What Actually Mattered in 2025
Six Lessons Learned in a Turbulent Year
It was December 2015 — a decade ago — that I flew home from a dear friend’s funeral in Toronto. He was the best friend of my husband, who had died by suicide years earlier. I spent the 5-hour flight thinking about the loneliness of grief, and brainstorming ways to make sure nobody ever had to grieve alone. By the time I landed I'd mapped out a text-based grief support service that I imagined might one day deliver expert, tailored, tips and wisdom to grievers around the world.
There have been a lot of 16-hour days since then. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years as we’ve built Help Texts into the company I dreamed it could be back in 2015. I learned some big lessons in the last year too, which was — let’s face it — a bit of a doozy!
Everything became uncertain in 2025. Government funding cuts and layoffs hit us hard. The AI investment frenzy was making people do all kinds of crazy things. Turnover was so dizzying that we were training new employees and meeting new customer leads every week, it seemed.
But, as in grief, challenges are what really give us a chance to test our mettle. When things turn upside down, we see what we’re capable of.
As we turn the corner to 2026, I realize that the ups & downs of 2025 showed me just how resilient and vital Help Texts has become. Instead of waiting for policy shifts and more stable markets, we acted on what we could see, worked with new partners, and adjusted without drama. We embarked on research with partners including the University of Miami, UCLA, and Canada’s National Research Council. We launched a brand new product focused on healthy aging, as well as a powerful Bereavement Cost Calculator for payers. We launched long-awaited, pay-as-you-go pricing too. I’m proud of my team for being willing to keep moving, even when things were unclear.
Here are just a few of the things we learned as we bobbed and weaved.
We learned that retention is the strongest signal of usefulness
Help Texts now supports subscribers in 50 states and 61 countries. That’s meaningful, but what matters even more is what happens after people engage.
In 2025, we saw a 93% customer renewal rate, including our first multi-year renewals. We saw organizations expand within their accounts, adopting multiple programs over time.
Despite massive uncertainty and financial pressures, Help Texts’ customers chose to continue offering Help Texts to their employees, bereaved families, and communities. So while things around us were chaotic, we learned that while some things change, text remains a powerful and effective tool. We learned that results matter and that our customers would stick with us even when times were tough.
We learned that accessibility builds trust
One of the clearest lessons this year was that improving accessibility is always a win. From the beginning, Help Texts has focused on removing the barriers to grief and mental health support. We write for a 7th-grade reading level, are available in 28 languages, and don’t require a Zoom connection or smartphone. In 2025 we tackled the biggest barrier of all: cost. We spent the better half of Q2 moving Help Texts to a new payment processor so that we could — at last — offer pay-as-you-go, monthly subscriptions.
Reducing up-front costs and making monthly subscriptions available also opened the door to exciting revenue share partnerships with charities, PMPM, and PEPM pricing for payers and employers, and increased engagement and uptake overall.
We learned that AI is not an end in itself
At Help Texts, we listen carefully to our customers, and to prospective customers too. As investors fell over themselves for the latest AI innovations, we noticed that health authorities, healthcare providers, researchers, and bereavement professionals were increasingly uneasy about putting GenAI in front of their vulnerable populations.
At the same time, we knew that AI could exponentially increase our ability to conduct sentiment analysis, assess response needs, and quickly catch signs of crisis from our subscribers around the world. We secured federal funding to conduct AI research in 2025, which has been transformative for Help Texts and — because we like to share what we learn — will be transformative for the bereavement field overall. My Chief Clinical Officer, Melissa Lunardini, will be sharing our learnings next year at the Association for Death Education & Counseling (ADEC) national conference in Maryland, at the National Association for Children’s Grief (NACG) conference in Texas, and at the International Death, Dying, and Bereavement (IDDB) conference in Wisconsin.
AI has enormous potential and comes with enormous risks. There’s a balance between novelty, efficiency, and judgment, especially when talking to people who are vulnerable and at risk. I’m proud that we leaned into AI in 2025, established ourselves as thought leaders, and built models for sentiment analysis and crisis assessment.
We learned that grief is very, very expensive
We worked with a lot of healthcare providers, payers, and big thinkers this year to launch the “Bereavement Cost Calculator” as a way to very quickly illustrate that grief is very — VERY — expensive. In addition to the significant human impacts, research shows that bereavement leads to a 20%-30% increase in health care utilization.
Having the opportunity to ratchet up my own learning & understanding of the US healthcare system was a big deal in 2025. I’m grateful to all the leaders who shared their time and wisdom with me and hope the calculator nudges health plans - especially Medicare Advantage plans - to quickly offer grief support as a way to offset the hundreds of millions of dollars they’re spending annually (usually without realizing it) to support bereaved members.
We learned the immense value of a disciplined outside perspective
I am incredibly lucky to have world-class experts who believe in Help Texts (and in me) and have offered to put in real time to help me expand this year. I launched an advisory board in 2025 and am deeply grateful to Mike Stein, Matthew Holt, Matt Walters, Galen Buckwalter, Ken Black, Sam Blackman, Katrina Spade, and James Sherrett for spending countless hours with me this year, helping me think BIG about the power of text to bring people from hopelessness to hopefulness.
Spending time with brilliant people this year has been — well — brilliant!
We learned what actually matters
2025 was stressful and unpredictable, and my team rose to the occasion. I’m immensely grateful to the Help Texts’ team for their courage, determination, & creativity under pressure. It’s working with them every day, to support people often in their darkest times, that matters the most to me. I’ll bob and weave every day of every year, if it means I can keep making a difference and hearing feedback like these messages we received in December:
“These texts have been amazing. They make me understand how I’m feeling is normal and all part of the grieving process.”
Your texts have reached my soul in ways no one else could. They speak to my situation that most people just don’t understand.”
“I look forward to these texts so much. They’ve been a life line to me. Please don’t stop. They have been a huge help."
The world may be uncertain, but I’ve never been more certain that the work we’re doing at Help Texts really matters. I’m closing out the year feeling more grateful and proud than ever, to be doing this work.