The Serene Profile Hackathon: build India's best therapist profile

This October, Serene is hosting its first hackathon for therapists in India, and instead of writing code, every participant will be building the best therapist profile they can on their own Serene public page. We are keeping the brief simple on purpose. You already have the tools, because they are the same ones you use to run your practice every week, and the challenge is to use them well enough that a stranger who lands on your page understands who you are, what you offer, what it costs, and how to begin, all within the first minute of reading. The best profiles will be featured by us and will become the reference pages that early career therapists study when they set up their own practice for the first time.

We are still finalising the exact dates, so please stay tuned for the announcement on this blog and in your Serene inbox. What we can share now is who can take part, how the profiles will be judged, and, more usefully, the specific setup problems that separate a good public page from a forgettable one. Those problems are the real subject of this post, because every therapist who has opened a private practice has run into them, and most of us solved them once in a hurry and never came back.

Why we are running a hackathon for a therapist profile

Serene makes it easy to set up a practice. A therapist can create an account, add a service, connect a calendar, and share a working booking link within an afternoon, and many of the therapists on the platform did exactly that. Easy setup, though, has a side effect that we see every week: a large number of public pages look almost identical, with a default colour scheme, a one line bio, a single service called "Therapy Session", and no answers to the questions a nervous first-time client is quietly asking. The page works, in the sense that someone can book through it, but it does very little to explain why they should book with this particular person.

A public page is the closest thing most independent therapists in India have to a therapist website. It is the link in the Instagram bio, the link sent on WhatsApp when a friend asks for a referral, and the page a prospective client reads at night while deciding whether to reach out. Clients compare two or three of these pages before choosing, and the one that feels considered, specific, and warm usually wins, even when the other therapist has more years of experience. Software can give you a working page in an afternoon. It cannot decide what makes your practice distinct, and that is the part we want to celebrate.

A hackathon gives that work a deadline and an audience. Many therapists have a list of improvements they mean to make to their page someday, such as rewriting the bio, splitting their services properly, or finally writing an FAQ, and someday has a way of never arriving between sessions, notes, and supervision, so this October we are turning that someday into a fixed date on the calendar.

Who can enter and how profiles will be judged

The hackathon is open to therapists practising in India who have an active Serene public page. If you already run your practice on Serene, you are eligible today. If you have been meaning to try it, setting up your account and public page before the hackathon opens puts you in the same position as everyone else.

Every entry will be judged on four things, and all four are areas you control completely from your dashboard:

1. How well the public profile is structured. A visitor should be able to scan your page from top to bottom and understand who you work with, how you work, and what to do next, without hunting for any of it.
2. How well your services are configured, including pricing and details. Each service should be clearly named, described in plain language, priced sensibly, and set up with the right duration and booking rules.
3. How well the intake forms for each service are designed. A good intake form asks for what you genuinely need before a session, in a tone that puts the client at ease, and it matches the service it is attached to.
4. The overall look and feel of the profile. Colours, fonts, photo, and writing should feel like one coherent practice, and ideally like you.

You will notice that none of those criteria reward spending money, adding flashy extras, or writing the longest possible page. A solo counsellor with two services and a carefully written page can beat a larger practice with ten services and nothing said about any of them.

What makes a therapist profile hard to get right

Most of the difficulty in a therapist profile comes from the fact that you are writing for someone you have not met, who may be anxious, and who is judging you on very little. Each part of the page carries more weight than it looks like it should, and each has a common way of going wrong.

The About section has to sound like a person

The About section on a Serene public page supports formatting, so you can use short paragraphs, bold text, and lists. The mistake we see most often is a bio written as a CV: degrees, institutions, and a list of modalities, with nothing about the experience of sitting in a room with you. Credentials matter, and clients do look for them, but a prospective client is mostly trying to picture the first session. A counsellor who writes two sentences about how they tend to open a first conversation, and one sentence about the kind of client they most enjoy working with, gives that client far more to go on than a paragraph of acronyms.

