Show Notes

Kayla: Welcome back to The Designer Practice Podcast, and I’m your host, Kayla Das.

As you may know, by now, Jane App is my absolute favorite practice management software system. From easy online booking to secure charting system to quick payment processing, all while being HIPAA and PIPEDA compliant.

Well, today I am sitting down with Ali Taylor, co-owner and co-creator of Jane app to discuss some of the great things happening behind the scenes of Jane.

Hi, Ali. Welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here today.

Ali: Thanks, Kayla. That was a lovely intro of Jane. You described it, I think, better than I describe it.

Kayla: Ali, before we dive into today’s episode, please introduce yourself, where you’re from, and can you take us back to the very beginning of Jane and what inspired you to create it?

Ali: I’m Ali, as you mentioned. I am in North Vancouver, which is in BC, Canada. If you have US listeners, people think that I’m saying Washington, but I’m in Canada. And I started Jane sort of accidentally, which I think is often the best way to start a business is when there’s just a need and it was my own need.

So, I was opening a multidisciplinary healthcare practice and I always have to think about how old my kids are to remember the year, 2011, I had my third kid and opened the practice at the same time. I was pregnant with Jonah, my youngest. And opened the practice in 2011 and it was multidisciplinary, so physio and chiro, massage counselors, acupuncture, osteo, naturopath. I had, I think, 13 or 14 disciplines working in the practice when we opened.

And one of the things that was a struggle for me was trying to find a software that would work for these different disciplines. And I think as you know, as a counselor and in any discipline, even the same practitioner will work in a different way. So, I always use physio as an example. It’s such a good, an obvious one, but you’ll have many of the same. But a pediatric physio, and a neurophysio, they’re going to work in a completely different manner. And so, there’s no software that really fits everybody.

And if there had been one at the time when I opened my practice, I would’ve just used it, but there wasn’t. So, I was working with my co-founder, Trevor at the time, and he was building my website and doing all the branding for the practice. And I just kept showing him all my options for online booking, for electronic charting, it’s like I just don’t have something that’s going to work for everybody. And at the time it was like appointment.com. I don’t know if that’s still around, but it would load as if only half the page had loaded. It was just not attractive. And Trevor’s a designer and he’d been building this beautiful online experience for me.

So eventually it was like, okay, well why don’t we just expand the scope of your website and we’ll build you online booking and online electronic charting and documentation for your practice. And I said to him, I’m like, okay, but you have to quote me like a real quote. Because we’d kind of been friends for a long time. He didn’t really normally do clinic websites. And I said, because I want to be a pain in the butt client, so you need to charge me appropriately. So, he put a quote together, charged us, and then it just got built into our website.

So, when we opened, the original version of Jane was just part of my website. And then I still had a different system that I had to use for billing. But I was using Jane, well what is now Jane for scheduling and for the electronic documentation of the practice. So, it just came from a need. And then apparently everyone else had the same need, which I didn’t realize at the time. But the online booking was visible and other people started seeing it and saying, hey, what is that? Can I use it? And so, I joked that that was our full market research.

It was like six people wanted this, and Trevor and I said, hey, maybe let’s build this into a complete software. And so, a year and a half later, after I’d been using it for a year and a half, he asked if I wanted to partner and build this into something we could license to other people. And at that point, my clinic had been running at capacity as, you know, physical clinics. They hit capacity. So, I’d started researching how to franchise Canopy actually to other locations. But I did the software instead, which I think was a good move actually.

Kayla: That is so fascinating. So, when it came to building up and really just selling the license to Jane. First of all, what made you decide to do that. And how was that starting out?

Ali: Yeah, it was, like I said, sort of not the initial plan. I thought this was just going to be a software that I was using for myself, but the online booking did create interest. So, Trevor is a designer. He built something really beautiful. And I think uniquely had all the faces of my practitioners. It really respected the brand of my practice. I didn’t want it to feel like they were jumping to a different site. It felt very cohesive. And so just the fact that there was a demand, and actually Jane’s grown since then in that same way. And you just find the spots where there’s people that need something and then we try to build Jane in a way that will solve their problems. And so, we were just eager, we were eager to help other people. We were eager to get it out there. So, the very first year that we launched, we just put a website up and said, here, you can use it if you want.

