Hi friend,

I don’t share much about the business of Hemingway. About how I think about creating impact, growing or making money.

I like it when other businesses are transparent, so I thought I should do the same.

I’ve just finalised our plans for 2026, so I thought it was good timing to share some stuff with you.

In this report, I’ll give you a full review of 2025, discuss my Theory of Change for Hemingway, share our 2026 plans and give you some thoughts and questions to noodle on. I’ll share lots of details and numbers too.

Kimono? Open.

I’m building Hemingway for you, so please see this as an invitation to engage in my plans. You are an important stakeholder in this project, and I’d love to hear your feedback.

Let’s get into it.

2025 Review

At the start of 2025, we had about 2,000 email subscribers, had just launched THR Pro (our paid membership), had never run an event and weren’t even thinking about hosting a community. To pay the bills, I was mostly doing consulting work.

Since then, we’ve done a lot and learned even more.

Here’s what we learned;

• People love our weekly news round-ups. I started these as a way to drive top-of-funnel interest on LinkedIn, but based on user feedback, it’s now one of the most valuable things we offer, and I turned it into its own email. We published the round-up every single week this year.

• People find our long-form deep-dives helpful (even if they do take more time to read). We’ve published 50 of these reports this year. Our analysis and guides are our most popular content, especially our first-party research content (like our report on Mental Health in an AI world). Luckily, this is also my favourite kind of work to do. A morning with an interesting data set, black coffee and noise-cancelling headphones is my idea of heaven. That said, there’s so much opportunity to create more actionable content (more on that later).

• People really want more ways to connect with each other, especially in real life. In May, I posted a survey on LinkedIn to see if anyone might be interested in a vetted community for mental health innovators. Over 700 people filled it out. So we launched one, and now, there are 277 people in it. In November, we hosted over 120 people at a Hemingway breakfast in San Diego - that actually blew my mind. We also hosted multiple dinners and mini meet-ups around the world, bringing together some incredible people. The appetite for connection is phenomenal. What I noticed is that while some of this is for professional reasons, a lot of it is simply a desire to find like-minded people with whom you can have a good chat. Tbh, that’s what I look forward to most about any Hemingway event.

• If you do this stuff well, people will pay for it. We just crossed three hundred THR Pro members (folks paying $29 / month for access to premium content and the Hemingway community). We also had our first major sponsors in 2025. This proves that the business model is sustainable. Initially, I had to do a lot of work on the side to support Hemingway, but I’ve now been able to scale that back quite a bit. A question that is always on my mind is how I balance what is free versus paid. In 2025, about 85% of everything we did was free. I’m not sure what the right balance is, but so far, this feels about right. I want to do much more in 2026, but that will take money. I think a lot about how much to reinvest, how to monetise and grow. I don’t have all the answers, but I think we can do a lot of really cool stuff in 2026 and triple in size while still maintaining good margins.

• I need to find leverage. If you want to create impact, leverage is everything. Content gives me leverage. But I’m at the limit of the amount of content I can create whilst running everything else in the business. I also recognise that many of the things that need to be done could be done better by someone else. As Scott Galloway says, greatness is in the agency of others. In 2026, I will be focusing on bringing more people into the Hemingway tent to scale the work we do. See below for the kinds of people I’m looking to bring on board.

My Theory of Change

I left my last job three years ago. I remember how much I wanted a meaningful project to work on. Something that would help improve population mental health and that I could spend decades on. Hemingway has become that project.

While delivering impact has always been core to what I do, it’s easy to get distracted - especially when people start throwing opportunities at you. Another reason is that what gets measured gets managed. And subscriber and revenue growth are much easier to measure than the impact Hemingway is having on the mental health ecosystem (although I think they aren’t necessarily bad proxies). So I need a mechanism to ensure we continue to prioritise impact.

My Theory of Change is that mechanism. It will guide our decision-making and ensure our work leads to helping people and creating real impact. Here’s how I think about it.

(Btw, if you aren’t interested in this and just want to read our 2026 plans, skip ahead).

The core problem.

Improving population mental health requires progress on multiple fronts. We need more innovation, better implementation, and system change to facilitate both of these. We also need significant improvement in the upstream determinants of mental health.

Thankfully, there are thousands of great people working on these problems - you are one of them. But these great people face a bunch of challenges. They often operate in silos, they duplicate efforts, they miss opportunities for coordination and are faced by a thousand small hurdles every day. The field is also evolving faster than traditional knowledge infrastructure (books, academia, etc.) can keep pace. In short, we lack the infrastructure to transfer knowledge, build coalitions, and coordinate action across these boundaries.

