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 brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
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.
Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand: decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability, and what did you learn from them?
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.
Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now, and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
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.
How are you thinking about search in 2026, across Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What have you changed to stay visible?
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.
What do you do to turn first-time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well?
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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