How Elizabeth Gentzkow runs Thrive West on Coachful
In June 2026, Elizabeth Gentzkow, founder of Thrive West, left a five-star review on Coachful's Trustpilot page under the headline "The platform we've all been waiting for". The first word of the review is "Seriously." Then comes the part that made us want to write this piece: they had already tried nearly every tool in the category, and when none of them fit, they went and tried to build one.
That is an unusual sentence to find in a software review. Most people churn. Very few get far enough into the problem to start writing their own version of the thing, and the ones who do come back with an opinion worth listening to, because they have seen the inside of the problem rather than just the pricing page.
This story is drawn from Elizabeth Gentzkow's public review on Trustpilot and from what they say on their own site; we have not added anything they did not say themselves. One honest caveat on the second half of that sentence: we tried to read thrivewest.com on 15 September 2026 and the domain redirected to a GoDaddy domain-for-sale parking page rather than a live site, so we could not verify anything about Thrive West's niche, offers or approach from the web. Everything below that is about Elizabeth comes from the review, word for word. Everything else is about the product, written in general terms, and is not a claim about what any one coach has set up. You can read the review yourself on Coachful's Trustpilot profile, and the rest of our public reviews on the reviews page.
What Elizabeth was running before Coachful
The review is specific about the shape of the problem and deliberately vague about the brand names, so we will stay exactly as specific as it is.
"I have tried just about every coaching, booking, learning platform out there."
Elizabeth Gentzkow, Founder, Thrive West, Trustpilot, June 2026
Read the three words in the middle of that sentence separately, because they are three different product categories and that is the whole point. A coaching platform is where the client work lives. A booking platform is where the calendar lives. A learning platform is where the course lives. Buying all three is the normal state of a coaching business, and it is normal because no single vendor historically wanted the whole job. Booking tools did not want to hold your curriculum. Course tools did not want to hold your calendar. Client management tools held neither.
The review does not say which specific products those were, how many they paid for at once, or what the monthly total came to, so we are not going to guess. What we can say is that the pattern is the most common one in our own signup data and in the rest of our Trustpilot page, and it usually ends the same way: the coach becomes the integration layer. You are the person who remembers that the intake form in tool one has to be copied into the client record in tool two before the call that was booked in tool three.
Then the review says the thing almost nobody says: "I've tried developing my own."
We have no detail on what that build was, how far it got, or why it stopped, and the review does not offer any. But the decision to attempt it tells you something about how badly the available tools fit, because building software is a miserable second job for a coach, and nobody starts unless buying has genuinely failed.
Why they say coaches work differently
The centre of the review is a diagnosis, not a complaint.
"I'm not really sure why other platforms haven't figured out that coaches work differently, have different ways of delivering their products or services and need features to match coaching business needs."
Elizabeth Gentzkow, Founder, Thrive West, Trustpilot, June 2026
We agree with it, so here is the version of that argument we would make in our own words, and then the parts of the product that exist because of it.
Most business software assumes the work happens during the appointment. A salon, a clinic, a consultant: someone books, someone shows up, someone pays, the record closes. Coaching does not close. The session is the smallest part of the week. What decides whether the client gets a result is the six days in between, which is where the habit either happens or does not, the reflection either gets written or does not, and the client either stays in contact or quietly drifts.
Software built on the appointment model has no place to put those six days. So the coach invents one: a shared document, a WhatsApp thread, a spreadsheet of who did their check-in. That is not a missing integration. It is a missing concept in the data model, and you cannot add it with a Zapier step.
The second half of Elizabeth's sentence is about delivery formats. Coaches do not sell one thing in one shape. The same coach might run a twelve-week one-to-one programme, a group cohort that starts every quarter, a self-paced course, a one-off strategy session, a monthly retainer and a downloadable workbook. Tools that model a single shape make five of those six awkward.
So the rest of this piece walks through the three categories Elizabeth named, booking, learning and coaching, plus the delivery formats, and shows what each one looks like in Coachful. To be clear about what is being claimed: these are the features that answer the categories in their review. We are not saying which ones Thrive West uses, how they are configured, or what results they produced, because the review does not say and we will not invent it.