And we went to three conferences and Trevor and I; we were Booth babes. We worked every conference for the first five years. We went to every conference that we ever exhibited at, and we would be the first to set up and the last to tear down. And we would just be like so excited to talk to all the different practitioners about their practices and the way they were running and. We didn’t mention this in the intro, but I ran a practice, I worked reception, I was an office manager. I brokered the purchase of a second clinic. I moved a clinic before I opened my own. So, the reason I opened a clinic was because I’d done it for years. And so, I felt like I knew how to manage and operate one.

And so, it was just this really exciting opportunity to hear about all these different types of practices. And then I would go and implement Jane physically in the clinics with all the different practitioners and it was so fun. Clinics have a soul. Each practice is so different and unique and practitioners are like my favorite people. These owner operators running small businesses. So, the first year was, it was so fun and Trevor and I were just two people. The support was my cell phone. So, I’d be like going for a run in the woods and I’d get a call and I’d stop and help talk someone through something on the side of the trail. It’s the same as starting up a clinic. It’s just you. Even when I opened my practice it, I remember I was pregnant. And my baby was turned the wrong way and my midwives were like, okay, well you need the baby to turn so you have to spend time on your hands and knees Because you need that baby to like shift around. I’m like, oh, well no problem. Because I’m like scrubbing the floors of the bathroom every night. So, I’m like, great. This is just dual purpose. So, it was the same as starting a practice. I think you just do everything. You really work hard to try to understand your customers and your clients and what they need and then fill that void whenever it pops up. So, first year.

Kayla: Amazing. So, Jane has seen impressive growth in Canada and across the US in recent years. What have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced along the way. And how did you and your team overcome them?

Ali: There’s so much I didn’t know about scaling a tech company, having come from small business and having come from just smaller teams. And I think one of the things that was a challenge for me personally was just that I’m always doing something I’ve never done before. And I say it’s a challenge, but it’s also my favorite thing. I get bored easily. I don’t like status quo. If I had to go to work and do the exact same thing every day, all day, I don’t know how I would survive.

And so now we have a team of 675 people or something, but every day we hire more. So, every day I’m leading a company that I’ve never led before with people I’ve never led before, and a size I’ve never led before. And so, I think there’s a challenge is of keeping up with that. You have to evolve and grow and learn. And so I think things like your podcast are so amazing because I seek those kinds of resources out in the software world, in the tech world, in the scaling world. I just try to learn from other people’s stories and take information and advice from all these different places and then try to apply them. But while doing that within our own kind of heart. Like when I said a soul, every company has a soul. I believe that’s true for even software companies. Every company has its own style, and that really comes from the mission and the vision and the values that you hold. So, we are trying really hard to make sure we’re scaling those.

But all that is, is how a group of people work together. So, we have 675 people, but we hired 20 more. So now how do we get those new 20 people to come in and work with the 670 that are already here in a way that supports the mission, vision, values that we want to build. And so, you’re just constantly trying to educate and you have to say the same thing over and over again to every new person. We have to say, this is what we’re building. You’re either a culture creator or you’re a culture destroyer. When you come in, you’re not a consumer. No one is a consumer of culture in the company. Because it’s just how people behave. So please come in and build the culture and if you don’t want to do that, then you should opt out early. Because we’re hopefully going to be filtering out those people. So, it’s all about trying to scale something like a working machine that has heart and also successful business outcomes.

And the funny thing is, it’s like that’s exact same challenges that you have in clinic is if you want to scale a clinic, you need to build something. It’s all humans, it’s all just humans behaving in a certain way. You need a good business outcome and you want to stick to the soul of your practice. So, it’s just doing that at scale is a whole new challenge. It’s fun though. I think it’s possible to keep doing it. All the way.

Kayla: I absolutely love that. And it makes me think of when I first became an ambassador for Jane app and it’s actually before you even had ambassadors.

Ali: Yeah.

Kayla: And I, kind of jokingly, was a nobody at that time. I was starting a blog for the first time, just kind of looking to really give coupon codes to people. I wasn’t even looking for anything. Just looking for a coupon code. And you guys took me under your wing and was like, yeah, we love for you to share. And like when you talk about that culture, I felt it from the very beginning, just how open and responsive you were.

For true transparency, I’ve reached out to a few competitors across North America, nobody wanted to take me under their wing. Now I will say that Jane was my first and only practice management software. But it just shows when we talk about culture, you were willing to support someone who had really no result to go by. And you’re just like, “Yes. We love you. Just share our coupon code.”

