10 years of Cliniko

Using a loan that had just been approved to renovate their house, Joel quit his job and, with Liora, started a company called Red Guava and began development on “Clinic thingy” (naming the software was not the first priority). They may have forgotten to let the bank know the change in plans for the funds.

The first-ever users of Cliniko signed up to be beta testers. It could have been thanks to Joel’s sales skills (he walked door-to-door and clinic-to-clinic and asked people if they were interested, but none of those people were convinced). Instead, through Liora’s contacts, a couple of businesses agreed to try it out.

After seven months of long days, late nights, and lots of coffee, Cliniko was officially released.

A month after launching, we’d had 37 businesses sign up to trial Cliniko, with 14 deciding to stick around.

As Cliniko grew, it became a lot for just two people to manage. The plan was to hire a local Melbourne developer, but fate intervened. Bartosz (software developer) applied even though he lived in Poland, and Liora and Joel knew he was The One—thus beginning Cliniko’s international (and remote) team.

In his talk for Real Big Things, Joel spoke about the experience of hiring remotely. Watch a snippet here:

Less than a year after launch, over six million dollars had been invoiced by all the clinics who were using Cliniko to manage their practice!

Up until now, patients would have to call clinics to book their appointments—which was, in our opinion, kind of archaic. We wanted to make things easier for everyone, so online bookings were launched. Patients could simply book themselves in, which was handy!

Making the world a better place might be a cliché phrase, but it’s one that means a lot to us. Joel and Liora decided to donate a portion of all revenue to charity. (This amount would later increase.) The first charities we donated to were Plan and WWF.

The need for dedicated customer support was growing and Liora’s mum was tired of managing the books! Jim and Melanie joined the team and worked out of the “office” (Liora and Joel’s living room). Rufus (resident CEO and Good Boy) supervised and encouraged extended lunch breaks.

There were people all over the world using Cliniko to manage their practices. We were truly astonished to see the widespread global use of what had been just a little idea less than two years ago!

The team had grown to eight, and the office migrated from Joel and Liora’s living room to an actual office in Glen Huntly (a suburb of Melbourne). It didn’t have many windows and the conference room was never used, but many critical conversations did happen over a game of table tennis.

A much-needed feature which had been lacking was the ability for patients to have a record of the appointment they booked! Customisable confirmation emails (complete with calendar attachments) made that a reality, and we were pretty excited about it.

We now had a total of 10 employees, and hosted our first-ever meetup in Australia. Everyone had a blast getting to know one another in person while enjoying good food and taking in some beautiful scenery in Apollo Bay, Victoria. Team members visited from the UK, USA, Brazil, and Poland.

Two and a half years in, it was high time for a little branding refresh. Kelly (our in-house designer and illustrator) reworked the existing logo into what you see today. T-shirts were made, too! You can take a peek at what we started with—and some of the various iterations along the way—before ending up with what we have now.

It felt amazing to believe that 2,000 businesses were now using Cliniko every day!

As Cliniko grew, so did our team (we were up to 14 employees across 6 countries). It became apparent how important it was for a remote team to spend some time together. Folks flew in from around the globe to hang out, work on Cliniko, and get to know each other.

Jim, Joel, Liora, and a very young Mae (Joel and Liora’s daughter) headed to Noosa, Queensland for the Osteopathy Australia conference. Mae turned out to be a great marketer, but sadly decided it wasn’t for her, and did not attend future conferences.

We’d outgrown our smaller meetups with a team size of 17. Nearly everyone (plus some family members) headed to Athens, Greece for two weeks where we found a big enough villa to house us. One of the highlights was watching the sunset from the Parthenon—while working on Cliniko, of course!

Our team had grown, and no longer was Glen Huntly central for those using it. It was time for an upgrade. Our new Richmond office had lots of natural light, a rooftop with a view, and of course table tennis, where Clint (customer support) rapidly gained mastery.

More than half a million appointments were booked from the online bookings page just in 2015 (502,760, to be exact!). Kind of mind-boggling—and this number would just increase in the following years!

There were now 5,000 clinics throughout the world using Cliniko to manage their practice! The fact that we’d reached 1,000 had surpassed even the wildest of dreams, so this was a huge milestone.

With the office becoming less important to our remote team, and meetups becoming essential, we set up for a regular meetup hub. We settled on the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia and folks made the trip out to enjoy the fresh air, taste some local wine, and meet some local celebrities—the friendly kangaroos at the local animal sanctuary.

Marcus (customer support) became our 20th employee, and the first Aussie “local” who didn’t live on the eastern side of the country (he was in Western Australia). Believe it or not, he had been a customer before working at Cliniko—as a physiotherapist, he had used the software to run his practice!

From day one, we’d always wanted to provide the best possible support to every Cliniko user. For six years up until this point, we’d relied on email and phone calls as our primary methods of helping people, but this needed to change. We were only able to answer 25% of the phone calls we received, and email could be slow. We made a rather controversial decision to switch to chat- and email-based support only, and you can read about why we did this here.

Two years had passed since our last “big” team meetup in Greece, and this time—with 24 employees plus their families—we opted for mountains and glaciers instead of oceans and olive trees. Everyone met up in Alberta, Canada for a two-week stay in a beautiful part of the country. We hiked in Banff, swam in an ice-cold river, and toasted marshmallows by the campfire.

Since 2012, at least 1% of total revenue had been donated to charity. This month marked a total of $100,000 in donations. We’d always wanted to make a difference through our work, and were astounded at how quickly it was adding up.

