Why I built ISOtherapist
Dan Zomerlei, PhD, LMFT, MDiv
I've been a private practice therapist since 2012. I'm a co-owner of a group practice, and every single day I work alongside other private practice therapists. Good people doing hard, meaningful, often invisible work. This is my calling. I believe it's one of the best ways to serve our communities. And I think it deserves better tools than it's had.
What I kept noticing
For years, referrals in this field have mostly happened the same way: someone posts in a therapist Facebook group describing what their client needs. A handful of people respond. Some we know, most we don't.
We trust our field. We trust the training we all went through. We believe that somewhere in that pool of responses, there's a genuinely good option for our client.
And yet, how much do we actually know about each other? How someone really works. Their style in the room. Whether a particular client is even going to connect with them. Not much, if we're honest.
A good clinical fit is built by so much more than a schedule that lines up and an insurance panel that matches. It's training. It's experience. It's the actual person sitting across from the client. A Facebook post can't tell us any of that. Not well enough to refer with real confidence.
And underneath it all, it becomes a speed competition, not a fit competition. Whoever's online, sees the post, and responds first gets the referral. Not necessarily whoever's the best fit.
Why "Alliance"
In graduate school, and in every year of clinical work since, one thing has stayed constant: the therapeutic alliance, the actual fit and relationship between therapist and client, is the single strongest predictor of whether therapy works.
Not the modality. Not the credentials on the wall. The fit.
That's why my own practice is called Alliance Counseling Group. And it's why I built ISOtherapist the way I did: not as a directory to browse, but as a real attempt to help one therapist find another therapist, or the right prescriber, whose style, approach, and availability are actually likely to be a good alliance for a specific client. Because that's what gives that client the best shot at real care.
More than a directory
I wanted to solve this from the other side too. ISOtherapist gives therapists and prescribers a way to actually be found: to stand out, to be known, to become part of a real, trusted network of colleagues. Not just another name in an unsorted list.
That's different from what a typical directory offers. Those are search tools. ISOtherapist is built to connect our profession.
What this is really about
There's a bigger reason I care about this.
Private equity, venture capital, and large healthcare conglomerates have spent a lot of money trying to own referrals. They've tried to plant themselves as the toll booth between a client and the right therapist. I want independent, provider-owned practices to fight back. To keep referrals inside our own community, clinician to clinician, instead of handing that relationship to a platform that doesn't do this work and never will.
I don't want to give Facebook a monopoly on this.
How this started
ISOtherapist didn't start as a product. It started as a tool I built for Alliance's own connections and scheduling team, a way to place people calling us with the right therapist on our own team.
It worked. And once it worked, I realized it was bigger than just us. So I opened it up.
If you're a private practice therapist or prescriber tired of referrals being a guessing game, I built this for you.