can be challenging to know what SOC 2, HIPAA and GDPR compliance require and to comprehend the potential financial risks of losing them. In other words, by buying, you may be better able to sleep well while winning corporate deals.
Downside: As you outgrow your initial coaching software vendor as you scale, you might face limitations of the software designed for limited configurability, which could hurt your business.
Build
Build only if you have a strategic IP and are looking to scale it with the help of software for a competitive advantage; make sure you triple to quadruple initial projections (budget, time, people) of what it will take to build a first version of a product.
Downside: Building defocuses your attention on the client and can be a black hole in investments—in my experience, it's never enough and more expensive than you think. You'll also need to hire talent to cover areas you didn't know existed—quality assurance, product management, DevOps, etc.
I like to say that you should outsource the things you don't want to be known for but insource what you like to be famous for.
Related to the above, you probably don't need to custom build all your stuff. If you're happy using Webflow, Calendly, Zoom or LMS, maybe it's not the right time to build a custom website with integrations and a content repository. Perhaps you can use an off-the-shelf platform with all of these built in. But there are certain things you will need to build and customize that are core to your value proposition—and only a unique IP that differentiates you on the market could justify going the software route.
In my experience, you need at least three developers to give you a rough idea of a bare-bones minimum viable product (MVP) team composition and the building budget; one should have the architecture and leadership experience of a product manager, a quality assurance engineer and a product designer. Depending on the hiring area, the budget for this team could be $500,000 per year, including headcount costs, hosting and other expenses.
Technology is an enabler, not a growth driver. If you can grow without hiring engineers, go for it and focus on the value you provide to your customers.
Partner
To go the partnership route, find a company closest to covering your holistic needs and open to continuous customer input. Ask if they go for design partnerships. This way, you can influence the road map, reap the benefits of partnering with an evolving product and not pay the hefty custom development fee.
As a founder, few things drive me more than talking to my clients—existing or prospective—building my empathy for their needs and delivering what they didn't even think they needed to develop our product in tight partnership. It's a win-win-win (the third win is for your coaching clients since partnership can let you focus on them and serve them better and faster).
Downside: It's not common to find a software company that sees what you see and is looking in the same direction. Also, venture capital (VC)-backed software companies thrive on the venture-scale metrics of fast growth, optimize for their stakeholders and might pivot to different priorities in any given quarter.
Conclusion
In today's world of service productization, we coaches must focus on providing the quickest and simplest way for our clients to receive the most personalized care possible. Our "why" as coaches is to help people, and while software can help us expand our mission, it is only a tool to achieve this goal. As coaches, we know it's better to double down on our strongest sides and outsource the weakest—which often includes software.
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