Our core ability at Hemingway is in synthesising insights and convening people across the mental health ecosystem. If I were pitching to a VC, I’d say something lofty like “we're building the coordination infrastructure for mental health change-makers”. But more tangibly, here’s how I think we will create impact.

1. Make execution easier. It is way too hard to scale a promising mental health innovation. We have to make this easier. We can help people avoid preventable mistakes, learn from others who've solved similar problems and provide insights and tools that allow people to make better decisions and operate more efficiently.

2. Help better ideas to emerge. There are still so many areas in mental health where we don’t have good solutions. We need more innovation. One way we can encourage that is by connecting people across disciplines, geographies and ways of thinking. Through intellectually curious conversations with leading thinkers across disciplines, we can help the field develop novel approaches and see problems from fresh perspectives, increasing the likelihood of breakthrough solutions.

3. Build coalitions that lower structural barriers. No single organisation can fix systemic stuff like poor reimbursement models, workforce shortages, or bad public policy. These require collective action. By convening the stakeholders - founders, policy experts, payers, researchers, clinicians - who together could lower systems-level barriers, and by creating a shared understanding of problems and solutions, we can help build the coalitions needed to change the environment in which this whole ecosystem operates. Doing something like this is very hard, and we are not close to it (yet).

4. Attract and retain top talent. We need more talented people working on mental health (and fewer of those already doing so to burn out). This requires demonstrating that meaningful impact and good livelihoods are possible in this space. It also means creating connection that reduces isolation and burnout. By building a community where people find peers, support, and intellectual stimulation, we can increase fulfilment and reduce burnout among existing changemakers, while attracting new talent by showcasing the opportunity for impact.

Measuring this stuff is hard. I have some ideas, but would also love to hear other thoughts on how we might measure the impact of a business like Hemingway.

Our Plans for 2026

Our theory of change is, well, theoretical… So what are we actually going to do in 2026 to deliver on it?

Hemingway Sessions

Last month, we launched Hemingway Sessions, and the early feedback has been awesome. “Sessions” are expert-led events on the most important ideas shaping the future of mental health. We know people want to stay on top of the most interesting things in mental health innovation and that they also want more practical guidance on the problems they’re trying to solve. We have a bunch of expertise in our community, and so, Hemingway Sessions is a great way to share that expertise with the world.

Sessions are also a great place to meet other people - we facilitate breakout sessions at the end of each talk. I hate boring webinars, so these have been designed to be short, sharp and insight-dense.

I’d like to get to a point where we run these every single week.

Hemingway Chapters

In 2026, we will launch local Hemingway Chapters in major hubs around the world. People want real-life connection and strong local ecosystems are very important in making stuff happen. Chapters will be local hubs for Hemingway members where you can meet peers face-to-face, form real relationships, and strengthen your regional ecosystem. They’ll also be fun. We will host regular dinners and events, and honestly, it’s the thing I’m most excited about.

In 2026, we’ll launch at least six Chapters (Sydney, NYC, SF, London, and two others), with local Chapter leads. If you’d like your city on the roadmap, let me know!

Hemingway Guides

I take a lot of inspiration from First Round Review. It’s the content arm of First Round Capital, and over the last decade, they have created a huge amount of high-quality, helpful content for people building startups. “Guides” will be my attempt to do this for the mental health ecosystem. I want to team up with seasoned experts in mental health to create content you can use to solve the problems in front of you today.

Practical stuff like, “How do I scale from 10,000 to 100,000 users?”, “When should I hire a Chief Clinical Officer?”, “What do investors want to see in a Series A mental health business?”.

There’s so much we could write. Our content calendar will be determined by the problems you want solved. I created The Hemingway Hotline so you can tell me what problems you’re facing - just fill it in, and I’ll do my best to make content on that topic.

Hiring

To do all this, we’ll need to bring on board two new people:

• A community co-ordinator who can help run “Sessions”, “Chapters” and everything else related to our community.

• And a writer to scale “Guides”.

I’ll still be the ultimate owner and editor of everything. If you know someone truly amazing who might be a fit for these roles (like genuinely top 1%), please reach out and let me know.

Things I’m saying no to:

Good strategy means saying no. I have lots of ideas (I think good ideas) for things I’d like to create but am saying no to in 2026:

Doubling down on mental health journalism. There’s actually a huge opportunity here. People want to consume content about what’s happening in this space, and there’s so much to write about. Like any industry, attention is important, and news is a great way to get attention. I like doing the weekly round-ups and selective deep-dives, but being a full-time media outlet is a different story. While there’s a huge opportunity here, I just don’t really want to be a journalist. I don’t think I have the skillset or capacity to do this in the right way.

