New-client enquiry matching for counselling practices
New-client enquiry matching for counselling practices is a SaaS idea for intake coordinators and owners of counselling practices with several therapists, priced to test at $9 per therapist a month. Enquiries arrive by phone, email and web form, and someone checks each therapist’s openings and focus areas by hand. With it, counselling practices with several therapists take every enquiry in one place and match each person to a therapist with openings.
. A starting point we wrote, not market research: run the 7-day test before you build.
What problem does it solve?
Enquiries arrive by phone, email and web form, and someone checks each therapist’s openings and focus areas by hand. Slow replies send people to the next practice on their list.
Why now: People search for a therapist online and contact several practices at once, so the first clear reply often wins.
What do they use today?
Most practices use a general inbox and a phone, with a spreadsheet or group message to find who has space. Matches depend on whoever is on the desk knowing each therapist’s focus.
How does it work?
Enquiries from the website form land in one place, and the coordinator adds phone calls to the same form. The product suggests therapists with openings whose focus areas and fees fit the rules the practice has set. Once the coordinator confirms a match, the client gets an intro email, and a report shows which enquiries reached a first session, by source.
What goes in the first version?
- One enquiry form for the website and phone calls
- Therapist profiles with focus areas, fees and openings
- Suggested matches from simple rules the practice sets
- Intro email to the client once a match is confirmed
- Report from enquiry to first session, by source
Who pays, and how much?
- Who pays
- Intake coordinators and owners of counselling practices with several therapists
- Price to test
- $9 per therapist a month
Charging per therapist follows the practice’s own growth: each new therapist adds openings to match against and one more profile to keep. The owner already counts the practice by clinician, so the charge is easy to understand.
How to test it in 7 days
- 1Ask five intake coordinators how long a new enquiry waits for a reply today.
- 2Read ten practices’ contact pages and note who promises a reply time and who doesn’t.
- 3Post in group practice owner communities asking how enquiries are matched to clinicians.
Where to find the first customers
- Private practice owner groups for therapists on Facebook
- Practice-building coaches for therapists
- Regional counselling and psychotherapy associations
What are the risks?
- Enquiries often mention mental health details, so privacy rules for health data apply.
- Openings change daily; if therapists don’t update them, matches will be wrong.
How to build it on shipanysaas
4 of the parts it needs are already in the kit. Get the kit, open it in Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and paste the starting prompt.
- Already in the kit
- Teams and roles
- Billing
- Emails
- In-app notifications
- You build
- Enquiry form and therapist profiles
- Matching rules and intro emails
- Enquiry-to-first-session report
See the starting prompt
You are in a fresh copy of the shipanysaas starter kit, a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo: the Next.js web app is in apps/web and the Supabase database, with its migrations, in apps/web/supabase. Help me build the first version of New-client enquiry matching for counselling practices. Read AGENTS.md first, then the AGENTS.md in every folder you work in: the kit's rules there win over your defaults. When a skill in .agents/skills (also in .claude/skills and .cursor/skills) matches a task, use it. ## The product - What it does: Counselling practices with several therapists take every enquiry in one place and match each person to a therapist with openings. - Who pays: Intake coordinators and owners of counselling practices with several therapists - Their problem: Enquiries arrive by phone, email and web form, and someone checks each therapist’s openings and focus areas by hand. Slow replies send people to the next practice on their list. - Price to test: $9 per therapist a month (a plan in apps/web/config/billing.config.ts) ## Build only this first version 1. One enquiry form for the website and phone calls 2. Therapist profiles with focus areas, fees and openings 3. Suggested matches from simple rules the practice sets 4. Intro email to the client once a match is confirmed 5. Report from enquiry to first session, by source ## Already in the kit: reuse it, never rebuild it - Teams and roles: team accounts with members, roles and invitations - Billing: Stripe or Lemon Squeezy subscriptions, per seat or usage-based, and one-off payments - Emails: transactional email through Resend or Nodemailer - In-app notifications: a notifications bell in the web app ## New code it needs - Enquiry form and therapist profiles - Matching rules and intro emails - Enquiry-to-first-session report ## How to work 1. Plan first: list the database tables (with row-level security, so each team only sees its own rows), the pages and the server actions for the first feature. Then stop and wait for my OK. 2. Build one feature at a time with the kit's own UI and form components, with a migration for every schema change and user-facing text in the translation files. 3. After each feature, run the verification steps in AGENTS.md, fix what they find, and tell me what you built and what comes next. ## Rules - Ask me before you add a dependency, delete a file, or change sign-in, billing or the admin panel. - Leave the parts of the kit this product doesn't use as they are. Done when every first-version feature works for a signed-in team and the AGENTS.md checks pass.
Guides for the parts it uses
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