Expertise that a client recognises in seconds

The expertise tags on your page are how a skimming visitor decides whether you work with their problem. Tags like "Anxiety", "Couples", "Grief", or "Adolescents" help only if they are specific and honest. Listing fifteen areas tells a client that you have not chosen any, while four or five focused ones, backed up by a line in your bio, reads as genuine depth. The languages line matters more in India than almost anywhere else, because a client who can speak about their family in Tamil, Marathi, or Bengali may feel held in a way that English alone will not offer them. If you work in more than one language, say so clearly.

A photo, colours, and fonts that fit how you practise

Your public page lets you set primary and secondary colours, text colours, and one of four font styles (Serene, Modern, Classic, and Editorial), with a live preview as you change them. These choices sound cosmetic, but they set the emotional tone before a single word is read. A child and adolescent therapist might reasonably choose warmer, brighter colours, while a therapist working with trauma or with corporate clients might choose something quieter. The only real mistake is picking colours that make text hard to read, which undermines everything else on the page. A recent, natural photo in good light, where you look the way you look in session, does more for trust than a formal studio portrait.

Services, intake forms, and the information you need first

Services are where a therapist profile turns from a description into something a client can act on, and they carry two of the four judging criteria between them. They are also where the most practical thinking is needed.

Naming and describing each service

A single service called "Therapy Session" forces the client to guess whether it covers what they need. Splitting your offering into clearly named services, for example an individual session, a couples session, a first consultation, and an assessment if you offer one, lets each carry its own description, duration, and price. The description is the place to answer the practical questions: what happens in this kind of session, who it suits, and whether it is online, in person, or both. Serene also lets you decide, per service, whether new clients, existing clients, or both can book it, and whether it can be booked by more than one person. A follow-up session that only returning clients can book keeps your first consultation slots free for new people, and a couples service that is clearly marked as such prevents confusion before it starts.

Intake forms that capture enough without overwhelming

When you attach an intake form to a service, a new client who books that service fills it in as part of the booking, before they pick a time. That is a genuine strength, because you arrive at the first session already knowing why the person came. It is also a responsibility, because every question on that form stands between an interested person and a confirmed session. We covered the cost of long pre-booking forms in detail in our post on what converts on a booking page for therapists, and the same logic applies here.

A strong therapy intake form for booking tends to do three things. It asks the questions that change how you prepare, such as what the client would like help with, whether they have seen a therapist before, and anything they would like you to know before the first meeting. It explains, in one friendly sentence at the top, why you are asking and who will see the answers. It leaves out the questions that can wait, such as detailed family history or a full medication list, which can be collected later by requesting a longer intake form from the client's record once the relationship has begun.

The Serene form builder makes this easier to get right, because you build forms by describing what you want and then refining the draft in conversation, rather than dragging fields around one at a time. You can also import an existing document and turn it into a form. The judging criterion here is about design choices, not length, so a short, careful form will score better than a long one that asks everything.

Deciding what you need before the first session

Before you write a single question, it helps to list what you genuinely need to know before meeting a client, and to be strict about it. For most individual therapists that list is short: the reason for seeking help in the client's own words, any immediate safety concerns you need to be aware of, preferred language, and whether they have had therapy before. A therapist working with adolescents will also need guardian details and consent. A practice that requires identity verification can switch on a requirement for clients to upload a government ID during booking. Everything else is useful but not urgent, and moving it out of the booking flow is one of the kindest design decisions you can make for a first-time client.

Different services, different forms

Because each form in Serene can be applied to specific services, you do not need one enormous form that tries to cover every situation. A couples service can carry a form that asks about both partners and the relationship. An assessment can carry a screening questionnaire. A consent form can be attached to every service that needs it. Matching the form to the service is one of the clearest signs of a well thought through profile, and it is exactly what the third judging criterion is looking for.

FAQs, fees, and the policies clients worry about

The last stretch of a therapist profile deals with the questions that clients often feel awkward asking directly. Answering them on the page removes friction for the client and saves you from answering the same message again and again.

A FAQ that answers the questions clients are too shy to ask

Serene public pages include an FAQ section that you write yourself, shown below your services as an expandable list. A good FAQ answers the practical and the emotional questions together. Practical questions include how long a session lasts, how to join an online session, what happens if you are running late, and how payment works. Emotional questions include what the first session will be like, whether you have to talk about everything straight away, how confidentiality works in your practice, and what happens if the fit does not feel right. Five to eight honest answers, written in the same voice as your bio, usually cover it. An FAQ that says "Please contact me for details" to every question is worse than none at all.