The booking part
Booking is the category coaches usually solve first and re-solve most often, because the free booking link works right up until money and preparation get involved.
In Coachful, scheduling is part of the same account as everything else. Booking pages with availability rules, buffers and time-zone detection. Two-way sync with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook, so a dentist appointment in your personal calendar blocks the slot without you doing anything. Built-in video, or automatically created Zoom, Google Meet and Teams links if your clients expect one of those. Paid sessions and session credits, so a package of six can be drawn down rather than rebooked and re-invoiced each time. Intake questions attached to the booking land on the client record instead of in your inbox.
The general pattern for a coach with a mixed practice is that the calendar stops being one kind of event. There are discovery calls that need a different length and a different form, one-to-one sessions attached to a programme, and a recurring group call that the whole cohort can see. Keeping those in the same calendar as the client records means a session is not just a block of time, it is attached to a person whose last check-in you can read before you join.
The learning part
The second word in Elizabeth's list is "learning platform", and it is the one that usually costs the most, because course tools price on audience size rather than on what a coach actually needs.
Coachful holds the content side in the same account. Video courses with modules, lessons, drip release and completion tracking. Articles, videos, audio, podcasts, forms and worksheets, downloads and PDFs, books, links and vision boards. Anything you make once and hand to more than one person has a place to live, and it can be attached to a programme, sold on its own, or given to a single client.
The difference between this and a dedicated course platform is worth stating plainly rather than selling. A course platform will give you a better storefront, more themes, and a more mature affiliate ecosystem. What it will not give you is a course that knows which of your coaching clients is enrolled, whether they finished module three, and whether that is why they went quiet. If your content is a product you sell to strangers, a course platform is fine. If your content is the spine of a coaching programme, having it in the same system as the client record is the thing that saves you.
Coaches in most niches end up with the same three layers: something free at the top to bring people in, something cheap that people can buy without a call, and the real programme. Keeping all three in one library means the free thing and the paid thing are the same objects with different access settings, rather than three uploads in three tools.
The coaching part, which is the part that is usually missing
Here is where the "coaches work differently" argument becomes a feature list rather than an opinion.
A Coachful programme is a multi-week structure with weekly goals, daily tasks, habits and notes. A client enrolled in it gets a week with something in it. Morning and evening check-ins, habits with streaks, goals with progress bars, and tasks capped at three a day with a backlog behind them, because a list of fourteen is a list nobody opens.
On the coach's side, that structure produces a signal. You can see who has done their check-ins and who has not, which is the earliest warning you get that someone is about to disappear. The clients view aggregates it: task completion, check-in rate, mood trend, and a flag on the people who need attention this week.
Habits are their own object rather than a checkbox on a task, because the way a habit fails is different from the way a task fails. A task is late. A habit lapses and then gets abandoned quietly, and the only thing that catches it is a visible count.
When someone enrols in a group programme, a cohort squad is created for them, with a feed, group chat and video events. Community is where the between-session weeks stop depending entirely on the coach being awake, which matters most in programmes that run for three months or more.
"Different ways of delivering their products or services"
This is the clause in the review we think about most, because it is the one that breaks tools quietly rather than loudly. Nothing crashes. You just find that the product you want to sell does not exist as a shape in the software, so you sell a slightly different product instead, and over a year your business is shaped by your admin tools rather than by what you are good at.
Coachful models offers separately from delivery, which is the part that matters. A one-off payment, a subscription, a payment plan with instalments, a package of session credits, a bundle of a programme and a course together, an application-gated offer, a free lead magnet. Payments run through Stripe Connect or Razorpay, with Apple Pay and Google Pay, coupons, refunds and Stripe Tax available, and with a 0 percent platform fee on every plan, so Coachful takes no percentage of what your clients pay you.
Agreements with e-signature sit in front of the money, so the contract is signed before the first call rather than chased after the third. Invoices are generated per transaction, and you can raise manual ones for the work that happens outside a checkout.
The general test we would apply, in any niche, is whether you can sell the same body of work three ways without duplicating it: as a one-to-one programme, as a group cohort, and as a self-paced course. If your current tools force you to rebuild the content for each, that is the tax Elizabeth's sentence is describing. Our own write-up of selling digital products as a coach goes through the offer types in more detail.