Ali: Nobody’s a nobody, Kayla, nobody’s a nobody. Your followers don’t make you somebody. Everybody’s somebody. It’s funny about the whole ambassador and influencer side of things because, and even conferences, I prefer small, I prefer intimate, I prefer authentic. And so, when people get really big, when they think they’re somebody, it’s not authentic. They’re doing it for payment. So, I think that it’s a lot more valuable to build authentic relationships with people.

And I always say, I’m like don’t sell Jane unless you think Jane’s the best. I actually really believe that you should really believe that Jane’s the best software for someone’s practice. And when I used to do the demos, I’d be like, if you have a different software and this is working better for you, please don’t switch. Because you’re just going to be unhappy. And I don’t want unhappy users. That’s really bad for me. Same with a practice, if you have unhappy patients or clients, they are going to go out and say, this person’s terrible. Don’t go see them. If you’re trying to treat someone who is totally out of your wheelhouse of what you’re capable of treating or what you want to be treating. That’s not good for your business.

Because, like practitioners, we’re growing on having a great service that we offer, and then people tell each other about it. That’s how small business grows. It’s how Jane’s grown. And so, I’m always like, I don’t want anyone selling Jane inauthentically. And I’ve been really talking about this internally a lot. Like be the obvious choice. Is Jane the obvious choice? Because then it’s just education to people. Like we have to be the best and then if we’re not the best yet, we need to work until we are. Even though those first few years of Jane, I’d be like, no, we don’t have memberships. You shouldn’t use us. You’re a membership heavy practice. Please don’t sign up.

And it’s actually funny because there was a few practices that I would speak to and I’d say, I don’t think this is a good choice for you. And they’d be mad. They’re like, are you saying I can’t use your system? Or I can’t sign up for Jane. And I’d be like, no, well you can. I’m just telling you, I don’t think you should right now. We will get better. I promise. My whole goal is that Jane is the best, most obvious choice for every single practitioner, but sometimes we’re just not yet. And that’s okay. But we will be. I’m like, we’ll get there. So, I’m like, I’m going to put you on a list and I want you to know when we get there. But it’s definitely not something that we want people pushing hard unless we really are the best. So, I’m glad to hear you are authentically and excited to share Jane with your practitioners.

Kayla: Absolutely and because I mentioned the coupon code. I do want to say it here; I’ll say it at the end of the podcast as well. But if you are considering, Jane, the coupon code is EVASPARE1MO, and it’ll give you one month grace period on your Jane account. And like I said, I’ll mention it again at the end of this episode. And I’ll also put it in the show notes as well.

But I think you’re right, Ali. Like authenticity is important. As new business owners, as new practices, I just know for my own self, I didn’t start off very authentic in the beginning. because we always feel like we have to sell ourselves.

Ali: Mm-hmm

Kayla: Right. And even going back to that as an example. When I first reached out to different companies, there was kind of an idea of, oh, maybe someone will sponsor my blogs, and at that point they didn’t have a podcast. But at the end of the day, it was because I wanted to make sure that other practitioners had access to a coupon code. I always joke, and I always call myself the coupon lady. I love to give people a good discount.

Ali: Well, that’s the win-win, and sometimes, I think in the helping profession too, people have a hard time bringing together the idea that financial success and helping people can actually be the same thing. And this is something that I see so frequently in practitioners and in practices we work with that, especially I think in counseling and mental health in this area where it’s very vulnerable and emotional and the work that you’re doing with people.

This idea though that, so you were saying, at first, I was like, well, maybe I can get sponsorship and I can get a coupon code. And I’m like, win-win people. There’s nothing that says those two things can’t coexist. There’s and in life, everywhere, this is true and this is true. And it doesn’t mean that they can’t live together.

And I think financial success and a successful business and raising your rates and charging what you’re worth and helping people and providing care and doing a job that really gives back to the world. These two things can go together and. I think it’s actually important to recognize the cycle of that.

So, this is what I say at Jane too. So, I’m like, we charge our customers for the service we provide. We use that to create a successful business that will thrive and continue, and then we continue to build a product. So, we treat our team well, we treat our customers well, and we do need a thriving business to support all of that. Those are not against each other.

And so, when people are always like, oh, are you a people first business? I’m like, I don’t even know what that means. There’s no hierarchy here. You can’t have a people first business without having a business that makes money to support those people. And so, I’m often trying to break down that thinking and making it more of an ecosystem and they all have to work together. You have to have a thriving business to support your clients. You can’t support your clients without you personally also succeeding in your business. And so small business, it’s really tricky. Margins are so small. You have to be really thoughtful about everything. And actually, the same in any size business, really thoughtful about your spend.

