How Adam Taylor runs Adam Taylor Basketball on Coachful
How Adam Taylor runs Adam Taylor Basketball on Coachful
Adam Taylor left a five-star review on Coachful's Trustpilot page in May 2026 with a headline that is hard to read past: "Exactly what I had been praying for". Coaches do not usually write that about software. They write that about a thing they had given up expecting to find.
The sentence that explains it comes two lines later. "I am a people person, and when I saw how I could deliver my coaching curriculum one-on-one or in small groups, I knew I had to sign up." That is a whole business model in one line. There is a curriculum, already built, already taught. It has to reach one player sitting across from the coach, and it has to reach a handful of players at once, and it is supposed to feel like the same thing either way.
This story is drawn from Adam Taylor's public review on Trustpilot and from what they say on their own site; we have not added anything they did not say themselves. On the site, we have to be straight with you: the domain for Adam Taylor Basketball did not load for us on 15 September 2026. The bare domain does not resolve at all, and the www address redirects to a page that is still carrying template placeholder text rather than any description of the coaching. So there was nothing there to quote. Everything below about Adam comes from the review, word for word, and everything else is about Coachful itself.
So you will not find client numbers, revenue or a session count here. We do not know them. What we can do is take each thing the review names, show you the part of Coachful being described, and explain how a coach running a curriculum for individual players and small groups typically uses it. Where we describe usage, it is general advice for that kind of practice, not a report on Adam's account.
What Adam Taylor was running before
The review says one thing about the past, and it is generous rather than bitter: "I have used a lot of great products, but Coachful is exactly what I wanted."
That is all it says. It does not name the products, it does not list a stack of five subscriptions, and we are not going to invent one. What is worth noticing is the shape of the sentence. The other tools were great, they were just not the thing this coach wanted, and a coach who has tried a lot of great products has usually spent real money finding that out.
The general pattern behind that sentence, in sports coaching especially, goes like this. The curriculum lives in a folder of PDFs and a few videos. Sessions get booked over text. Payments arrive by whichever app the family already has. Small groups run in a chat thread that starts fresh every season. None of those tools is bad at its own job. The problem is that the curriculum, the thing the coach spent years building, never has a home. It is attached to the coach's memory and to a folder, and it gets re-explained from scratch every time a new player starts.
"I have used a lot of great products, but Coachful is exactly what I wanted."
Adam Taylor, Adam Taylor Basketball, Trustpilot, May 2026
One more thing before we get to features. The review was written after a short time in the product: "I did not need to be on the Coachful app very long to see that this was exactly what I had been praying about." Read it as a first-impressions review. It tells you what Coachful looks like to a coach in week one, not what year three feels like, because in May 2026 nobody had a year three with Coachful.
Delivering a curriculum one-on-one
"…when I saw how I could deliver my coaching curriculum one-on-one or in small groups, I knew I had to sign up." Take the first half of that sentence first.
The feature being described is a Coachful programme. A programme is your method written down as weeks. Each week carries goals. Each day inside the week carries tasks. Habits and morning or evening check-ins run alongside the whole thing, so the days between sessions have something in them. You build it once, and then you enrol people into it.
The important part for a curriculum coach is that a programme has a format. It is either 1:1 or group, and the same material can exist in both shapes. The programme library shows each one as a card with its format and how many clients are currently active on it.
Here is how a coach with an existing curriculum usually approaches this, in general terms. You do not put the whole thing in on the first night. You take the first block, the part every new person goes through anyway, and write it as weeks. Week one has a goal. The days under it carry the drills, the reading, the film, the reflection, whatever your version of homework is. Then you enrol one person and watch what they see.
Enrolling a client puts them on the week-by-week track and starts the clock. From then on the client opens their own app and sees this week, not the whole binder. That is the difference a curriculum coach usually feels first. The material stops being a folder you send and starts being a sequence someone is moving through.
On the client side it looks like this: the programme they are on, the week they are in, the percentage done, and the next thing that is theirs to do.
The 1:1 version of a programme is the one that surprises coaches who expected group software. A single player can be enrolled on a programme by themselves, get their own week-by-week track, their own tasks, their own habits and check-ins, and the coach still sees it all on one page. The curriculum does not need a cohort to exist.
Or in small groups
Now the second half of the sentence. Small groups.