"A new way of reaching clients"
The last line of the review is the one that reads least like a software review and most like a business change.
"This platform helped me establish a new way of reaching clients."
Elizabeth Gentzkow, Founder, Thrive West, Trustpilot, June 2026
The review does not say what that new way is, and we are not going to characterise it. What we can do is describe the front-of-house side of Coachful that exists for exactly this, and let you judge which parts are relevant to how you sell.
There is a section-based website builder with a blog, a custom domain and SEO settings, so the site and the client area are the same product under the same brand rather than a site that links out to a portal on someone else's domain.
Funnels sit alongside it for the paths that are not "read the whole site and decide": a lead magnet that collects an email, an application form in front of a high-priced offer, a webinar registration, a direct checkout link you can put in an ad. Pixels and UTM tracking are attached, so you find out which one produced the client.
Then email lists, broadcasts and multi-step sequences with triggers, delays and branching, plus a link-in-bio hub for the social traffic that never reaches a website at all. The leads all land in one place with the source recorded, which is the difference between knowing your marketing works and believing it does.
What they say about support and the updates
Two of the three things Elizabeth praises are not features at all.
"The support is unmatched and the updates/development are consistent."
Elizabeth Gentzkow, Founder, Thrive West, Trustpilot, June 2026
We will not editorialise on the first half beyond saying that it is the single most repeated theme across our Trustpilot page, and that we would rather you check that claim against the public reviews than take our word for it. Coachful holds 4.5 out of 5 from 21 reviews, which is a small sample, and we say so on every page where we cite it.
The second half is worth one honest note, because "consistent updates" cuts both ways. A product that ships every week is a product that is still filling gaps. Coachful launched in early 2026. If you want a tool that has not changed in three years and has a decade of forum answers behind it, that is a real preference and Coachful is the wrong choice for you today. If you want a tool where the thing you asked for in March exists by June, the same fact is the reason. One onboarding detail that follows from having people rather than a help centre: clients, programmes and content are imported for you during onboarding rather than left to you as a CSV job.
The trade-offs, honestly
Elizabeth's review says "Coachful does it all and I'm so glad." That is their experience of it and we are glad too, but a story that ends there is an advert. Here are the places where a coach reading this should stop and check.
Coachful is not HIPAA-certified. It is GDPR-ready with a full data export, and for most coaching that is the right standard, because coaching is not clinical care. If you are a therapist, a licensed clinician, or a health coach working under a covered entity in the US, this is a hard stop and you should be looking at a HIPAA-compliant platform instead. We would rather lose the signup than have that conversation after you have onboarded thirty clients.
There is no workout builder. Fitness coaches use Coachful for habits, check-ins, programme structure, payments and community, and it does those well. It does not build sets, reps, tempo and load, and it does not have an exercise video library. If your product is a training block, you will still want a training app next to it, and that is two subscriptions rather than one.
The client app carries your branding inside the Coachful listing. Your logo, your colours, your custom domain on the website, the client home and the email. But the app your clients download is found by searching for Coachful, not for your business name. A separate App Store listing under your own developer account is not something we offer. For most coaches this is a non-issue; for a coach whose whole positioning is "my own app", it is the deciding fact.
There is no free plan. The free part is a 7-day trial, and a card is required at signup. No charge lands during the trial and cancelling takes one click. We say this early rather than late because coaches who resent trials are usually the ones who did not know which kind they were in.
The review footprint is small. Twenty-one Trustpilot reviews is not twenty-one hundred. If your buying process depends on reading a hundred reviews from people in your exact niche, we cannot give you that yet.
What this looks like for a coach in a similar position
If the opening line of Elizabeth's review sounded like your last three years, here is a way to use seven days that will actually tell you something. This is general advice for any coach who sells programmes and products rather than only hours, not a description of what Thrive West did.
Day one, put one real offer in. Not the whole catalogue. Pick the thing you sell most and build it as an offer with its real price and its real billing shape, whether that is a one-off, a payment plan or a subscription. If the shape you sell does not exist in the builder, you have learned the most important thing in the first hour.
