As entrepreneurs scramble to plug chatbots and generative AI into seemingly everything, Help Texts founder and CEO Emma Payne is sticking with something simpler.
Seattle-based Help Texts is a subscription service providing customized, supportive text messages for people experiencing grief from a loss, providing caregiving for a loved one, or wanting some mental health care to boost their well-being.
The content is specific to a person’s situation, but is not crafted by a bot and doesn’t provide a conversation. Instead, the twice-weekly communications draw from thousands of messages that are pre-written by humans and reflect input from experts in numerous fields.
“We are a one-way, deeply therapeutic support, as opposed to attempting to be a two-way therapy,” said Payne. Subscribers “are very happy to have someone just text them thoughtful things that they can look at when they feel like it without expectation of a response.”
The approach appears to be working, according to newly published research.
Of 4,000 Help Texts users in the United Kingdom who had experienced a loss, more than 83% kept their subscription for a full year. In a survey of the users, more than half provided a response, and nearly 95% of those rated the program as moderately or very helpful and more than 95% said it contributed to their sense of being supported.
Payne thought of the idea for Help Texts on an airplane flying back from a friend’s memorial service in 2015. She was asked to speak at the funeral of the friend, who had also been the best friend of her deceased husband, who died by suicide 10 years earlier.
“The experience was — from the funeral all the way through the pub night — sitting with people, many of whom I haven’t heard from in a decade, who all said some version of, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t reach out. It’s not that I didn’t care, I just didn’t know what to say,'” Payne said.
Within three years, she launched Help Texts.
Signing up for the service takes about five minutes and includes providing information needed for personalizing the texts. In the case of a loss, that can include the name of the loved one who died, the relationship, important dates and anniversaries, and the cause of death.
Subscribers can also provide the names and numbers of two friends, family or colleagues who will also receive periodic texts encouraging them to reach out to the bereaved and offering suggestions of what to say. These communications are particularly important, but can be hard to foster, Payne said.
“I have yet to meet one single griever who would rather talk to a therapist than have their own friend remember the day that their daughter was born,” she said, providing an example of a grieving parent. “That’s what we want, all of us.”
The service costs $99 for 12 months for individual subscriptions and can be stopped and restarted. Customers include individual users, employers offering grief support, government agencies, tissue bank and organ donor support, hospice organizations, colleges that provide it as suicide prevention, charities, and churches.
“Bereavement care is healthcare, and it’s completely overlooked. It is an opportunity to keep people healthy at the most vulnerable time in their lives.”
– Emma Payne, CEO Help Texts
Help Texts are available in 24 languages and being used by subscribers in 44 countries.
While the service is not a dialogue with another human, the company does monitor subscriber messages back to the platform and will respond to someone sharing suicidal thoughts or in need of assistance.
Help Texts doesn’t use generative AI to talk with people using the platform given its potential for inappropriate responses, but it does use AI in a limited capacity in running the service and Payne said the technology could be used to train therapists in how to treat people who are grieving. She also said Help Texts has built a dataset that could work well as a large language model for training AI.
This is Payne’s sixth startup. In 1995 she co-founded her first company, WebPool Syndicate, which she describes as one of Canada’s first web design companies. The business was later acquired.
Payne said this go-around she was focused from the outset on creating a business that was financially viable and scalable. She began charging for the product from day one, and was profitable from the start. Payne has raised just over $1 million from investors over the years, and is currently seeking new funding. The startup has six employees.
Customer growth was slow initially, Payne said. Then COVID-19 hit, which was tough as potential corporate customers weren’t launching new initiatives. But the pandemic did drive media coverage of Help Texts as society began embracing digital healthcare to an unprecedented degree.
Starting last year, Payne said, the business has taken off.
The company continues expanding its offerings. It added texts for those whose pet has died. It delivers messaging for healthcare workers who are burned out. It also provides these workers guidance in comforting patients and families experiencing grief — which is an area of training many providers lack.
Payne said she loves working on this challenge.
“Bereavement care is healthcare, and it’s completely overlooked,” she said. “It is an opportunity to keep people healthy at the most vulnerable time in our lives for most of us — and it will happen to us all. So it’s a public health concern, with immense opportunity to make a difference.”