This is one of the things that drives me a little bit up the wall sometimes. I’m like, these are the same thing. Everyone needs to win. And that is very possible if you’re thoughtful about your decisions.

Kayla: That’s such a beautiful way to say it. So can you share a behind the scenes look on how you and your team prioritize which features to work on next. As I’m sure there’s probably a running list of possibilities to choose from.

Ali: Yeah. That’s funny. If you use Jane, I hope you’ve come across the feature request list, which is in the help menu at the top right of your screen.

And when we first started, people would email be like, we want this, we want this, we want this. And one of the problems I was having, which was fascinating is everybody would say they want something, and think that what they wanted must be what everyone else also wants. I think as humans, we believe we are normal. We believe we are just like everybody else. And we also believe we’re super special and unique. It’s another, and that exists in life, which I think is fascinating.

So, they would email and I’d be you’re the only person that wants this, no one else has ever asked for this. This is something that you do that’s really unique in your practice, but they would assume it would be how everyone would. And so, I was having a public facing feature request list where people could see what other people were asking for and voting on. I was hoping would do a couple of things.

One was explain to people like, not everybody wants this. And so, make that more visible because me just saying it is hard to believe sometimes when there’s like, I don’t believe you. I bet everyone’s asking for this and you just don’t want to build it. Like, no, really not a lot of people are asking for this.

And the other thing is it also allows us to compile all that information and show people just how many requests there are. Like there’s thousands and thousands and thousands of requests. So it’s a great question.

It also gets harder to prioritize as we scale, because. I used to think we had like, okay, we have three developers. They develop a feature, then they develop the next feature, then they develop the next feature. But it doesn’t quite work like that because your three developers who develop that first feature have to maintain that feature. They have to fix bugs with that feature. They have to upgrade that feature every time things change in the tech world constantly. So, you actually have to add three more developers to build the next feature, and then you have to add three more developers. And it’s not just developers; it’s actually a team of three. It’s called a triad. So, it’s a designer, a product manager, and a developer that have to work together in a team, and then they have to build feature. It’s a shocking number of people. And this was a big lesson for us because Trevor, my co-founder, he taught himself how to code in order to make his designs work. Because he’s a designer. He wanted that to work. He wanted more control over it. And so, we came into this world not knowing anything about that.

And I was like, wait, what? We just need one person to build. No, his brain was three people in one. And so, you have to scale and scale and then you have to do so much work on the background and the privacy and security of things. And then the infrastructure and you’re just constantly having to keep it updated and more modern.

And then now with AI, it’s fascinating. You have to bring in a whole new type of thinking into everything because AI first, I don’t know, like AI is going to really be a thing when nobody even knows they’re using it. So, it’ll just be magic. And I am really fascinated in the idea of how AI agents can– so Jane’s like a tool kit that we’ve created that you can use to run your practice. And the cool thing about an AI agent is that it should have the ability to use Jane for you. So, it’s kind of like hiring a person. So, you would have to hire a person to do these things like an external person. And then potentially what we can build on top of Jane is now a layer that can reuse the tools that we’ve already built. So, we have to keep building the tools and then build the ability to build onto that. The number of people required for all of this thinking is magic. It’s why we have a lot of people.

And so how we prioritize, we really have to go back to, there’s kind of three different things we look at. Feature requests is definitely one. You have to say, what do people actually want us to build, and then are we solving those problems? The problem with the way people asks for features is what they normally ask for is something they’ve seen before. So, if they’re coming from a different product, they will ask that exact thing, but sometimes there’s a better way to solve that using Jane’s toolkit, they’re wanting it solved the exact same way they’ve solved it before, just because it’s easier. There’s cognitive work to relearn something or to unlearn something and then learn something different. And so we have to kind of like filter through the noise and figure out what problem are we really trying to solve? What part of that did you really love? And then can we solve that within Jane? So that’s fine. So, feature requests are one of them.

Another one is just where we see the world going. So, no one’s going to ask for some of these things because. They don’t even know they’re going to happen yet. Or it’s not even something that they would think a software like Jane could provide. So, I have some like passion projects that are kind of always down the road, but I love the win-win-wins and I’m always like, what were the problems we were trying to solve? For me as a clinic owner, what was really frustrating for me, or difficult or time consuming?

