Sober Sidekick connects with Amplitude to prevent relapses with a 70% increase in engagement

Insight/Action/Outcome: The team at Sober Sidekick realized that user engagement was key to reducing relapse rates. By leveraging Amplitude, they identified that members who provided support to others had 5X more retention than those who didn’t. With this insight, they redesigned their onboarding process and even reshaped their business model to prioritize member success. As a result, the app saw a 70% increase in user posts, retained 120,000 users tracking their sobriety status annually, and secured $4M in capital at a 40% higher valuation—while doing it 96% faster.

Connection beats addiction—that’s the heart of Sober Sidekick. As someone who has battled alcoholism for years, I know the value of connecting with the right people at the right time, without whom I wouldn't be here today. That connection can become anyone’s lifeline.

My experience inspired me to create Sober Sidekick, an app where finding support isn't left to chance—a place people can go to instantly find human connection and empathy.

When I launched the app five years ago, I would've been happy if it made a difference to even a few people. At the time, only a handful of users shared how Sober Sidekick had helped them, and I thought maybe—just maybe—I'd become a somewhat successful tech developer. But I hadn't seen the bigger picture yet. Today, over half a million people are sharing their comeback stories, supporting one another on a journey that's both deeply personal and collective.

As a self-taught developer with no degree, I quickly realized that learning to understand and value data would be crucial to make a lasting impact on people recovering from addiction.

From addiction to connection

After a long search, I found precisely what I was looking for—Amplitude, a self-service data analytics platform that allowed me to be more efficient at helping others, drive healthy engagement, and even reshape Sober Sidekick’s business model.

One of the first things I discovered was that people who supported another member with a written post had 5X more retention than those who didn't. The initial goal was clear—to fine-tune the experience and develop features centered around our members, boosting retention.

By using Amplitude Analytics' funnels and the returning user percentage chart, we redesigned our onboarding process. Now, we have specific prompts tailored to each user's behavior, which has reduced drop-off rates and increased posts by 70%. We also added more "gamification," like displaying users' sober stats as they go up—how many days, hours, or minutes—to foster engagement.

This focus on connection has been a game-changer. We've rebuilt our app from the ground up since we started prioritizing data. Now, around 1,000 new members join every day, and 20% of those who download the app give support to another member within their first eight minutes. That's 73,000 people stepping up to help just minutes after joining each year!

Staying ahead of relapses with 93% accuracy

One of the things I'm most proud of is that no member has ever gone without support. That's the magic of Sober Sidekick—real-time, peer-to-peer support, ensuring that no one is left behind.

As a team, we are also incredibly proud to have the largest database on sobriety in the world. Over the last year, more than 120,000 people have tracked their sobriety through our app. Thanks to Amplitude Activation, the customer data platform integrated with analytics, more sobriety and relapse reports are shared with Sober Sidekick than any other platform. While relapses are obviously not a good thing, being able to track them is essential for predicting them.

This is where Amplitude truly shines—its ability to identify high-risk individuals is essential for what we do, as it prevents relapses and saves lives. With the prediction feature, we can filter which members are in danger of relapsing and create personalized support for them. Over the past year, we have predicted relapses two weeks in advance with an astounding 93% accuracy.

In a country where the rest of healthcare reacts to people waking up in the emergency room, we can intervene weeks in advance and allow our national and local healthcare partners to do the same.

Data-driven decisions, life-saving outcomes

Beyond any UX/UI changes or engagement and retention tweaks, Amplitude empowered us to make a far more impactful shift that fundamentally changed how we view our entire business.

To put it into context, the average person who goes to rehab ends up going seven times. Rehab stays cost between $10,000 and $30,000, and $43 billion is spent annually on treatment. Three years ago, nearly all of our revenue came from these treatment centers, and we realized we needed to shift to a value-based model that succeeds when our members succeed—not when they fail.

With our members as our number one priority, we decided to cut that revenue stream, but we needed data to support this decision. My business partner, Jake, found it through Amplitude. The data revealed that member interactions significantly reduce relapse rates. While the baseline relapse rate was 20%, just one peer engagement on the platform cut that rate in half.

A $720 million transformation

Matching our data to risk and cost predictions showed we could reduce one of the steepest healthcare expenditures—rehab treatments—and gave me the confidence to make the shift. I started directly pursuing health insurers and the government, and I relied on data in every negotiation. With investors, I'd pull up an Amplitude chart. With health plans, I leaned on the data as well.

Before consolidating our data and key metrics with Amplitude, our first round of raising venture capital took over two years—an eternity in our field. By the time the second fundraiser came about, we already had Jake's chart up and running, and it only took 30 days to meet our goal. Not only did we become 96% faster in securing funding, but we also surpassed our investment goals, raising $4 million at a 40% higher valuation than we expected. This was a key result of using Amplitude.

We've just begun working with health plans, but third-party firms already estimate $6,000 in savings per member per year on Medicaid thanks to Sober Sidekick. Based on our 120,000 members who track their status with Sober Sidekick each year, this could translate to $720M in annual savings.

Keeping it lean with Amplitude

While handling a fast-growing community might seem a daunting task, Amplitude has been invaluable in optimizing our internal processes and keeping our team small. Our platform is managed by only four full-time employees, as Amplitude handles time-consuming tasks like moderating our community by identifying and removing spam-generating users.

The support provided by Amplitude's Strategy & Operations team, especially from Corey Gibbel, has been vital to our journey in understanding Amplitude's new prediction features. Corey advocated for us internally and helped us fully take advantage of Amplitude as a whole.

Beyond every design decision or business achievement, the most important thing for me is that Amplitude helped me prove a crucial hypothesis: connection is the opposite of addiction. Every person in recovery has their own epic comeback story, and being part of their journey has been the most meaningful job I could ever have.