When a programme is set to group format, enrolling clients creates a cohort squad automatically. The group exists before the first person posts in it. Nobody has to make a chat, name it, invite people one at a time and then re-do it next season, which is the part of small-group coaching that quietly eats an evening every time a new intake starts.
Inside a squad there is a feed and a group chat, plus video events. The feed is where the coach posts the thing that belongs to everyone: this week's focus, a clip worth watching, a reminder that Saturday's session moved.
Generally, a coach running small groups off a curriculum uses the two formats together rather than choosing between them. The curriculum is the same in both. The group gets the shared week and the shared conversation. The 1:1 track carries the parts that only make sense for one person: the thing they personally need to fix, the goal that is theirs. Because both sit inside one platform, a player who starts in a small group and later wants individual work is not moved to a different tool and re-taught where everything lives. Our group coaching software page has the detail on cohorts.
Two practical notes for small groups, both general. Cohorts want an end: a group with a finish date gets finished, and a group that runs forever slowly stops being attended. And the feed does better with one anchored post a week than with five scattered ones, because the people in a small group check in around their own schedules rather than sitting in the app waiting.
"Simple to structure coaching material in a professional way"
This is the line in the review that most directly describes a feature, and it is the one coaches with a curriculum should read twice.
"The platform is clean, easy to navigate, and makes it simple to structure coaching material in a professional way."
Adam Taylor, Adam Taylor Basketball, Trustpilot, May 2026
Structuring material is a real feature area in Coachful, not a side effect of the programme builder. Resources are typed. Instead of one undifferentiated pile of uploads, you create a course, a library, an article, a video, an audio piece, a podcast, a form or worksheet, a download, a book, a link, an AI tool or a vision board, and each type behaves the way that type should.
Courses sit on top of that: video modules and lessons, drip release so week four does not appear on day one, and completion tracking so you know who watched. For a coach teaching a curriculum, courses are usually where the teaching part lives while the programme carries the doing part. The course explains the concept once, properly, and the programme is what makes someone practise it on a Wednesday.
The "in a professional way" half of the sentence is doing work too. Material delivered inside a branded client app, under your own logo and colours, with your own domain on the website side, reads differently to a family than a shared drive link. Coachful's client app carries your branding, and the website builder gives you a real site with a blog, pages and a custom domain. That matters more in youth and skills coaching than people admit, because the person paying is often not the person being coached.
How a curriculum coach typically sequences this, in general: build one course from the block you teach most often, attach it to the programme week where you would normally explain it live, and stop explaining it live. You get that time back every intake. Worksheets and forms go in as their own resource type, so responses land on the client record rather than in your inbox.
If you are weighing this against the other places a coaching business can live, our coaching software overview covers the category, and the best online coaching platforms roundup puts the alternatives side by side.
"Clean, easy to navigate": the one dashboard part
Adam's review opens with speed. "I did not need to be on the Coachful app very long to see that this was exactly what I had been praying about." A coach who reaches that conclusion quickly has usually not read documentation. They have opened the home page and understood what they were looking at.
The coach home page in Coachful is built as a briefing rather than a menu. While you are still setting up, a wizard sits at the top and tracks the steps you have left, then drops away once it is done. Under it is your client list, with a task-completion percentage against each name and a one-word status: thriving, active, quiet or at risk. That status is not something you assign by hand. It comes from whether the person has actually been doing their tasks and check-ins.
Everything else lives behind one login. Booking with two-way sync to Google, Apple and Outlook calendars. Built-in video, or automatically created Zoom, Google Meet and Teams links. Payments through Stripe Connect or Razorpay with a 0 percent platform fee. Agreements with e-signature, sent before the first session. Email lists, broadcasts and sequences. Funnels. A link-in-bio hub. Michelle, an AI assistant that works from your own practice data rather than from generic advice.
For a sports or skills coach the calendar sync earns its keep fastest, because gym time, team commitments and school schedules make your availability genuinely irregular. An appointment you put in your own calendar blocks that slot on your booking page, so you are not fielding a booking for a court you are not in.
"I am a people person": the between-session part
The review says something that is easy to skip over: "I am a people person". Coming right before the sentence about delivery formats, it reads like an explanation of why the delivery formats mattered. A people person does not want software that turns coaching into a content drop.
The parts of Coachful that exist for this are habits and check-ins. A habit is a daily thing with a streak and a reminder. A check-in is a short recurring question, in the morning or the evening, that the client answers in their own app. Together they produce the thing a coach normally only gets by asking: a record of what actually happened on the days you were not there.