Deciding on services, pricing, and therapist fees

Pricing is the part of the page that people look for first and that therapists often find hardest to write. Searches for therapist fees in India outnumber searches for therapist profiles several times over, which tells you what a large share of visitors want to know before anything else.

Serene lets each service be free, flat priced, or marked as negotiable. A free service works well for a short introductory call, and a negotiable service is an honest way to signal that you keep some sliding-scale places without publishing a separate rate for each. A flat price can be set in more than one currency, and visitors see prices converted to their own currency, which matters if you see clients in the Indian diaspora. Clients pay you directly, through a UPI ID or a payment link you add, and can upload a screenshot of their payment receipt during booking, as described on the Serene billing page. The judging criterion on services rewards clarity here: a visitor should know exactly what each session costs before they begin booking, and should never have to message you to find out.

Cancellations, rescheduling, and availability

The last group of settings is easy to skip and worth getting right. You can allow clients to cancel or reschedule on their own, each with its own notice window, which removes a lot of anxious messages from your phone. You can set a minimum notice period before a slot can be booked, separately for online and in-person sessions, add buffer time between sessions so you are not running from one client straight into the next, give individual services their own hours, and turn on a waitlist for services that fill up. All of this is covered on the scheduling features page. Mentioning your cancellation policy in your FAQ as well, in plain words, means the client meets it before they book rather than after.

Why creativity still matters when setup is easy

It would be easy to read the sections above as a checklist, and a checklist will get you a solid page. The profiles we most want to feature will go further than that, because two therapists can tick every box and still produce pages that feel completely different, and the difference is in the choices.

Consider two counsellors in Pune who both work with young adults on anxiety. The first writes a careful bio, lists the right expertise, and sets a clear price, and the page is perfectly fine. The second does the same, then names her first service "A first conversation" instead of "Consultation", writes an FAQ answer about what to do if you feel like cancelling on the morning of your first session, and attaches an intake form that opens with the line "There are no wrong answers here, and you can skip anything you are not ready to share". None of those choices required a new feature. All of them tell a client something true about how she practises, and a client reading both pages will almost always feel more drawn to the second.

That is the kind of creativity we mean, and it has very little to do with decoration. It comes from using the words, the structure, the forms, and the settings available to you to express the particular way you care for clients, so that the right people recognise themselves in your page and book.

Featured profiles become the examples for the next generation

When we talk to early career therapists in India, one request comes up again and again: they want to see what a good practice setup looks like before they build their own. Most of them are building a practice alone, often while still in supervision, and they are guessing at the answers to questions nobody taught them in their training. How much detail goes into a bio, what a reasonable first consultation looks like, which questions belong on an intake form, and how to write about fees without feeling awkward are all practical skills that tend to be learnt through trial and error.

The profiles selected in this hackathon will be featured by us so that those therapists can learn from real, working examples rather than from templates. A newly qualified counsellor in Kochi or Indore will be able to look at how an experienced colleague structured their services, phrased their FAQ, and designed their intake form, and then adapt those ideas to their own practice. If your page is featured, it will help your practice be seen, and it will also shorten the path for the therapists who come after you, which we think is the better reward of the two.

The first of many

This is the first Serene hackathon, and it will not be the last. We chose the public profile as the opening theme because it is the part of the practice every therapist shares, and because it is where small improvements make the most visible difference to clients. Future hackathons will pick up other parts of running a practice, and the ideas that come out of this one will shape which themes we choose next.

Between now and the announcement of the dates, the most useful thing you can do is open your own public page in a private browser window on your phone and read it as a stranger would. Notice which questions it leaves unanswered, which service names are vague, and whether the intake form feels like a conversation or a questionnaire. Write those down, because they will be your starting list when the hackathon opens. We cannot wait to see what you build.

Also read

• The best practice management software in India also finds you clients: how the Serene therapist directory sends people who are already searching for help to a public page like the one you are building.
• Why affordable practice management software matters in India: why a free tier matters so much to early career therapists, the same group the featured profiles are meant to help.
• Why every therapist needs a secure client portal: what your clients see after they book, and why keeping their forms and documents in one private portal matters.