Addiction Couples Therapy
A solo therapist's practice site that doubled his booked consultations within two months.
Overview
Max, a therapist with 40 years of experience, was starting a private couples practice with exactly one growth channel: word of mouth. Through my agency HiroHaus, I designed and built his site, and because he had no other team, the engagement grew into positioning, content strategy, and lead generation. This is the project where I was the entire design department.
The problem
Referrals don't scale, and therapy is a high-trust purchase. Nobody books a couples intensive from a stranger's website without proof. The site had to manufacture the trust that referrals used to carry: He had an outdated site with little web presence aside from an old Yelp page. It was hard to tell if his practice was even active.
Key decisions
Lower the commitment cliff. Booking therapy is a big first step, so the primary CTA became a free 20-minute phone consultation, small enough to say yes to. Backing it up, I condensed Max's 50-question couples-intensive survey into a short email version offered via popup: a low-stakes way in that also gave Max qualified leads and started the intake conversation early.
Borrow trust he already had. Max had years of client reviews nobody could see. I made anonymized testimonials central to the landing page, real couples' outcomes doing the persuasion instead of marketing copy.
Content over ads-for-ads' sake. Rather than generic ad creative, we ran his own published articles as content-marketing ads. We saw an average 20% traffic increase, and doubled his inquiry count.
Scope honestly, then deliver. Max arrived with a wishlist that wasn't all technically feasible. My job was to translate each want into the underlying problem and offer buildable options, including subcontracting a photographer for headshots when the site needed them. Client management is a design skill too.
Outcome
Within two months of launch, Max reported roughly double the calls and consultations booked. From a handful a month to 10 real inquiries.
Max expressed encouragement about how quickly he was receiving new client leads thanks to the website.
How I'd build this with AI today
This project predates my AI workflow, which makes it a useful before/after. The same engagement today:
The site itself: prototyped in Lovable in an afternoon instead of the 3 weeks it actually took, with Max reacting to a working site in our first meeting instead of mockups in our third.
The content strategy: Claude to repurpose Max's existing articles into ad variants, meta descriptions, and the condensed survey, a day of copy work, not weeks of back-and-forth.
What wouldn't change: the consultation CTA, the testimonial strategy, and the scoping conversations that turned his wishlist into buildable options. The judgment layer is the deliverable; AI just collapses the production time around it.