The client's side of the relationship has its own hub. Next session, the worksheet they are meant to fill in before it, the notes from last time, their programmes and their progress, all on one page rather than scattered across email threads.
In general, coaches who describe themselves the way this review does tend to use check-ins as conversation starters rather than as compliance tracking. One short evening question, answered in fifteen seconds, gives you something specific to open the next session with. The coach who opens with "you said Thursday was rough, tell me about Thursday" is doing the people-person thing with a tool underneath it, which is roughly the whole point.
Worth naming the limit here as well: none of this replaces the session. It changes what the session starts from.
What the review says about support
Nothing. We should say that plainly rather than borrow a compliment.
Adam's review does not mention Coachful's support team, an onboarding call, or a feature request. It is about the product. If you are trying to work out what support is like before you sign up, that has to come from other reviews on the same Trustpilot page. James Wallace, founder of Fountainhead Coaching, wrote in August 2026: "I am an established coach who has been a full time coach for seven years, and this is the most comprehensive tool I have used. Support is also incredible!"
Support does come up in most of Coachful's 21 public reviews, and the Trustpilot score is 4.5 out of 5 from those 21 as of September 2026. Twenty-one is a small sample. It tells you that early customers are happy and tells you very little about what happens at scale, and we would rather you read it that way. The full set is on the Coachful reviews page and on Trustpilot.
One piece of support that is a documented part of how Coachful works, rather than a review quote: clients, programmes and existing content are imported for you during onboarding. There is no self-serve CSV import you can run yourself at midnight. If you arrive with a curriculum already built somewhere else, the move is a conversation with the team, not an upload button.
The trade-offs, honestly
A coach story that only lists strengths is an advertisement. Here is what a coach in a sports or skills niche should know before signing up, taken from what Coachful does and does not do.
There is no workout builder. Coachful has programmes, weekly goals, daily tasks, habits and check-ins. It does not have a sets-and-reps builder, an exercise library with demonstration videos, or a nutrition database. A strength coach prescribing loads week to week will still want a dedicated training app next to this. For a curriculum built around skills, drills, film and habits, the task-and-week structure carries it; for a programme built around percentage of one-rep max, it does not.
There is no drill or film analysis tool. You can host video as a resource, put it in a course, and attach it to the right week. You cannot draw on a clip, cut angles together or compare two takes side by side inside Coachful. Coaches who do heavy video breakdown keep a separate tool for the breakdown and use Coachful as the place the finished clip lives.
The mobile app is branded, not your own App Store listing. Your clients download the Coachful app and see your logo, your colours and your content inside it. They do not download an app with your name on the store page. For most practices this is fine. If a standalone listing is part of what you are selling, this is not it.
It is not HIPAA-certified. Coachful is GDPR-ready with a full data export, and it is not HIPAA-certified. Anyone whose work needs a signed Business Associate Agreement should choose a platform that offers one.
It is a young product. Coachful launched in early 2026, and 21 public reviews is a start rather than a verdict. The counterweight is that plans are monthly, cancellation is one click, and a full data export ZIP covers the roster, notes, check-ins, goals, habits, sessions and form responses.
What this looks like for a coach like Adam Taylor
If you have a curriculum and you teach it one-on-one and in small groups, the trial is seven days with a card required at signup, no charge during the trial, and one-click cancellation. Seven days is not long, so here is how to spend it. This is general advice for a curriculum coach, not a description of anyone's account.
Day one: one block, not the whole binder. Take the block every new person goes through and write it as three or four weeks. Week goals at the top, daily tasks underneath. Resist the urge to build everything. The question you are answering this week is whether your material survives contact with a week-by-week structure, and three weeks answers that as well as thirty do.
Day two: make the 1:1 version real. Enrol yourself as a test client and walk it from the other side on a phone. You will find the week where a task says something only you understand. Fix those.
Day three: turn the same material into the group version. Set the format to group, enrol two test clients, and see the cohort squad appear. Post one thing in the feed the way you would post it in week one of a real intake.
Day four: booking and money. Connect your calendar so your real commitments block your real availability, then connect Stripe or Razorpay and put a price on one thing. Send yourself through the checkout. A coaching business that cannot take a payment on day four is not being tested.
