The AI Reality Check
Built by a chiropractor for chiropractors at iconpractice
Matthew Holmes is the managing director of iconpractice, a practice management system built for chiropractors. He started it to solve a problem in his own clinic, and that first-hand experience still shapes how the software is built and sold.
For a niche business, trust still does most of the work. iconpractice is getting new customers mainly through referrals and useful content, while AI has been most helpful in coding and least reliable as the final check on quality.
What’s the quick origin story of your business, and what makes what you do genuinely different from the other options your customers are looking at?
iconpractice started by scratching my own itch. As a chiropractor running my own practice, I wanted a practice management system that better reflected how a chiropractic practice actually operates, so I built one for my own use.
That origin still shapes what makes iconpractice different: it’s built by a chiropractor for chiropractors. It comes from firsthand industry experience and an understanding of the day-to-day realities of practice, rather than approaching practice management purely as a software problem.
Where does most of your new business come from today, and where do you wish it came from?
Most of our new business today comes from word of mouth and referrals, supported by SEO and content marketing. In a specialised market like chiropractic, trust and recommendations from within the profession are particularly valuable.
The next step for us is developing more scalable, predictable acquisition channels. We’d like to explore paid channels such as PPC alongside the organic and referral-based growth that already brings people to iconpractice.
What’s one thing you’ve actually handed over to AI in the last year, and one thing you tried it on and went back to doing the human way?
One thing I’ve increasingly handed over to AI is coding. It can be very useful for producing code and speeding up development work.
Where I’ve gone back to the human way is QA. I tried using AI to check code, but found that final quality assurance still benefits from human review. AI can help build faster, but I’m not yet comfortable treating it as the final check on whether the code is actually ready.
Have you noticed a change in how customers find you or what they already know before they reach out? Is anyone arriving through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet?
We haven’t noticed a major change yet in how customers find us or what they know before they get in touch. Our established channels—word of mouth, referrals, SEO and content—are still important.
We’re also not aware of customers specifically discovering us through AI assistants like ChatGPT yet. It’s an area we’d like better visibility into, but the AI search and tracking tools we’ve looked at are currently prohibitively expensive for a business of our size.
If you were advising someone in your industry on all of this for the next 12 months, what would you tell them to actually do, and what would you tell them to ignore?
For the next 12 months, I’d focus on the fundamentals: stay close to customers, solve real problems, create genuinely useful content and build the kind of product people are willing to recommend to their peers. I’d also experiment with AI where it can save meaningful time, but keep human oversight where quality matters.
What I’d ignore is the pressure to chase every new channel or AI trend simply because everyone is talking about it. For a niche software business, you don’t need to be everywhere. You need to understand where your customers actually are, what earns their trust, and invest consistently in the channels that produce results.
Thank you to Matthew Holmes and the team at iconpractice for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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