We’re adding a payroll integration right now. Nobody asked for that. But payroll was something that I had to go in and do in the evenings. I would feed my kids and go back and have to do payroll at night by myself in the practice. Actually, I didn’t mind. It was kind of nice and quiet, but still something you had to do outside of your normal hours. And so, one of the things that we’re trying to prioritize is I’m like, well, what was hard for me as a practice owner and what could gimme back more time? So, some things people will never ask for, we just know we want to build them.

Then the other is just also, we have some parts of Jane where we have different types of practitioners that use Jane. And so, there’s some things that are just not working very well yet. We need some labs and e-prescribe and these kind of things for especially psychologists and people more in the pure medical. We’d like to add more features for that group. It’s always a battle. I’m telling you. It’s always a battle.

And I’m fighting for some features right now and I don’t know if I’m going to get them in Because we, we do our feature planning midyear for next year. Because we have to hire the team and get it all set up so it takes forever. You have to do the feature planning midyear for next year. What do you want?

Kayla: Honestly, for everything that I use Jane for, you already have all the features that I wanted. The one feature I wanted, which you do have now, was for the schedule to be able to show up in the time zone of individual practitioners, because I work across, the country, north America and so forth. And I believe it was last year; you implemented that. And it has been a game changer for me.

And talking About things that people are asking for. I bet you before the pandemic, that was probably something that no one ever asked for. And then all of a sudden because of this new way of doing practice, that becomes a huge requested feature. Am I correct with that?

Ali: Yeah. Even before the pandemic, we had telehealth. We built out bare bones because as counselors and mental health practitioners we’re very delayed on the tech revolution. I think of all of the different types of practitioners, counselors were the least interested in tech.

You know, it worked. It worked on having it, I think people felt like it was impersonal. You don’t like having computers or devices in your treatment room. And so, we thought that there was going to be a couple of years before mental health practitioners really started adopting technology, and so we started building out telehealth expecting that that was going to be coming. And then the pandemic hit and it was just overnight a tidal wave of practitioners needing to move their practices online.

And for talk therapy for anyone that could work via telehealth. It was just so sudden. And so right when the pandemic had all our massage therapist clinics shut down and stopped signing up. And then we had a huge number of mental health practitioners signing up. So, it was like this double– like internally in Jane, we were sprinting to serve the mental health practitioners. So, we’re signing up, we were trying to accommodate all the practices, including mine. I had to shut down my physical practice for three months that I got no rent relief. Thanks very much. I had to pay rent that whole time. I used the federal loan to pay my rent, which I was renting from my local government. And so, they’re like, we can’t give any small business help. And I’m like, this is a pandemic people. And then I had to pay back that loan. Oh, my goodness. Don’t even get me started. It was such a tragic time for small business. I just think small business does not get the support it needs ever, but that’s me going on a little rant. Side rant. So, telehealth, we had the bare bones of it. We just sprinted to get it out into the wild and actually into Jane.

And then time zones is a funny story because we actually tried to build time zones three times and it took Jane down the first two times because the way it had to be implemented and the technical parts of how we built time zones. Because we’d really built Jane thinking of physical locations. And when you have a physical location, you just see the people around you. Sometimes people are traveling, they’ll figure it out. But yeah, the change to online practices has really, really shifted that. So, it’s interesting.

Kayla: Well, it’s interesting that you say that because many listeners know I’ve just developed the Canadian Clinical Supervision Therapist directory. So, it’s a therapist directory for therapists and clinical supervisors to connect, and I thought it was going to be this super easy site, right? We’re just going to develop it out. You know, everyone’s going to be able to sign in. Like it’s just going to be like super easy.

Well, first of all, it took about six to eight months to even develop. Then when it went live, and even to this date, we’re still having issues with regarding to payments. And I just want to say to anyone listening, if you are the one that’s experiencing the receipt issues. I apologize and I thank you for your patience.

But yeah, it’s just so interesting because if you make one change on one little aspect of the site, it breaks another aspect of the site and then you need to go back and fix that aspect. But then like current clients or members are going to experience the backlash of it breaking. Now of course we do try to test a lot of it behind the scenes before it goes live, but sometimes you can test and then the test sites are working fine. And then when you do it in real life, it’s just not the way it’s testing.

