This isn't a "our founder had a vision" story. This is a "we watched someone we love get chewed up by a broken system" story.
Someone in our family is a nurse. She went back to school for her NP, while working full-time night shifts, by the way, because that's what nurses do. She's the kind of person who runs toward emergencies. Smart, tough, compassionate, absolutely relentless.
And the clinical placement process almost broke her.
Not the coursework. Not the exams. Not the 12-hour shifts she was pulling between study sessions. The thing that nearly ended her was finding a preceptor. Weeks of cold-calling. Dozens of emails that went nowhere. Clinic after clinic saying no, or not responding, or saying yes and then backing out. Her program deadline creeping closer while her options got smaller.
She cried about it. This woman who handles codes and traumas and death and grief without flinching, she cried at the kitchen table because she couldn't find someone to let her do her clinical hours. The system reduced one of the strongest people I know to tears, and it didn't even notice.
The Anger That Became This Platform
I'm not a nurse. I don't work in healthcare. But I know how to build things. And sitting there watching her go through that, I kept thinking: this is a solvable problem. Not the whole broken pipeline. I can't fix school funding or accreditation standards or preceptor compensation. But the matching part? The part where a student with specific needs can't find a preceptor with matching qualifications? That's a data problem. That's matchmaking. That's something technology can actually help with.
So I started building. Not because I saw a business opportunity. I was angry. Angry that placement services were charging students $5,000 for something that shouldn't cost anywhere near that much. Angry that schools were collecting tens of thousands in tuition while providing little meaningful help with clinical placement. Angry that the people this profession needs the most were being treated like an afterthought.
Why $10
People ask why we charge $10 per match instead of the $3,000 to $5,000 that placement services charge. The honest answer? Because $10 is what it actually costs to run the match. The technology does the heavy lifting. We don't have a sales team. We don't have an office. We don't have "clinical coordinators" who are really just people with a spreadsheet and a phone.
We built a matching engine that takes a student's program requirements, the specialty, the credential requirements, the location, the schedule, and finds preceptors who fit. The preceptor sets their availability and their capacity. The algorithm does the matching. The student pays $10 when they get connected. That's the whole business model.
Is it going to make us rich? No. Is it sustainable? We think so. More importantly, it's honest. We're not going to extract thousands of dollars from students who are already drowning in debt. That's not why we built this.
What We Believe
We believe that nursing students shouldn't be punished for choosing a profession the world desperately needs. We believe that preceptors deserve respect, not spam. We believe that clinical placement is a solvable problem that the current system has no incentive to solve because too many people profit from it staying broken.
We believe the clinical hours bottleneck is one of the biggest threats to healthcare in America, and that the answer isn't to charge students more, it's to build better infrastructure.
And we believe that if you can build something that makes a broken system a little less broken, you should. Even if it's small. Even if it's just one piece of the puzzle.
For the Nurses
Every decision we make comes back to one question: does this help the nurse? Not the school's bottom line. Not the placement company's margins. The nurse. The student. The preceptor. The people doing the actual work.
If you're a student looking for a preceptor right now, we built Preceptor.Network for you. Drop your school email, pick your program, and let the matcher do what cold-calling can't. $10 per match. No subscriptions. No contracts. No catch.
If you're a preceptor willing to take students, sign up. We won't spam you. We won't share your info. You set your terms, and we only send you students who actually fit.
If you run a school or a program, partner with us. We'll build your program's requirements into the matching engine so your students get better results and your coordinators get their lives back.
We're tired of watching this system hurt the people it's supposed to serve. So we built something. It's not perfect. But it's real, it's live, and it's here for you.
Inspired by the love of a nurse, for nurses.