DDSmatch, the Indianapolis-based practice transition firm that's been brokering dental sales since 2009, just launched a mobile app. Swipe left, swipe right — except instead of a date, you might end up buying a practice in Boise or picking up an associateship in Tampa.
The app, built with development firm Ternary Labs, went live July 21 on iOS and Android, and it's free. The pitch is straightforward: DDSmatch already runs one of the biggest transition marketplaces in the country — 868 listings at last count, 517 of them practices for sale, 351 associateship gigs — and until now, all of it lived on a website. Founder Thad Miller's read on the market is that the dentists doing the buying these days aren't going to bookmark a webpage and check back weekly. They're going to want it the way they want everything else: on their phone, pushed to them, the second something matches what they're looking for.
That's really the whole idea. Filter by location and opportunity type, swipe through what comes up, get a push notification the instant a new listing fits your criteria, and message a DDSmatch transition professional directly if something catches your eye. There's also a tie-in to DDSmatch Academy, the company's library of legal and financial resources for people navigating a sale or purchase for the first time.
What's worth sitting with here isn't the swipe mechanic itself — that's just familiar UX borrowed from every other app on your phone. It's what it says about where practice transitions are headed. This has always been a relationship business. Brokers, phone calls, someone who knows someone who's ready to retire. DDSmatch isn't pretending otherwise; the app funnels straight back to its 70-plus transition professionals rather than trying to cut them out. But the front door to that relationship used to be a conversation. Now it's a notification.
Whether that changes who actually gets matched with what — or just changes how fast the matching starts — is the more interesting question, and not one an app launch answers by itself. DDSmatch says it's crossed $1 billion in total practice sales and has close to 30,000 registered buyers in its system. If even a fraction of them start browsing between patients instead of during off hours, the volume alone might tell us something in a year that the press release can't.