Ali: It’s always different in production. Yeah. And sometimes it’ll break something that’s completely unrelated. You’re like, these two things don’t even work together. Why are those things breaking? Yeah, speaking of previously about scaling people, scaling a tech system is similar. We have a monolith it’s called, which is a single code base. And so, you’ve been having to work on decoupling everything. Because when it’s small and you do it just a few things, it’s not as big a problem. And I don’t think we ever expected Jane to get quite this large. Well, we really didn’t. We just thought we were going to be selling locally. Yeah, the intention was not to create an international company, but I’m really excited that we have.

We should have a call with you. You should tell us what issues you’re having. Maybe we can help you.

Kayla: Yeah, I appreciate that. It’s so interesting because we’re talking about how things break even when they’re unrelated. The most recent issue which my website developer is currently working on is that literally I helped someone upload a new image to their profile. And it canceled them from the payment system, like how that happened makes no sense. So, they’re working on like, why did that happen? Right? So totally unrelated, updating someone’s profile, like just helping them with an image that wasn’t uploading well to canceling them completely. Just made no sense.

But anyway, these are some of the things with tech. I mean, similar to you. I love the problem solving. As much as I don’t like that it impacts customer service and it is an inconvenience to our members. We do have wonderful members who are so supportive and understand that we’re at the very beginning. We only started our directory in January, so we’re like very, very baby. But no, it’s a whole different world in tech for sure.

Ali: When I first started, I’d always just say to Trevor, can’t we just put a button there? And I had to stop saying that. I’m not allowed to say, just put a button. Now, I say it as a joke because I know you can’t just put a button somewhere. There’s a lot more that goes behind the scenes. But I like to say it as a joke. Just put a button there.

Also, for clinical supervisors, we just improve the supervisor sign off. So, there’s a whole bunch of new changes that just went live for supervisors. And yeah, there’s more things coming there. So I think those will be hopefully well received and make it a lot easier to work with a supervisor.

Kayla: Well, that actually goes into my next question. As you look ahead, in the next year, the next couple of years, what are you most excited about for the future of Jane. And are there any upcoming features that you can share with our listeners?

Ali: I’m excited about everything, product roadmap, I’m just so impatient. I just feel like we’re going so slow all the time and I want to build everything. And I think it’s funny, Trevor and I, co-founders and co-CEOs, so we have the same view and anytime anyone talks to us about Jane, we’re like, Ooh, I know that’s not good. Oh, that’s not very good. That could be better. And everyone’s like, no, I love it. I’m like, how can you love it? It needs to be so much better. So, there’s so much that we’re always trying to build into.

There’s a lot of work happening right now around messaging. I think five, six of our top feature requests around messaging. And we have this sort of long-term plan and we’re just trying to figure out if it’s going to take too long to get there. So, if we can’t build it– in software, you buy, build, or partner. Those are the three ways to get whatever it is you want into your product. And we love to build. We’re builders. We like to build our own. But sometimes this can take quite a long time. So, we’re just trying to decide what direction we should go there.

We have just opened up this partnership model in the last year. We’ve built all these APIs and this is what’s called an SDK, which is the ability for people to build onto Jane. And so, we’re hoping that will open up a lot of opportunities for people to build more specific style apps onto Jane’s– the SDK specifically is for the clinical charting. So, someone like you or anybody could build an app that would interact with Jane’s charting for a specific type of customer, so something that we probably wouldn’t build. There’s also home exercise programs and– so we’ll end up developing kind of an app store, which I’m really excited about. I think that could give a lot of flexibility to people.

And also, I would love for it to create a new income stream for people, for practitioners who would build onto it so you could build something and sell it on the app store. So, I’m excited. I always hope we can build new income streams for people where they can use their expertise to have some passive income.

Kayla: I love that. And we talk about passive income all the time on this podcast. Actually, I just wrote a book called The Passive Practice and it launches ideally in October, it’s going to be October and November. We’re still the publishing stage. But it’s teaching practitioners How to create passive income into the practice. And actually, one of the suggestions I have at the end of the book is creating an app. If you have that ability and knowing now that you know that is something in the future that Jane is looking for any listener who you know is really tech savvy or maybe has a partner whose tech savvy or a friend or a family member, this might be something right up your alley with respect to a passive income stream.

Ali: I’ll tell you there’s so many options now for people who are even not as tech savvy to at least get their idea out there so that someone else can understand what they’re thinking. There’s this site called Lovable, I think there’s lots of them that are coming up now, but you can use AI to create what’s called wire frames. So essentially, it’s all the buttons that look like they’re working, but they’re not really working yet. So, I’m trying to fix our pricing. We have a pricing and packaging problem because as you add more things that have to be add-ons, people start feeling like you’re being nickel and dimming them. And because we have so many different practices that work different ways, the packages don’t work very well because the typical way of doing it is good, better, best. But some people, what’s in the best they don’t even care. They don’t want any of those things because every practice works so differently.