Launching a podcast. Quite a few people have asked when I will launch a Hemingway podcast. The answer is not any time soon. I used to run a podcast, and if you want to do it well, it’s a lot of work. In content businesses, there are no returns to creating average content. So you either go all-in or you on’t do it. I don’t have the capacity to go all-in, so I won’t be doing it right now.

Courses. I’d really love to create a bunch of courses on mental health innovation. Courses like “Mental Health 101 for non-clinical employees”, or even a “101 on the US mental health market”. They could help people better understand the clinical, commercial and regulatory environments that are often so opaque. But again, it takes a lot of work to do well, and it just didn’t make the cut for 2026.

All that said, perhaps there is a way for me to partner with people to build these projects. If that’s something you’re interested in, let me know.

Some Other Thoughts and Questions

Working with sponsors. My first experiment of working with a sponsor went well, and I’m open to more of it in 2026. I will always make sure that they are aligned with my values. I also disclose all sponsorships and will create content with them in a way that is genuinely valuable to the audience. I’ll also never sacrifice my independence. Sponsorships like this are a lot of work, though, so they’re only worthwhile if they are relatively big and consistent. If you are interested in partnering in 2026, do let me know - I have some cool ideas.

Feel-good business. I’ve had this nagging feeling lately that we’re living in a world of “screw you, capitalism” - where everyone is trying to squeeze every last cent from their customers in a hyper-optimised but very soulless kinda way. I won’t get into my economic beliefs but in short; while I think capitalism is largely the best system we know of, it feels in need of some reform. My entirely anecdotal view is that capitalism today sometimes just feels a bit gross. I don’t want Hemingway to ever be like that. Being a Hemingway customer should feel good. It should feel more like shopping at an independently owned corner store than at a PE-owned mega-franchise. I do a few small things to try and make it feel like this: I provide student discounts, I always refund someone if they feel they aren’t getting value, and in general, I just try to be kind and reasonable. But I want to do way more. If you’ve got any ideas for how I can do so, or have seen inspiration somewhere else, please let me know.

Growth. So far, all our growth has been organic. The least cool thing about me is that I’m quite good at LinkedIn - the platform is a great top-of-funnel audience source. A certain percentage of those followers become newsletter subscribers and ultimately THR Pro members. The quality and engagement of the audience is super high (>60% open rates and >10% click rates). But growing a newsletter (without being spammy / lowering the quality) is hard. In 2026, I might explore other ways to grow. For now, the most helpful thing you can do is continue to tell your friends and colleagues about Hemingway. Every referral means so much.

Personal fit. I always wanted Hemingway to be something that fits with me. Like, as a person. I wanted freedom - financially, geographically and in how I spend my time. I wanted to follow my curiosity. I wanted to think deeply about things and spend time writing - because that is where I most often find flow. And I wanted to work with smart, kind people. I count myself very lucky that I get to do all that. But it’s also because this is how I designed it. As I grow Hemingway, I want to maintain this alignment between the business and me. I think this is often overlooked. But when you run your own thing and don’t have investors, it’s entirely possible. You just need to be thoughtful and good at saying no. It makes it more enjoyable, but it also makes it way more sustainable. As I said, I’d love to run this thing for decades. If I maintain this personal fit, I’ll be able to do so.

There’s a piece of advice I’ll never forget: “When starting a business, choose your customers wisely. These will be the people you spend all your time with, talking to them, listening to them and building for them. While your product might change, your customers won’t. So you better like them.”

That sage advice led to one of the best decisions I ever made, choosing to build for this audience. People like you: good, passionate, intelligent people who are trying to improve population mental health.

I’m privileged to be able to work with a group of people like this, to do work I really enjoy, and to try to make some sort of contribution to a problem I care about. While Hemingway is still in its infancy, I’m super excited about what we can build for the future.

I appreciate you coming with me on this journey so far and can’t wait to see what we’ll do together in the future.

I know you have thoughts on all this, so please do reply to this email and let me know what you think about our plans for 2026. I really would love to hear your feedback.

That’s all for this week. Until next week…

Keep fighting the good fight!

Steve

Founder of Hemingway

Join The Hemingway Community

We now have over 270 members in our vetted community for mental health innovators. This includes founders, clinicians, investors and researchers, all passionate about improving population mental health. We discuss important topics, share learnings and host events. If you’re interested in networking and collaborating with these kinds of people, feel free to check it out.