This is the first of what I want to be a regular series — a short, honest writeup from the clinic floor. What shipped this week, what surprised me, what I'm about to throw out, and what I'm wrestling with. Posted on whatever cadence I can sustain without it turning into marketing copy.
The point isn't to perform transparency. It's to give other operators a window into what building this from inside a real clinic actually looks like, including the parts that aren't flattering.
Shipped this week
Three things landed in production at Prosper Health and on the live Loyalty Flow build. In rough order of how much I sweated each one:
Magic-link login on patient web.Replaces a password login that almost no one was actually using. A patient gets a one-line email, clicks the link, they're in. The team at Prosper ran this through about eight patients before we pushed it broadly — the relevant feedback was from Margaret, who's 64 and has historically refused to download our app. She got in on the first try. That's the bar we needed to clear.
A2P 10DLC SMS compliance. The unsexy infrastructure work that has to be right or the entire SMS channel quietly stops delivering. I spent more time on this than I want to admit. Worth it.
Partner program affiliate flow.Built end-to-end this week. Configurable commission, attribution windows, payout terms. Lots of pieces. Most of it is invisible to a single operator, but the agencies and consultants we've been talking to need this to make introductions worth their time.
What surprised me
The Tuesday drops we ran for two weeks straight at Prosper had an unexpected secondary effect: our Wednesday and Thursday utilization went up too. The hypothesis was that drops would just pull demand forward — patients who would have booked Friday booking Tuesday instead. The data shows something different. Tuesday filled and the back half of the week also filled. The drops were creating new appointment intent rather than redistributing existing intent.
I have a guess about why this happened, but it's a guess: when a patient reserves a Tuesday drop, they look at our menu for the first time in weeks. They see the new injectable we're carrying, they see the photographer headshot we just put up, they remember the laser facial they meant to book in March. The drop is the doorway. The actual booking that follows is something else.
The thing that draws the patient in doesn't have to be the thing they buy.
I'm going to test this more deliberately over the next month. If it holds, it changes how I think about the economic value of the drops module.
What I'm about to throw out
The points-balance hero on the patient mobile home screen. It's a vestige of how I thought loyalty apps should work when I started — big number, satisfying to see. In practice, the patients who care about the points balance pay attention to it without us shouting. The patients who don't care are confused by it.
What I want to put there instead: the next thing the patient can do — the next drop, the next reward they're close to, the next visit they're due for. Forward-looking, not backward-looking. I'll prototype it this week and see if Prosper's patients notice.
What I'm wrestling with
How to handle the case where a patient wants to redeem a reward at the front desk but their phone is dead. Right now the staff workaround is to look up the patient and apply the redemption manually, which works, but it requires staff training and it's slower than the in-app path.
The right answer is probably some kind of physical fallback — a printable QR for tap-to-redeem on a dead phone, or an Apple Wallet integration that works offline. Both have edge cases. I'll probably ship the Wallet integration first and the printable fallback later for the corner case where the phone literally has no battery.
From the second location
Loyalty Flow now runs in our second clinic — Prosper Health & Aesthetics in Indianapolis, which I've invested in — beyond the Sioux City practice I run day to day. Same build, a different front desk and a different patient mix. Watching it work in a second location, with staff who didn't build it, is the best bug-finder we have and the truest test of whether any of this holds up outside the room it was made in.
What I'll say after watching it run in two places: the drops are doing what a rev-share platform was supposed to do, and we keep zero percent of what they generate. That's not a testimonial — it's just what we see on our own floors. I'd rather show you that than a logo wall we haven't earned yet.
Separately, an injector who's evaluating us — not a customer yet — said the check-in QR "feels like opening a wedding invitation. Where did you find your designer?" I'm the designer. Thank you for asking.
We're a small team. The product reflects whose hands have been on it. That's the whole promise.
What's next
Three things on the bench for the next two weeks:
Email template editor for cohort clinics. Apple Wallet sync for membership cards. A first pass at the public API so the partner program integrations have something to call into.
If you're reading this and you run a clinic, the cohort is open. We're hand-picking operators we'd want to be in the room with. Founder pricing for life.
— Robbie