And so, I’m trying to envision a whole new way of doing pricing where you get exactly what you want and you don’t get what you don’t want. But we still give people all the value. So, I built something with Lovable for this. Because I was trying to explain this to my team and so I went on, I purchased the advanced whatever pro license because I don’t want to talk about Jane and then have it trained anything. So I bought the version where it doesn’t train the model, whereas, so it’s more insular.

And I built a whole wire frame, which I’ve never been able to do before. Because I am not a designer. This is so far from my skillset that it’s actually comical. The kind of slides I usually make for presentations at work, they get screenshotted and turned into emojis. Because they’re so bad. They’re so bad. They’re good. I think that’s what I’m going for. It’s kind of like a paint level. Anyway, so I use this lovable and you just describe what you want to the AI builder and it creates this wire frame of everything that you’re thinking. And then you can adjust. You can adjust. You can adjust.

And it really did feel like magic. And this is what I mean about when AI works really works. It’s going to feel like magic. And so, we have the AI Scribe now, which we’ve launched. And when you actually figure out how to use it in your practice, people are saying this is just life changing. Because everyone knows documentation is a challenging part of practice. Nobody wants to do any of the admin work or the documentation. You just want to spend time with your clients and your patients. And so, trying to find more ways to allow people to do that, that’s when AI is going to be magic.

So lovable if you are not a tech person, but want to try building something out. Super fun. I should get the coupon for that or something. I don’t get anything for that. That is not a sponsored post. This is just me.

Kayla: You should get a coupon code because I literally wrote it down and this is going to be helpful for my web designer. Because I’m always like sending, oh, can we do this? Can we do this? Can we do this? And he ask a hundred different other questions because like what I’m thinking in my brain is not translating in writing.

Ali: Exactly. And even Lovable. Like I just said, this is the idea. I know this isn’t exactly what I want. It’s just the idea of what I’m thinking. And I’ve been sharing it around and it’s just so fun because it clicks. You feel like you did it. You feel like you built something but you didn’t really.

So, I grew up with Macs in the school. I think I was one of the first years that had the computer lab with the Mac and there was this like storybook sort of software and you could add buttons and you click the button and it would decide which story you would take and take actions. This was so influential. It was so huge to me. I was like, I’m building something. I think it started my love of technology actually, and this feels like the adult version of I can just build things that click in the buttons, do stuff, and I didn’t actually have to go and learn how to code it all in the background.

But don’t be deceived. It’s not actually building you anything. Those are called wire frames. They don’t actually do anything. Someone else then has to go build them and that takes a long time.

Kayla: That’s amazing. So, for therapists who are hesitant to switch to a new practice management software, what advice or encouragement would you offer them?

Ali: Well, I always ask people like, what’s not working for you? If you’re thinking about switching, there’s a reason. If the problem is big enough that you’re considering switching, I would say you probably should switch. There’s something that’s not working for you there and for the friction to be at the point that you’re actually considering something else that’s quite high, that friction.

And so, there’s a cognitive jump that has to happen with all the work that has to happen with switching to a new software. And it’s kind of a black hole. And I’ve been talking to my team about this too. I’m like, people need a map of exactly how to get there, how long it’s going to take. And Jane, we’ve built up this support team, and I always say, if you hire Jane, you’re also hiring a team of people who cheerlead and support and want you to succeed. And so really just build out that map and then you can reduce your cognitive uncertainty. And that’s the scariest part. The scariest part is right before you jump, you don’t know anything about it.

And if you take too long cycling in that you’re going to just psych yourself out and stay with your current friction, but you’re having a problem. So, let’s fix the problem. Let’s jump and just make sure you know the timeline. Depending on how big your practice is, I always, I used to say it’s like two weeks. It’s a two-week process. We’re going to be here, call our support all the time, use our documentation, but build out that map to get there.

