Spotlight: The Eye Care Advocate — a community for the room after the exam room
Optometry has an odd gap in its training pipeline. You spend years being examined, then one day you're the one in the testing room, door closed, and there's no invigilator, no study group, just you and a patient. The Eye Care Advocate is built for that specific gap: the stretch between passing exams and actually feeling competent, which for a lot of newly qualified optometrists can last years.
It's a membership community (built on Mighty Networks, not custom software) aimed at optometry undergraduates, pre-registration trainees, and optometrists in their first five years of practice. The pitch isn't "learn to pass your exams," it's "never test alone." Inside: gated clinical skills simulators for things like cover tests and motility, a digital library built around a companion book on history and symptoms, case study courses, and a wellbeing section called Points of Light aimed at imposter syndrome and burnout rather than clinical technique.
The smart move here is the positioning. Most products in this space are exam tuition companies competing for the same pre-registration wallet share. The Eye Care Advocate explicitly frames itself as a complement to those companies, not a rival, which is a sensible wedge for a single-founder community trying to avoid a fight it can't win on content depth or brand recognition. It also means the product doesn't have to be the best at teaching clinical technique from scratch. It has to be the best at what happens after the technique is learned but the confidence hasn't caught up, which is a genuinely underserved moment in a clinician's career.
Founder Jason Searle is an optometrist and clinical supervisor, and that shows in the tone of the site copy, which talks about "the politics of the industry" and being afraid to ask for help in a way that reads like someone who has actually supervised newly qualified staff, not a marketer guessing at pain points.
Who should join: someone in the last year or two of an optometry degree, a pre-reg trainee who wants a judgement-free place to ask "is this normal?", or a newly qualified optometrist who passed their assessments but still feels shaky walking into the testing room solo. At £15 a month or £150 a year, it's priced like a hobby subscription, not a professional development budget line, which fits its own framing as accessible rather than premium.
Who should skip it: anyone hunting for CPD points. The FAQ is upfront that none of this counts toward the GOC's official CPD requirements right now, and it frames that as a philosophical choice (development because you want it, not because you're mandated to), which is honest but also a real limitation if your employer is only going to fund things that tick a compliance box. It's also not the place for actual second opinions on real patients, which the FAQ addresses directly. And if you're more than five or so years qualified, the whole framing of "early career" and "journey to practice" probably won't speak to you.
Where this goes next, as I read it: the value of a community product like this compounds with member count and the density of peer conversation, not with feature count. The simulators and library are the hook, but the actual retention driver will be whether pre-reg trainees and newly qualified optometrists actually show up and talk to each other in there. Mighty Networks as a foundation means Searle isn't burning time on infrastructure, which is the right call for a solo-founder, wellbeing-adjacent niche. The open question is whether a single founder can moderate and nurture that peer support layer at scale while it's still this affordable, or whether pricing has to move as the community (hopefully) grows.
Try The Eye Care Advocate: community.theeyecareadvocate.co.uk
See the launch: The Eye Care Advocate on welaunch.sh