As some of you may know, we’ve been working with the business experts over at Distinctions Inc. Over the course of the last few months one thing has become increasingly clear: in order to create the best possible product and successfully engage enough coaches to adopt it to make it a viable business, we need to go back to Beta and do some more testing and development.

At the same time, the CoachAccountable team is facing some exciting developments with our primary business, Playground Creative. Thus, we have less time and financial resources to work on CoachAccountable, which has always been an unfunded labor of love.

So what does this mean for our users? Well, if you already have an account, you will be able to use the system for free from now on. However, we aren’t making any guarantees about the system so use is at your own risk. This is the nature of Beta. Don’t get us wrong – we’ll still maintain the same level of security and all the same features will be available. We just won’t necessarily respond to support requests within 24 hours and any updates or bug fixes are solely at our discretion.

I’d like to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who has supported us this far, provided feedback, told a friend or otherwise has participated in CoachAccountable up to this point. It’s been such a great journey – and we’re sure that it’s not over. We are just exploring options for where to take this baby.

If you don’t currently have an account but would like one or you have any questions about what’s happening with CoachAccountable, shoot us an email at support at coachaccountable dot com.

Can we get a “woot woot”? Today we successfully completed Beta and launched to the public!

Building this fabulous application has been a long, fascinating and (usually) fun journey. And this is just the beginning. As my mama woould say, “There’s no rest for the wicked.” We are working out the technical details for our Affiliate program and should be launching that soon. We are working on some new solutions to some of our Beta coaches’ feedback. We are also working on a major revamp of the Calendar so that it will sync with your other calendars and will feature online scheduling for Premium accounts. Whew!

We’d like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to all of our Beta coaches who tested the system and got their clients on board and gave us such great feedback and positive support.  You guys totally rock! We couldn’t have done it without you.

We have officially been in Beta for a few weeks now and are super excited about how things are progressing. We have a great group of Beta users and we’ve just sent out our first questionnaire so we should have a solid range of feedback to begin our next development phase next week. Some things that will be updated include time zones and currencies so the system will be useful worldwide. Also, we will be building out new features on the calendar and working to make CoachAccountable sync with a few other popular systems. We will keep you posted as new features arise.

On a different note, we have been brainstorming ways to add more value for the coaching community at large. We aren’t professional coaches, so we won’t presume to tell you anything about being a coach or how to coach. However, one thing that we know pretty well is web technology, including applications, social networking, and future trends. We thought we could provide some tips and tutorials for coaches on improving their business with technology. Keep checking back here to see what we find. Also, if you have any questions about technology at all (from super basic to advanced or even theoretical) please just ask! If you want to know, I’m sure there are others out there with the same issue. We would love to find the answer. Cheers!

Alright, folks. No one is as anxious as we are to get this bad puppy up and running. We can’t wait to get our BETA testers plugged in. And it’s coming…very soon.

November was a bit crazy. Much-needed vacations, cross-Atlantic visits from family, and a lot of outside work kept us from launching Beta last month. However, that turned out to be a really good thing. We’ve been getting some great feedback from coaches (thank you! please keep it coming, every bit is super useful.) Looking at these pearls of real-life wisdom, we realized we needed to rethink some of the design and functionality to make it more intuitive and versatile.That led to a major re-think and redesign, which is complete as of today. Woot!

Included in the changes are a more customizable system to that coaches can truly set up their business any way that works for them. Drag-and-drop widgets allow you to choose which things you want to be able to see at a glance, such as to-do lists (for you or your VA) outstanding invoices, your upcoming appointments, etc. A brand new template system lets you to input your intake forms, questionnaires, and worksheets easily into the system and have your clients fill them out on-line, where they can always be accessed in a moment by both of you or emailed as a pdf. There’s also a great Library for uploading and sharing newsletters, audio files, anything you want. We’ve been working on the Billing system and think we’ve found a great intuitive way for coaches & clients to manage their financial agreements and clients can even pay online from within their system. All in all, it’s looking fantastic. We sure hope you’ll agree.

Final development has begun (and knowing John, it’ll go QUICK – particularly if we bring him hot meals occasionally!) With the holidays coming up, we are aiming for a late-January Beta launch. There’s still space for testers, so sign up and tell your coaching friends to do the same. There’s no long-term commitment, you get early access to a fully-functioning system and you’ll get 6 months FREE upgrade once we’ve released to the public. Sweet!