Up until this point, Cliniko was best suited towards “computer” use—that is, it worked well when using a desktop or laptop computer, but didn’t look (or behave) the nicest if you were on a mobile phone or tablet. We made a ton of changes to get with the times (or a bit ahead) and implement “responsive design” (the fancy phrase for “works well on things besides computers”) throughout the whole application. This meant that Cliniko was now fully functional across all devices, which was exciting.

Little did we know that when we hired Rachel (customer support), we would also be getting a video pro! Rachel’s bubbly personality and enthusiasm for Cliniko has been evident in each and every video she’s created. Watch the very first Cliniko This Week video:

The location for our meetups came with a barn. It had previously been a home for horses, but the Cliniko co-founders didn’t have any equestrian plans in mind. Instead, it was converted into an exceptional office space—and, in true Melbourne form, included a coffee bar. “The Barn,” as it’s called, has since become a central hub for Cliniko get-togethers.

At this point, 48,000 people (spread over thousands of clinics) were using Cliniko throughout the world! This gave us a lot of warm fuzzies.

While we had always been compliant with Australian privacy requirements, we had to make sure that we stayed up to date with new rules coming out! When the EU introduced GDPR regulations, we added features to make sure that those using the software were empowered to be compliant with GDPR.

After many months (okay, years) of prepping for body charts, they were finally released. This was really exciting because we knew that in addition to typed notes, marking up diagrams was a much-needed feature!

Rachel (customer support) flew to Nepal to work directly with one of the charities that we support, Beyond The Orphanage (BTO). For two weeks, she spent time building relationships with the BTO team and the children they support. Read her account of the trip here.

We added fields for sex, gender identity, and preferred pronouns into Cliniko. You can read more about this here—long story short, it’s very important to us that you (and your patients) are empowered when it comes to handling sensitive details. We had wanted to add this to Cliniko for a long time, and were happy to finally have it available.

We increased donations from 1%, to 2% of all revenue. All donations are based purely on revenue, not profit, to ensure that the charities we donate to are not impacted by our running costs. You can read more about the charities we contribute to here.

Most of our team was international at this point, and even those who lived local to Melbourne were spending more time working from home. We made the decision to formally close the Richmond office and embrace the fully-remote lifestyle (using The Barn as our official headquarters), but not before a few final rounds of table tennis were played.

After eight years, it was time for a full branding refresh. Our main website had a glow up—which happened to be just in time for the introduction of The Fancy Conference Booth (more on that next!).

We attended the ESSA (Exercise & Sports Science Australia) conference in Melbourne, and were happy to have a fancy new booth! We had a great time chatting to people and meeting both current and future Cliniko users.

We had the opportunity to chat with a whole lot of Cliniko users at our first-ever Cliniko Community meetup in Melbourne! It was great to see some familiar faces, and meet new people.

Up until now, folks in the United States who needed to be compliant with HIPAA regulations weren’t able to use Cliniko. As with other privacy requirements (such as GDPR), features were added to help make HIPAA compliance a reality for those who needed it!

Remember that Fancy Conference Booth we mentioned… yeah that went into storage, community and team meetups were put on hold, and the Cliniko team started working on building features that would benefit clinics during lockdowns.

Social distancing became the norm, but patients still needed treatment. Telehealth was added to Cliniko because we knew that practitioners would need to treat patients remotely—and as we’d find out later, it became one of the most-used features during the year.

Not everyone could see patients in person, and we wanted to make sure people had access to digital forms that could be emailed to patients, which they could then fill out online and submit back to each clinic. Secure digital patient forms were released, and were one of our most welcomed additions.

As with GDPR in the EU and HIPAA in the United States, we had to make sure that we set clinics up for success with PIPEDA (Canada’s privacy requirements). New features were added to ensure that clinics in Canada would be able to be PIPEDA-compliant!

We wanted to do something both fun and educational during lockdown, so we began an occasional live Q&A session in which Joel showcased his barista skills in front of an audience (remotely viewing from many countries!). Along with teaching everyone about coffee, Joel answered questions about Cliniko. You can watch the recording here!

Sadly, the pandemic meant we couldn’t see one another in person, but that didn’t stop us from having our first-ever virtual event! Working out time zones was a little tricky, but most of the team was able to get together over video conference and chat, play some trivia, and generally enjoy one another’s company!

To get to this point was humbling, to say the least—Cliniko had started in a living room, and now it was a 40-person company, something that exceeded Liora and Joel’s wildest dreams. Fede (customer support) was our 40th hire!

When the online payments feature launched in 2020, we had no idea that in under a year, patients would have paid over $15 million dollars to their clinics! This number continues to grow, and we’re excited that we get to help make your life easier by making payments easier.

Telehealth exploded during 2020, and we knew it would be useful, but we were blown away when we saw that 30 million minutes of telehealth consults had taken place through Cliniko! Pictured above may or may not be a real telehealth consult.

We’ve always cared greatly about the environment, and finding ways to offset our carbon emissions was really important to us. In June, we officially became a carbon neutral company, and as we move forward, we’ll continue to measure our own carbon footprint and ensure that we leave the world a little better than we found it.

Over the past decade, 201 years (you read that correctly) of work have been put into Cliniko! This includes hours spent by each and every employee, and covers everything from software development to supporting customers to keeping track of company finances.

Cakes and balloons are one way to celebrate our 10th birthday, but even better is donating to those in need. To mark a decade of Cliniko, we’re happy to say that a million dollars have now been donated to charity, from your subscription payments. That makes this birthday so much sweeter.