If you spend any time in your Althea account or on the marketplace, you'll run into three related but different things: Experiences, facilitator profiles, and center profiles. They show up together, they link to each other, and it's easy to assume they're all the same kind of page with different labels. They're not. Each one answers a different question for the client looking at it, and understanding the difference helps you decide what to actually build out first.

Quick version, before the detail:

On the marketplace home page, these three show up as a segmented control: Experiences, Facilitators, Centers, with Experiences shown by default. Clients can browse any of the three, and all three paths lead to the same place: a booking.

What it contains: Your photo, bio, credentials, license information, and your approach to the work. It's the "about you" page: the same kind of trust-building content a great About page does on a personal website, but built into the marketplace so it shows up in search and links directly to booking.

What it represents: You, the person. A facilitator profile describes a specific licensed individual. If you work at more than one center, or independently, your facilitator profile is still just one page: it's about you, not about where you happen to be practicing that day.

How it works: Once published, your facilitator profile is browsable on its own (under the Facilitators tab) and also shows up as a guide on any Experience you're attached to. Clients can reach out to you directly from your profile without booking a specific Experience first. This is what we call a profile-initiated booking, as opposed to booking a packaged Experience directly.

Reviews: Client reviews and your aggregate star rating live on your facilitator profile, aggregated across everything you've done on Althea, not scattered per listing.

What it contains: The center's name, location, photos, team, and philosophy. Where a facilitator profile is about a person, a center profile is about a place: the physical space where sessions happen.

What it represents: A licensed location, not an individual and not a specific offering. A center profile can list the facilitators who work there and the Experiences hosted at that location, but the profile itself is the venue's front door.

How it works: Like facilitator profiles, center profiles are browsable on their own (under the Centers tab) and also appear as the venue on any Experience hosted there. A client browsing centers is usually evaluating logistics and setting: where is this, what does the space look like, who's on the team, does the philosophy match what I'm looking for.

What it contains: The full, bookable offering: session format, what to expect before and after, pricing, availability, and photos. This is what used to be a single line in the old directory. Now it's a complete page built to answer, on its own, whether this specific offering is right for a specific person.

What it represents: A packaged, purchasable thing, not a person or a place on its own. Every Experience is owned by a business (yours, your center's, or an organizer's), and it references the profiles that make it real: the facilitator profile of whoever is guiding it, and the center profile of wherever it's happening. An Experience with no licensed facilitator or center behind it can't go live.

How it works: Experiences are what clients browse by default when they land on the marketplace, and they're built to be self-selected: a client can read the page, decide it's right for them, and book without ever needing a phone call first. That's the whole point of packaging it this way instead of leaving it as a simple listing.

Multiple experiences, one profile: You can have several Experiences live at once (a 1:1 session, a weekend retreat, a couples format) all pointing back to the same facilitator or center profile. Reviews and trust build up on your profile even as your individual Experiences change.

Think of it as a simple hierarchy of intent:

In practice, this means your facilitator or center profile and your Experiences work together, not instead of each other. A strong profile builds the trust that gets someone to click into your Experience. A strong Experience converts that trust into an actual booking. Neither one on its own does the whole job.

The directory's version of this was a single line per practitioner: a name, a location, a way to get in touch. That worked as a starting point, but it left almost everything up to a phone call or an email. A lot of interested people simply never converted into clients, not because they weren't a fit, but because there wasn't enough on the page to build confidence on its own.

Experiences exist to close that gap. Instead of asking a client to imagine what a session might be like, an Experience shows them: the format, what to prepare for, what it costs, and what other clients said afterward. That's a fundamentally different kind of page than a directory listing, and it changes what a client is capable of doing without talking to anyone first.

The self-serve case: Bookings that come from a profile (a client messaging a facilitator or center directly) tend to need a human touch. Internally, we've seen that the large majority of profile-initiated bookings were preceded by a matching call with our care navigation team; people want reassurance before committing to something this personal. Bookings that come from a packaged Experience are different: a client can read the page and book on their own, no call required. That's a meaningfully more scalable path to growth, and it's a big part of why we're investing here.

The curation case: Packaging offerings as Experiences also lets us do things a flat directory listing never could: market experiences like "Grief and Loss" hit on why someone is looking for psychedelic healing, highlight accessible price points, or surface trauma-informed offerings to the people specifically searching for them. None of that curation is possible when the unit is "a person's contact info" instead of "a specific, describable offering."

None of this replaces facilitator and center profiles. It builds on top of them. The profile is still what makes you findable and trustworthy as a person or a place; the Experience is what targets clients more directly and makes you bookable with less upfront work. Together, they're how we're trying to get further away from being a directory and further toward being a real marketplace: one where a client can go from curious to booked in one sitting.

Q: Do I need a facilitator or center profile before I can publish an Experience?

Yes. Every Experience has to reference at least one licensed facilitator profile or center profile behind it. You can't publish an Experience with no licensed entity attached; that's a compliance requirement, not just a product preference.

Q: If I already have a profile, do I need an Experience too?

Not strictly, but we'd encourage it. A profile alone lets clients message you directly, but it puts the burden of figuring out what to book on the conversation that follows. An Experience does that work up front, which is a big part of why Experience-based bookings tend to need less manual back-and-forth to close.

Q: Can one facilitator profile be attached to more than one Experience?

Yes. You can have multiple Experiences (different formats, price points, or locations) all linked back to the same facilitator profile. Your reviews and reputation build up on the profile, not on any single Experience.

Q: What's the difference between a center profile and an Experience hosted at that center?

The center profile describes the place itself: location, team, philosophy. An Experience hosted there is a specific bookable offering that happens to take place at that center. A center can have many Experiences, and an Experience always names the center profile as its venue.

Q: Why did the old directory listing become two different things (a profile and an Experience) instead of staying one page?

Because a directory listing was trying to answer two different questions at once: who are you, and what am I actually booking. Splitting them lets each page do its job well. It also means a client can browse by "who" (Facilitators, Centers) or by "what" (Experiences) depending on how they're starting their search, rather than being forced down one path.