Part V: Sustainability Update

Dear Community,

I’ve got 4 kids. Part of my job as a father is to help raise my kids so that they can function autonomously in the real world. How do I do that? I care for them and let them “bake” until they are young adults. By bake I mean I want to create an environment where they can mature and develop their strengths as much as possible before launching in the real world.

What does this look like? I cover all costs and provide a rich and nourishing environment to prepare them for college. Then they go to college. I cover tuition for the first 3 years. They cover their last year. For room and board, I cover the first year, but starting sophomore year I cover about 70% of their costs; they have to cover 30% of their rent and food costs by working in the summer and part-time throughout the year.

I do this in a staged manner so that by the time they are in grad school or have graduated they are more or less living on their own and able to cover all of their living costs. I’m of course here to help and have signed on to pay for weddings for my 3 girls and do my best to pitch in during hard times.

In this context, I see 7 Cups as my 5th child. By far, my most expensive child! I have worked hard with the team and community leaders to create a high warmth and high expectations community for the child we are all raising. 

And, man, has that kid matured and become smart and strong! When we first started, there were near constant fires. I was running all over the place. It was like having a very big and unwieldy newborn! Over time, 7 Cups went through early childhood, adolescence, and now, finally, it is in early adulthood and getting ready to launch (just like my twins).

We don’t talk about this much, but 7 Cups is big. It is a 99.99% site. That means it is larger than 99.99% of other sites on the Internet. If you lined up people from shortest to tallest. 7 Cups would be at the very tall end of the line and would be 6 feet 7 inches tall. Taller than Michael Jordan, but not quite as tall as Lebron James.

As you might imagine, it is very expensive to run 7 Cups. I won’t get into details, but I can share that it is far more expensive than anything else I have ever done in my life. You might be wondering - yes, that seems obvious - how does 7 Cups make money? At present, we make money in 3 main ways: we sell online therapy, premium accounts and branded versions of the platform to organizations.

Part of my job as the CEO is to make sure we have enough money. Just like I have to make sure my family has enough money. It wouldn’t be great if I said sorry kids we can’t go to the grocery store this week. Over the last 12 years, financing 7 Cups has been the thing that I have worked the hardest at doing. It is also the most challenging thing I’ve done in my life.

It is very difficult for a number of reasons. One, it is just very expensive. Two, we help a lot of people with less financial resources, so not a lot of people can afford therapy or premium accounts. Three, when you sell to an organization it is not uncommon for funding to stop or for other unforeseen challenges to arise. You can see it is like spinning 5 plates at once. I’ve been keeping all of those plates spinning for 12 years.

Like with my twins, it is now time for 7 Cups to start covering more of its own room and board costs. I need 7 Cups to start to generate more of its own revenue. In part, this is because I’m trying to be a good Dad. You don’t want your kids dependent on you forever. There might come a time when I’m not able to provide as much as I want, so it is good for all my kids - including 7 Cups - to be able to function on their own.

This leads me to advertising. I never did advertising on 7 Cups because I was afraid it would negatively impact its cognitive and emotional development. If we started advertising earlier, we would have become dependent on it for revenue. We would have been tempted to grow the population (even if that included folks that were harmful) because we would have wanted more page views to drive more revenue. I didn’t want us to be in that compromised position, especially when 7 Cups was still growing up.

Now, like with my twins, 7 Cups is growing up and becoming stronger and smarter. We are past the place of it being vulnerable. Adding advertising now will not hurt 7 Cups as a developing organism. It will, instead, strengthen 7 Cups because it will begin to function in a more autonomous and independent manner. This will allow for more dedicated progress.

How it has been with us historically is that I go and close a big account. This is great because it provides us with money to help cover costs. We work hard to align big client needs with the needs of the community so that whatever we build is a two for one deal. It helps the client that is paying us AND it helps the community. Sometimes, however, clients want things that don’t have any impact on the community. We have to build these things because they bring in much needed revenue, but they are also a distraction from our core mission of building a free, global, mental health system.

Continuous revenue from advertising will enable us the freedom to focus more on our mission and expand outreach so much farther than we could. The economy, funding challenges, etc. are extremely difficult to navigate. There is a lot of uncertainty and when you think you can count on something, well, sometimes you cannot and then it is very stressful to find new ways of covering our costs.

We are going to be thoughtful, careful, and smart about how we do this. Most of the advertising will be for guests (people with no account that are just visiting our expert articles or Q and A), but there will also be advertising for members and listeners too. We are going to be very mindful of ethics, privacy, and consent. Ads will be both programmatic and contextual. Programmatic works like most of the advertising on the Internet. You look for shoes and then shoe ads follow you around the Web. Contextual advertising isn't tied to you or your behavior. It instead looks at content on the screen to display ads. If you opt in, then you'll get programmatic ads. If you opt out, then you'll get contextual ads. We will be working on an extra build so that older users can write-in to support (help.7cups.com) to request ads being turned off. This has taken us quite a while to build. It was more complicated than we expected, so we are mostly focused now on getting these ads live. Please share any feedback below.

This is something that we are researching now and consulting with experts on. It will be a bit of a phased rollout. We’ll ask for feedback along the way.

In some ways, this is a big milestone for all of us. The child we’ve been collectively raising - 7 Cups - will start to function in a more independent manner. We’ll have more reliable finances and will be able to make more progress. It’ll be a huge relief for me too. I love 7 Cups, but being primarily responsible for funding it has been a very heavy burden for me to carry. I had more energy and broader shoulders when I was 36. I’ve been through the fire many times now parenting 7 Cups. I’m happy that it will soon not be resting on my own strength and, thankfully, good fortune.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them below.

Best,

GlenM

PS - funding 7 Cups has been something we’ve been working on from the start. If you are interested in the history of 7 Cups and sustainability, then you can read check out the earlier posts linked below:

Part I: Sustainability Update

Part II: Sustainability Update Summer 2016

Part III: Transparency

Part IV: 7 Cups is Here to Stay! We are Now Sustainable!