One lesson from building JourneyLoop, three finds worth your time, under five minutes.
Hey,
A coach we work with sat on our client consent link (the one you send your clients to agree to being recorded) and never sent it, because he could not answer the questions he knew his client would ask.
🔧 Under the Hood
His words on the call: "I think what I hesitate with is that I don't really understand what's happening behind the scenes." Then: "Where does it explain to me where the data is being housed?" The industry is busy debating whether clients should be told AI is involved. The person who would not send the disclosure was the coach.
Michael reorganized the problem in one line: it's always the client's agenda. A form that opens by asking permission to record leads with what the coach's software needs, and asks the client to grant something before they have said a word about why they came.ow.
We were asking coaches to push technology onto their own clients, and they could not bring themselves to do it.
So we changed the order. The first touchpoint is now a coach-branded intake form, handed over before the intake call, complete without recording and without saving anything.
Simple, but effective. Michael’s clients now have a first touch point with JourneyLoop before the intake call - no consent or credentials required.
Giving your next client a space to reflect before you even meet puts them in the driver’s seat.
The client writes a few sentences about what brings them here. Only at the end do they get the option to save those words and open a reflection space of their own, where they can talk with an AI about their goals. Recording arrives after that, framed by how much it improves a space the client already owns. Michael's version is live for his own practice, check it out!
🔁 Worth a Loop
The State of AI in Coaching Businesses 2026 (The Coach's CMO): most coaches already use AI, almost entirely for content creation, the lowest-leverage use available.
The Race to Build a Personal AI Agent (And Why Nobody Has Won Yet) (Peter Yang): the clearest writeup of the agent race for non-engineers, and his verdict is that reliability beats demos.
Why Agentic Systems Need Ontologies (Frank Coyle, UC Berkeley): an agent needs a structured map of its domain before anyone can trust it, which is the engineering version of knowing one thing well.
Reply and tell me: what is the first thing a new client of yours sees before the two of you ever meet?
Marco
P.S. If you want to go further with this, the free Coaching & AI Round Table is where Michael and I take these questions live, and the JourneyLoop community is where coaches work through them together.