Waitlist management for private practice therapists

The idea

Full therapists turn away enquiries every week, then can’t fill a sudden Tuesday-6pm opening because their waitlist is six months of stale emails scattered through an inbox. Ringing down that list means days of phone tag while the slot, worth $150+ a week in recurring revenue, sits empty. Meanwhile half the list found another therapist months ago and never said so.

The wedge is a structured, self-maintaining list. Intake captures the three fields that determine fit (insurance, availability windows, format), monthly automated check-ins prune the dead entries, and slot matching turns filling an opening into a filtered query plus one email. Staying deliberately non-clinical, no notes and no treatment content, keeps the compliance surface small while still running on a BAA-friendly stack.

Who pays

The buyer is the solo private-practice therapist or a small group practice, paying $25/mo because filling one weekly slot two weeks faster pays for a year. Distribution: therapist communities are dense and online, including private-practice Facebook groups, Reddit’s therapist forums, and practice-building podcasts and consultants who recommend tools to thousands of clinicians.

MVP scope

• Public structured intake form with insurance, availability, and format fields
• Waitlist table with ageing, filters, and inactive-state management
• Automated 30-day still-interested check-ins with one-click responses
• Slot matcher filtering the list against an opening’s parameters
• One-click offer emails with expiring response links
• Skip for v1: scheduling and calendars, clinical notes or anything PHI-heavy, EHR integrations, client portals, payments from clients

Build OpenSlot, a waitlist manager for private-practice therapists. Stack: Next.js App Router, Supabase (Postgres, magic-link auth), Postmark for email. Bill with Stripe Checkout.

Core flow: the therapist shares an intake link; prospective clients submit structured entries: name, contact, insurance carrier or self-pay, availability windows (weekday and time-of-day checkboxes), preferred format (in-person or telehealth), and a one-line presenting concern. Deliberately collect no clinical detail beyond that line, to keep the product non-clinical. Every 30 days, Postmark sends each waitlisted person a still-interested check-in with one-click responses: keep me on the list, or remove me. Two ignored check-ins moves them to inactive. When a slot opens, the therapist enters its parameters (Tuesday 6pm, telehealth, takes Aetna) and gets a match list filtered by availability, insurance, and format, ranked by wait time, with a one-click offer email that includes an expiring response link.

Pages: waitlist table with filters and wait-time ageing, public intake form, slot-matching screen, check-in activity log, settings (insurers accepted, check-in cadence, templates), billing.

Implementation details: sign a BAA-friendly stack (Supabase and Postmark both offer BAAs) and encrypt the presenting-concern field at the application layer; log every email for the therapist's records.

Pricing: $25/mo flat, 30-day trial.