After nearly four decades in the aesthetic beauty industry, Neil Osborne kept noticing the same problem. Clinicians knew their craft, but when it came time to explain treatments, recommend products or guide clients through decisions, many struggled to find the words.
It's rarely a skills problem. The people he trains are, in his words, passionate about skin and beauty. What holds them back is confidence, the ability to say out loud what they already know, in an industry that is as much sales as it is treatment.
"It's not what you know," Neil said. "It's how well you can articulate it."
At the same time, Rob Scott was asking a different question. After co-founding tech consultancy Comet CX and growing the business to 20 employees over five years, he'd become fascinated by AI and the way it could reshape how people work. Rather than continuing to build software for clients, he wanted to build a product of his own.
Those two journeys eventually converged to become Clinara.
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Neil had been a client of Rob's at Comet CX, where an early version of the product first took shape. As Rob watched customers engage with it, he saw something worth going all in on. The current version of Clinara has been in development for around a year, following an earlier idea that never quite found product-market fit.
The platform helps aesthetic clinics in three ways: accurately transcribing consultation notes, coaching therapists to improve their consultations against Neil's training methodology, and drafting personalised follow-up emails for clients who are still deciding.
"Transcription and meeting notes have become a commodity," Rob said. "The coaching piece is the hero."
That coaching stems directly from Neil's decades of experience working alongside clinicians.
"The people we train love skin and beauty," he said. "But it's a sales environment as much as it is a clinical one."
For Neil, the turning point came while training two Silk Laser Clinics in Cairns. Watching clinic owner Sarah put the framework into practice, he realised the commercial value of what they were building.
Clinara is saving operators around an hour a day on note-taking, and 50 users across multiple clinics are already using the platform. Two industry conference presentations earlier this year generated 71 and 69 downloads respectively from audiences of around 250 attendees, validating demand ahead of a broader commercial rollout.
Joining Launch Club accelerated the business in different ways for each founder.
For Rob, it filled the gap between running a consulting company and building a venture-backed startup.
"I probably didn't know how startups really worked," he said.
Learning about fundraising, cap tables, vesting and investor conversations gave him a new framework for building the company.
For Neil, the biggest lesson was more personal.
Having spent years building businesses on his own, he realised how valuable it is to build alongside others.
"The collaboration has been the biggest shift," he reflected.
Both Rob and Neil encourage founders to get involved in the community.
"It's small," Rob said, "but it's incredibly supportive."
The next milestone is converting Clinara's early users into paying customers and building recurring revenue. From there, the founders plan to raise a pre-seed round from angel investors.
Together, Neil and Rob are building Clinara with the same ambition: giving clinicians the confidence to communicate what they already know, while using AI to make that confidence scalable.
Follow Neil and Rob and learn more about Clinara here.