Day five: the agreement and the first invite. Load your coaching agreement, send it to yourself for e-signature, and then invite one real person, ideally someone already working with you who will tell you the truth about the app.
Day six: habits and one check-in. Add two habits and one evening check-in question to the programme. One question. The instinct to add six is the instinct that kills check-in rates.
Day seven: decide on evidence. Look at the home page. If your test client's status and completion percentage tell you something you would otherwise have had to ask for, the between-session part is working and the tool fits. If your work is entirely on the call and nothing happens in between, be honest about that and spend your money on something simpler.
On plans: Lite is $29 a month for up to 5 clients with every feature, Solo is $49 for up to 20, and Pro is $99 for unlimited clients. A coach running individual players plus one small group usually starts on Solo, because a cohort of eight plus a handful of 1:1 players passes five quickly. If you are running multiple cohorts a season, Pro is the honest answer. There is no platform fee on any plan, so what your clients pay you is yours after Stripe or Razorpay processing.
"I would recommend it to coaches, trainers, and educators who want to build structured programs and deliver them in a meaningful, personal way."
Adam Taylor, Adam Taylor Basketball, Trustpilot, May 2026
Note who that sentence names: coaches, trainers and educators. It is a wider group than "life coach", which is the label most coaching software wears. Anyone whose job is to teach a body of material to people over time is in it.
Frequently asked questions
Can I deliver the same coaching curriculum one-on-one and in small groups on Coachful?
Yes, and it is the thing Adam Taylor's review singles out. A Coachful programme has a format, either 1:1 or group, and the same weekly goals, daily tasks, habits and check-ins run in both. Group format also creates a cohort squad with a feed and group chat when clients enrol, so the group exists before anyone posts in it. A client can be on a 1:1 programme and in a group cohort at the same time.
Is Coachful good for sports coaches?
It suits a sports coach whose work is a curriculum with homework between sessions: skills blocks, film, reflection, habits, and small-group work alongside individual sessions. It is not built for strength programming. There is no sets-and-reps workout builder, no exercise library and no nutrition database, so a coach prescribing loads week to week needs a separate training app next to it.
How much does Coachful cost for a coach running individual clients and a small group?
Lite is $29 a month for up to 5 clients, Solo is $49 for up to 20, and Pro is $99 for unlimited clients. A practice with a cohort of eight plus individual players passes five almost immediately, so Solo is usually the starting plan and Pro is the answer once you are running more than one cohort at a time. There is no platform fee on client payments on any plan.
Does Coachful have a free trial and does it need a card?
Seven days, and yes, a card is required at signup. Nothing is charged during the trial and cancellation is one click. There is no permanently free plan. We say the card part plainly because coaches who resent trials are usually the ones who did not know which kind they had started.
Can I move an existing curriculum into Coachful myself?
Partly. You can build programmes, courses, articles, videos, worksheets and downloads yourself in the resources area, which has twelve resource types. What you cannot do is bulk-upload your client list from a spreadsheet; there is no self-serve CSV import. Clients, programmes and existing content are imported for you during onboarding instead.
What does a client see when a coach delivers a programme through Coachful?
Their own branded app with their current programme, the week they are in, the percentage complete, the tasks that are theirs today, their habits with streaks, any morning or evening check-in, their next session with any pre-session worksheet attached, and the group feed if they are in a cohort. They see this week rather than the whole curriculum, which is the practical difference from sending someone a folder.
Does Coachful handle booking and payments for a coaching practice, or just programme delivery?
Both. Booking pages with two-way sync to Google, Apple and Outlook calendars, built-in video or automatically created Zoom, Google Meet and Teams links, payments through Stripe Connect or Razorpay including subscriptions and payment plans, invoices, and coaching agreements with e-signature. The 0 percent platform fee means Coachful takes no cut of client revenue on any plan.
How reliable is Coachful's Trustpilot score?
Treat it as early evidence. Coachful holds 4.5 out of 5 from 21 reviews as of September 2026, which is a small sample from a product that launched in early 2026. The reviews are almost all arrivals rather than departures, because most reviewers have not been customers long enough to leave. Adam Taylor's own review is explicitly a first-impressions one, written by someone who said they did not need to be on the app very long.
Join Coachful now
If you have a curriculum you already teach, the test is whether it survives being written down as weeks and handed to one person and to a small group without changing shape. That takes an afternoon to find out, and the trial is seven days with one-click cancellation.