Then just make sure you’re a bit open with the fact that things are going to be hard when you start something new because you have to learn new flows. And so don’t give up right away. Take some time to get the setup done and just know that that’s going to take a little bit of work. But once you’ve gone through that. You’re going to gain all that time back. There’s a math equation there that will work, but the first little jump is always the hardest part. And then also recognizing that you shouldn’t be trying to recreate whatever your existing processes are. You’ve probably built a lot of process around whatever your existing software is capable of or not capable of. And if you try to recreate that, not only will you be frustrated probably, but you’ll be missing so many of the benefits of the new software, and

I would say this, no matter what you’re switching to or from, you might not recognize all the benefits of the flow of the way that that software was actually intended to be used and designed. So, you’ll miss out on a lot of the benefits. And so, there’s a lot of curiosity. Click everything, click every button. People are so scared to click buttons. I’m like, click every button. See what it does. Go through everything. Go through the documents, spend some time, and it feels like I don’t have time. That’s what I don’t have. But I think the math does work if you just take the time upfront to get it all set up. Do you find that to be true?

Kayla: A hundred percent. The more you work with any type of software you’re going to, learn more about it and even for practitioners who currently use a software, chances are you had to get used to that one as well. And of course, now, it’s easier because you’ve pressed all those buttons, you navigated all that. But I really like that you said don’t bring those same systems or processes with you to another software because the reason you chose to switch is because something wasn’t working. So, bringing those same processes is only going to recreate the same issues or stresses that you had previously.

Ali: And probably make them even worse because the software you’re changing to wasn’t designed with whatever process it was you’re doing in mind. I used to say this to people too. I would have them sit at a front desk because they’re clicking so fast, they’re not even seeing the screen. You just know where everything is. So, 10 clicks that you know where they are is faster than two clicks when you don’t know where they are. And that’s fine, but you eventually, you’ll know where the two clicks are and then that will be faster. So, it’s just recognizing, but I know this and I’m like, yeah, I know.

And then the other thing is ever boarding even within Jane, people are like, oh, I want to change system. And I’m going to say this, even though it’s probably going to work against me if we’re talking about switching to Jane. But if you’re thinking about switching away from Jane. Is you implement your software one time when you first set it up, you never go back to that, but We’re constantly evolving. And so going back and ever boarding, and I say this with our internal tools at Jane, I’m like, look at the tool. Did we re-implement it? Have we looked at what’s available now that wasn’t available when we first set it up. And we have some people that started with Jane six, seven years ago, and I’m like, do you know how much more we can do now that we couldn’t do then? And so, you might not even know.

And sometimes starting fresh. It’s the solution. You got to start from a clean slate, but make sure you’re aware of all the tools.

Okay, wait, I will say one more thing. Oh my gosh. I just want to talk to everybody about, so I’m like, call me. I’m going to help you set your system up. You don’t have to do everything at once. So set up your most important parts. When I used to have people that were switching from paper to electronic charting back early Jane. I feel like that’s not even a thing anymore. Who paper charts. Do people still paper chart? Some people? I’d be like, you don’t have to do it all at once. Don’t worry. Just set up the scheduling. Set up that part. Don’t worry about switching all your practitioners to electronic charting. What a headache can you imagine an administrator trying to set up their whole practice, and then also having constant practitioners getting mad about this electronic charting system. I’m like, just wait. It’s fine. Just keep paper charting for a little bit. And then add that later.

So, you can do it in stages. So set up your own map, like you have a map, and then just choose what’s going to work for your practice. And it doesn’t have to be the same for everybody. And then I also used to say pick your battles. Like I had one practitioner that was going to retire and he didn’t want to switch to electronic charting. And I’m like, that’s fine. So, I laminated his paper chart note. Then I gave him an erasable marker and he would do his charting on erasable marker, and then I would scan them into the chart. I’m not going to make you learn how to use an electronic charting system when you’re going to retire in like six months. I’m like, that’s fine. I’ll just figure it out. So also, be like, you can be creative. We can be creative and flexible with our own situation.

Kayla: I love that. So, if you’re listening to this podcast and you’re thinking, hmm, maybe I should check out Jane, head to kayladas.com/jane and book a free demo so that you can see what Jane app is all about.

Also, when you use the promotional code EVASPARE1MO, you’ll receive a one-month grace period on your new Jane account. This coupon code really comes in handy if you’re switching platforms as it helps you buffer the cost between both platforms at the same time. So don’t forget to use the coupon code when you sign up.

Ali, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today and giving us a sneak peek of all of the great things happening at Jane.

Ali: It was my pleasure. Absolutely Kayla, thanks for having me.

Kayla: And thank you everyone for tuning into today’s episode, and I hope you join me again soon on The Designer Practice Podcast.

Until next time, bye for now.

Credits & Disclaimers

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