The night I found Voyj

This is the only post on this site that is not about career coaching. It is about the software, and I am putting it here rather than on a separate page because the honest version of running a small practice includes the admin — and pretending otherwise would be a strange thing to do on a website about being honest.

I am Veronica. I run Bottletop Coaching Co, which is a fictional company built to showcase what Voyj does. I will explain why it is fictional at the end. First, the part that was making me miserable.

I was becoming good at admin instead of good at coaching

Something had shifted and I did not notice it happening.

I had started this practice because I wanted to sit opposite people and help them make sense of a career. Slowly, without deciding to, I had become a person who ran a small logistics operation. And the logistics were winning.

The coaching was the part I was best at and the part I was worst equipped for. I am not a systems person. I am someone who listens hard, asks the question nobody wanted to ask, and writes down what matters. None of that is difficult. All of it requires that nothing else is falling apart while you do it.

Everything was everywhere

Here is what running one coach actually looked like.

A spreadsheet of availability that I was constantly re-checking against my calendar. A second spreadsheet of clients, with their notes in it, which was out of date within a fortnight of being correct. An inbox where booking questions sat unanswered for hours because I was coaching all day. Session notes in one document, follow-ups in another, and a third file I was fairly sure contained a version of a plan I had given someone last year. Files — files — on a laptop desktop, in a downloads folder, in an email, and once, memorably, on a stick of USB I could no longer read.

Every one of those places was a place I had to remember to look. That was the real problem. Not the number of places. The remembering.

And the cost was not abstract. It was the fact that I was spending the evenings after a full day of sessions doing data entry instead of going to bed. The people who had paid me for a career decision were getting the version of me who was too tired to give them a proper one.

I needed a solution. I did not know what it looked like, but I knew for certain that it was not going to be me, on a Sunday, reformatting a column.

The kitchen bench

It was a Wednesday, which is worth mentioning because it was not a crisis. No deadline. Nothing had gone wrong. I had simply finished a day of sessions, made tea I let go cold, and sat down on the kitchen bench in my pyjamas to do admin instead of resting.

That is the actual image of the low point. Not a crisis. A woman on a bench at eleven at night, in pyjamas, with a cup of cocoa, retyping a client’s details into a spreadsheet for the fourth time that week.

And somewhere in the middle of it — I genuinely do not know how, and I have thought about this since — I typed something different into the search bar. I searched for software to run a small coaching practice properly, and I found Voyj.

What the website said

I read it in bed with the cocoa going cold again, which is a habit I would recommend against.

What I was looking for was narrow: somewhere for the booking, the scheduling and the client information to live, without me being the thing that moved information between them. Voyj is a coaching practice workbench built by coaches, and the features on the site mapped onto my list of complaints almost one for one:

• Client management. Every client’s details, notes and history in one place. This is the line on their site — “no more juggling spreadsheets” — and it is the sentence I needed to read.
• Smart scheduling. Booking and running sessions in the same system, rather than a form that emails me something to process.
• Email and calendar sync. My inbox and diary keep themselves up to date without me doing it. This was the single biggest chunk of my evenings.
• Secure documents. Client notes and files in one private, findable place instead of a downloads folder and a USB stick I could no longer read.
• Availability tracking and reminders. See my real availability at a glance so I stop double-booking myself, and automatic reminders so fewer people miss sessions they paid for.
• Goal tracking and structured learning. The work between sessions lives with the client rather than in my head, which is where it always should have been.
• A client portal. One place for messages, files, tasks and sessions — so nobody has to ask me where I sent something.
• Video sessions and recordings built in. No third-party link to lose, and I can find the moment a client mentioned something important instead of relying on memory.

It starts free, and the paid tiers are priced in Australian dollars, which I appreciated as an Australian practice. You can see the pricing on their site — I would rather point you at it than summarise it and get it wrong.

What convinced me was not any single feature. It was recognising that this had been built by people who had done the job. Every awkward edge case I had been grumbling about — the time zones, the follow-ups, the notes — was something somebody had already hit and built a fix for. That is what the line on their homepage means by built by coaches, and you can feel it in the feature list.

So I gave it a try.

Here is the introduction they gave me

I have put their video below rather than describing it, because they will do a better job than I will and because you should see the actual product:

The video is a product video, made by the people who built the thing, and it describes Voyj well. Watch it, then read the rest of this post with that in mind.

Two weeks later

That is genuinely how long it took. Not a month of migrating. Not a consultant.

The first week, the booking stopped being a chore with a form attached. The second week, I realised I had not once retyped a client into anything, and that the follow-up notes I had been promising people had started going out on time without me remembering to.

The spreadsheets are still there. I have not deleted them, because I am not fanciful, and I still check one of them most weeks. But they are no longer load bearing. Nothing breaks if I forget about them, which is the entire point.

And the bit I care about most: the evenings are mine again. I go to bed at a reasonable hour. I have not opened a spreadsheet on a kitchen bench in pyjamas since roughly the second week.

What I would tell another coach

The honest bit, from someone who has no reason to oversell it — and who has now recommended this to four other solo coaches:

• Start with email and calendar sync. That is the quiet one. It is also the one that gives you your evenings back, and you will notice the difference within a week.
• Do not try to migrate everything on day one. I did. It was unnecessary. Bring the live clients across and let the archives sit in a spreadsheet until you want them.
• Turn reminders on before anything else. They are unglamorous and they stop people losing sessions they have paid for — which is both kind and profitable.
• Use the goal tracking with your clients properly. It is the feature I thought I would ignore and now use most. Clients who can see their own progress between sessions stay in the work, and stay with you.
• If you are a solo practice, the client portal pays for itself. Nobody has to ask me where I sent something, and that removes an entire category of message.

If you are still not sure

It starts free. That is not a trial-shaped free tier that expires with your data in it — it is a plan you can genuinely use, with real clients in it.

So the cheapest possible test is: put your three most awkward clients in it, run two weeks, and see whether you are still on the kitchen bench at midnight. If you are not, that is your answer.

That is exactly what I did, which is why this post exists.

Why this whole site is fictional

Because you cannot demo booking software with a real business attached to it. Real clients would be booking real sessions with a coach who does not exist, and the prices and testimonials on the rest of this site would be lies told at scale.

So Bottletop Coaching Co is invented — the coach, the clients, the reviews, the 150 Doogle ratings, all of it. What is not invented is the structure. The sessions, the formats, the pricing tiers, the booking experience, the timezone handling: those are modelled closely on how a genuine small coaching practice runs, because that is the thing worth showing you.

If you want the actual product, it is at voyj.app, and it starts free. If you want to see what a practice built on it looks like, you are standing in it.