About CoachTide
The admin almost cost me the coaching.
I am a working coach. I built CoachTide because the patched-together tools I ran my practice on were quietly eating the part of the week I actually trained for. So I replaced them, and built the replacement to guard my clients' trust first.
Jacob Hokanson
Founder, CoachTide. ICF ACC, working toward PCC.
I still coach, and I run my own practice on CoachTide every day. If you write to us, you are writing to someone who uses it the way you will.
01
The part nobody trained me for
I earned my International Coaching Federation ACC credential, and I am working toward PCC now. The coaching was never the hard part. I love the work. The problem was everything around it.
Booking. Notes. Invoices. Logged hours. Reminders. Follow-ups. None of it was hard on its own. It was the volume, and the fact that it all lived in different places, that wore me down.
02
Five tools, none of them talking
My clients lived in a CRM built for sales teams, where I lost weeks to features I would never use. Booking ran through one app. ICF and reciprocal hours went in a spreadsheet. Session notes in a doc. Invoices in another doc, and one more spreadsheet just to track which I had sent and been paid for.
- A sales CRM
- A booking app
- A notes doc
- An invoices doc
- Spreadsheets for hours and payments
I kept a whole group of browser tabs open just to flip between them, and I still scrambled to find my notes and trust my memory before every session. I dropped balls. It was a real mess.
There is a deeper reason it hit me this hard. My brain does not hold on to scattered details, and a memory-dependent pile of admin is exactly the kind of work it quietly lets slip. So I built CoachTide for how I actually work: nothing to remember, everything waiting where I need it. I wrote more about how the way I think shaped CoachTide on the blog.
03
The credential was the breaking point
Chasing the credential is what finally broke it. Logging every coaching hour, tracking CCEUs, keeping client records straight enough to stand behind, all through a setup this unwieldy. I could find something built for this, or accept that the admin would keep crowding out the work.
So I went looking. Most of the tools I tried limited the free tier hard or charged for each feature, and none did the whole job. Every one left gaps I would still be patching with spreadsheets and docs.
So I stopped taping tools together, taught myself to build, and made the thing I kept wishing for. Then I cancelled the other subscriptions one by one.
04
That is CoachTide
Everything I had cobbled together, rebuilt to work as one system: booking pages, a client pipeline, prep before every session, invoices that chase themselves, a private client portal, ICF hours, and a built-in Guide for the how-does-this-work questions. Nothing waits on me to remember it any more.
The part I am proudest of: it is all behind one price. No locked features, no hidden upsells, no “upgrade to unlock”, and no cut of what your clients pay you.
I still coach. I still use it every day. And I am still building it, for the coaches who would rather coach than spend their spare moments keeping up with the admin that keeps a practice healthy.
Why privacy came first
My clients tell me things they tell no one else. That shaped every decision.
Before I wrote a line of the booking page, I had to decide where my own clients' notes would live and who could ever see them. A coaching tool holds the most private conversations people have. So I built the protection in from the first day, rather than adding it later, and I say plainly what we do not have yet.
Stored at rest in Canada
Your data is stored in Canada, and CoachTide's application servers run in Canada too. A few specialist services we rely on, like email delivery, card payments and AI help, process the specific information they need in the United States. Every one is listed on our Sub-processors page.
Each practice walled off
The database itself keeps every practice apart, so no screen can show your clients to another coach.
Nobody here browses your notes
CoachTide has no tool for our staff to sign into a coach’s account or look inside a practice. Support works from a shared screen, screenshots, or a Guide conversation the coach sends.
Straight answers
Small, and honest about it.
CoachTide is a small Canadian company. We hold no security certification yet, and no outside firm has tested us yet. Our handling is consistent with PIPEDA and BC PIPA, your data is never sold, and you can export it or delete it whenever you like.
Built it for me. Sharing it with you.
Set it up in an afternoon, then just show up and coach. Free for the beta, 40% off for life after.
