The parts of growing a coaching business that have nothing to do with coaching.
Finding clients, chasing bookings, keeping session notes straight, running a webinar without the tech breaking. Coaching OS is a small piece of software I’m building to take that weight off — starting with my own practice at niv-now.com.
I run my own coaching practice — career and leadership coaching, bilingual, based in Berlin. The coaching itself was never the hard part. Keeping the business side running underneath it was: leads that don’t turn into booked calls, client notes scattered across tools that weren’t built for this, webinar links that break five minutes before a session starts.
I looked at what’s out there for coaches and found plenty of scheduling tools and plenty of course platforms — almost nothing that treats lead generation, client management, and session delivery as one connected problem. So I started building it for myself first. Every piece gets used in my own practice before it’s offered to anyone else.
I also lead a business coaching certification program, starting this November in Berlin — so I get to see this from both sides: the coaches building an income from their practice today, and the ones about to start theirs. That’s who I want this to genuinely work for.
I’m building this together with a technical co-founder — I bring the coaching practice and the daily use case, he brings the engineering. Neither half works without the other.
What we think is missing — not yet confirmed
Shaped by reviewing a dozen coaching platforms and directories, plus running my own practice on an early version of this. None of the four below are proven yet — that’s what the conversations are for.
Visibility doesn’t reliably turn into clients
Almost none of the platforms we reviewed treat lead generation as a first-class feature. Our guess: a directory and profile built for discovery matters more than another scheduling tool — but we still need to hear if that’s true for a practice like yours.
The client relationship lives in too many places
Our working assumption is that session history, notes, and progress belong in one record per client, not split across a calendar tool, a notes app, and email. Untested outside my own practice so far.
Group sessions are where most tools start to crack
Booking and video links that hold up when several people join at once — a weak spot we’ve hit ourselves. We think it’s a real gap; we haven’t yet confirmed how often it bites other coaches.
Tooling should help the coaching, not just the admin
Structure for the session itself — prompts, frameworks, follow-up. The least tested of the four so far, and the one we’re least sure belongs in software at all.
AI is already changing how coaching businesses get built
This isn’t just about one coach’s admin problem anymore. AI is showing up on both sides of the market at once — as a tool coaches can use, and as a new way clients discover and choose a coach in the first place. We don’t think anyone, us included, has this fully figured out yet.
Chances
- The invisible admin work can shrink.Content, first-touch client matching, scheduling logistics — the layer we’re building Coaching OS around — is exactly what’s becoming AI-assistable, giving coaching time back to actual coaching.
- AI-assisted matching is no longer enterprise-only.CoachHub’s org-wide “AIMY” and newer players like hey-coach.ai already use AI for client-coach matching — a lever independent coaches should be able to use too, not just large platforms.
Challenges
- Being found is starting to mean something new.Clients are beginning to get recommended coaches by AI assistants, not just Google — almost no independent coach has a system for that yet, us included.
- The squeeze from both ends.Well-funded, AI-heavy enterprise platforms are moving fast at the top of the market, while generic AI coaching apps compete at the bottom — the open question is what stays distinctly human and valuable in between.
No pitch, just the current state
Research
Scanned 12 coaching-software platforms and the standalone coach-directory market (RAUEN, DBVC, ICF, Noomii and others) to find out what’s actually underserved.
Building it for me
Dogfooding at niv-now.com first. A working version — coach directory, profiles, sign-in — is already live, built and run with my technical co-founder.
Building it out
Turning the self-tested version into something other business coaches can rely on — this is the stage these conversations feed directly into.
- Building out client management, payments, video
- Running coach interviews (this is one of them)
No fake traction, no placeholder logos — this is genuinely where things stand today. If you book a call, you’re talking to the stage above, not a finished pitch.
Help us find out. Leave with more than you came with.
I want to hear what actually slows a business coach’s practice down — lead-gen, client admin, webinars, or something else entirely. In return, you get a real look at how those pieces could work better in your own practice, whether or not you ever touch what we build.
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