Day two, connect the calendar and take a booking from yourself. Connect Google, Apple or Outlook, set your availability and buffers, then open your own booking page in a private window and book a session as if you were a client. Check that it blocks correctly, that the video link is created, and that the intake questions arrive on the client record.
Day three, build one week of the programme. One week, not twelve. Weekly goal, three daily tasks, one habit, one check-in. This is the part other tools do not have, so it is the part worth testing properly.
Day four, be the client. Enrol a test client and open it on your phone. Do the check-in, tick the habit, look at the week. If it is confusing to you it will be worse for someone who is tired on a Tuesday night.
Day five, run money end to end. Connect Stripe or Razorpay, put your agreement in front of the offer, and buy your own thing with a real card. Refund yourself afterwards. You want to have seen the signature, the receipt and the enrolment fire before a client does.
Day six, publish one page. A single landing page or a link-in-bio hub with your offer on it. Point your existing audience at it and see whether a lead lands with the source recorded.
Day seven, decide. By now you have a real offer, a real booking, a real programme week, a real payment and a real page. If any of the five felt like fighting the tool, that is your answer and cancelling takes one click.
If you want the wider view before you start, our coaching software overview covers the whole category, the best online coaching platforms roundup compares the main options side by side including the ones we lose to, and the all-in-one software comparison is the one to read if, like Elizabeth, you are trying to collapse three subscriptions into one.
Frequently asked questions
Is Coachful a good fit for coaches who sell more than one-to-one sessions?
That is the case it is built for. The same body of work can be delivered as a one-to-one programme, a group cohort with its own squad and chat, or a self-paced course, and sold as a one-off, a subscription, a payment plan, a session package or a bundle. Cohort squads are created automatically when someone enrols in a group programme, so the community side does not need setting up per intake.
What does Coachful cost?
Lite is $29 a month for up to 5 clients, Solo is $49 a month for up to 20, and Pro is $99 a month for unlimited clients. There is a 0 percent platform fee on every plan, so Coachful takes no cut of what your clients pay you; you pay Stripe or Razorpay's processing and nothing else on top. The trial is seven days with a card required and one-click cancellation.
Do I have to move my clients and content across myself?
No. Clients, programmes and content are imported for you during onboarding. There is no self-serve CSV importer to wrestle with, which is deliberate: the messy part of a migration is mapping your programme structure, and that goes better with a person on it than with a spreadsheet template.
Does Coachful replace a separate booking tool?
For most coaches, yes. You get booking pages with availability rules, buffers and time-zone detection, two-way sync with Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and Outlook, built-in video or auto-created Zoom, Meet and Teams links, paid sessions and session credits, and intake questions that land on the client record. The reason to keep a separate booking tool would be a workflow tied to something Coachful does not integrate with.
Is Coachful a course platform?
It has one inside it. Video courses with modules, lessons, drip release and completion tracking, plus articles, audio, worksheets, downloads and more. A dedicated course platform will give you a more developed storefront and affiliate ecosystem. Coachful's advantage is that the course knows which of your coaching clients is enrolled and how far through they are, which a separate course tool cannot tell you.
Can I use my own domain and branding?
Yes, on the website, the client home and your email, with your logo and colours throughout. The one limit worth knowing is the mobile app: it carries your branding, but clients find it by searching for Coachful rather than for your business name, because there is no separate App Store listing under your own developer account.
What happens to my data if I leave?
You can export a full client data ZIP covering the roster, notes, check-ins, goals, habits, sessions and form responses, plus a course export and an organisation backup file. Plans are monthly and cancellation is one click. Your data stays until you ask for it to be deleted.
Is Coachful HIPAA compliant?
No. Coachful is GDPR-ready with full data export, but it is not HIPAA-certified. If you handle protected health information under US healthcare rules, choose a platform that is certified rather than one that is careful.
Join Coachful now
Elizabeth tried nearly every platform in the category and then tried to build their own, which is a long way to go to find out that coaching software mostly is not built for coaching. Seven days and one real offer will tell you whether we have got closer than the last five tools did.
