I spent the first few months of building SoloAgent solving the wrong problem.
I have about 20 years of building and running businesses. Software companies, operations-heavy work, things that required understanding how money moves and how organizations function at small scale. Running a business means billing, contracts, scheduling, taxes, pricing decisions, client acquisition. I've worked through all of that. I thought I knew what a "small business problem" looked like, and I thought I saw one here.
Therapists in private practice deal with clunky EHRs, fragmented billing, and practice management software built for group practices and squeezed down to solo use. That's real. I still think it's worth fixing.
But it wasn't the right place to start. And it took me too long to understand why.
Quick note: I'm not a therapist. I'm building SoloAgent, a practice management platform, and most of what I know about private practice came from conversations with clinicians who've been generous enough to talk with me. What follows is what I learned from those conversations, not from clinical experience I don't have.
The actual starting problem
A therapist finishes their training (or burns out on a group practice, or decides to leave an insurance panel) and chooses to go out on their own. And they have essentially no idea what that means, operationally. Nobody taught them. Grad school covered clinical work thoroughly. The business side of running a private practice was never on the curriculum, or mentioned once in passing.
So they're standing at the beginning of something, and the questions stack up. Do I need to form an LLC before I see my first client? How do I set my rates when I have no reference point? How does billing work for self-pay versus insurance? What are my tax obligations as a newly self-employed person? What should a client agreement include? When do I need a proper EHR, and when is a spreadsheet fine for now?
There is no playbook. There are fragments: Reddit threads, blog posts, a colleague who figured it out and shares bits of what they learned. But there is no starting sequence. No "here are the steps, and here is the order to take them."
One therapist put it this way: "I didn't go to grad school to learn how to run a business. And now I'm trying to run one with no idea how to start."
What this changes about what we're building
A better tool for an existing practice is a real improvement. A clear starting path for someone launching from zero is something different. That's the thing that makes the transition from trainee or employed clinician to independent business owner actually navigable for someone without a business background.
That person doesn't know what they don't know yet. They're making their first rate decision without a frame of reference. They're wondering whether their malpractice coverage needs to be confirmed before they schedule their first intake. They're doing their taxes as a self-employed person for the first time.
SoloAgent is built for that person. Not the established practice that needs more powerful software. The therapist who is starting, who didn't get a business education, and who needs to know what the steps actually are.
What I'm still working out
I'm still learning what the right starting sequence looks like in practice. Every therapist I talk to took a different path. Some figured out rates early. Some spent years on the wrong EHR. Some nearly gave up before landing their first client outside insurance.
The difference between the ones who figured it out and the ones who struggled wasn't clinical skill or ambition. It was almost always whether someone had given them a starting map.
What's consistent across those conversations is the confusion at the beginning. And the relief when someone just tells them, concretely, what to do and in what order.
That's what we're working toward. If you've gone through the process of starting a solo practice (recently or years ago), I'd genuinely like to hear what was hardest. What did you wish someone had just told you? Reach me at [email protected].