7 cups scales emotional support and increases revenue with Amplitude

As a trained psychologist, I started 7 Cups because I saw a gap: too many people were struggling emotionally and didn’t have a safe space to go. For many, traditional emotional support was out of reach, and opening up to friends and family wasn’t necessarily an option.

My question became, “What if we created a space where people could simply talk to someone?” An anonymous, judgment-free zone with trained listeners who are there to support people, no matter what they’re going through. That idea turned into 7 Cups—an online platform that since 2013 has helped 73 million people find connection and comfort through one-on-one chats, supportive communities, and self-guided tools. 

Emotional support—more specifically, the need to talk to somebody—is traditionally offline behavior. To move support and emotional connection online successfully, I had to learn to track the digital indicators of healing.

Building 7 Cups has been a journey of learning, listening, and iterating, and the product insights we’ve uncovered along the way have shaped everything from user retention to scaling empathy. Here’s a look at how we’ve grown, what we’ve learned, and how partnering with Amplitude has helped us materialize the power of being heard.

Our breakthrough moment: How to track digital healing

In the traditional mental health context of in-person therapy, I could easily track a patient’s progress. But the lines aren’t as clear in an online context, and we needed a way to similarly track a person’s progress and see how it related to their activities on our platform. Otherwise, we couldn’t guarantee we were helping our users heal or make sure we were optimizing our digital treatments.

To get visibility into the impact of each chat message, mindfulness exercise, and forum post, we turned to digital analytics. At the time, the major player was Google Analytics, so we started with them. However, the insights it delivered weren’t nearly detailed enough to be useful.

We then moved to Mixpanel, and it did give us better insights—along with a higher price tag. Since we had to analyze a large volume of events to discover which ones most impacted healing, we burned through our budget pretty quickly. Staying with Mixpanel would either mean tracking fewer events and delaying our understanding, or finding the money to track everything we wanted, which would risk damaging our “Impact first, revenue second” business philosophy.

That’s when we learned about Amplitude, and it felt like a breakthrough. Amplitude Analytics had many more available features to explore our platform data, and it also had a significantly more cost-effective event budget. These factors enabled us to cover a much larger surface area instead of simply flagging a few key events. 

We made the switch to Amplitude back in 2015, and we’ve since uncovered the insights necessary to succeed as a company and achieve our mission of healing—and never doubted our decision to switch.

Growing revenue and building a valuable community

Our business philosophy is “Impact first, revenue second”—the social impact of helping people feel better is our primary concern. 99.8% of what we do is at no cost, funded by 0.2% of users upgrading to paid services, like talking to a licensed therapist.

That means the majority of our growth focus is on how to make sure the free community is valuable to our users. Our formula involves training someone seeking help to become a helper themselves—aiding them on their personal healing journey while increasing our resources. After all, one of the best ways to help yourself is to help somebody else.

Our product, revenue, and community teams use Amplitude Analytics daily to chart and track metrics related to user growth, member sign-ups, and retention. Amplitude’s intuitiveness and versatility empowers everyone to use it and derive value from it, whether their background is in data science or social services.

Before rolling out a new feature, such as our Daily Journal feature, we use Amplitude Experimentation to perform A/B tests so we can understand the feature’s impact on engagement and retention. These results are valuable because they shape our strategy going forward.

7 Cups is also a gift economy, and generosity and gratitude are like currency. We have various ways of recognizing prosocial behaviors, such as giving points and attaining badges. Tracking these variables in Amplitude helps us understand the strength of our community.

At the same time, we do have to drive revenue to continue providing the free aspects of our ecosystem. With Amplitude, we found the best way to convert free members to paid members, generating more than $26K in revenue. Amplitude more than pays for itself.

Scaling healing with clarity

At 7 Cups, our mission has always been about connection, but supporting millions of people requires more than good intentions. It takes insight.

Amplitude gives us the visibility to understand how support becomes healing—how one chat, journal entry, or act of listening can spark real change. That clarity has helped us improve retention, grow revenue, and strengthen our community while keeping our impact-first philosophy intact.

We’re not just tracking behavior; we’re scaling empathy. And with Amplitude, we’re better equipped to keep doing what matters: helping people feel heard, and empowering them to help others.