Lasting
Unknown
Website: https://getlasting.com
Cover Block
PUBLIC
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Lasting |
| Headquarters | New York, NY |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Industry / Vertical | Digital mental health, relationship counseling |
| Geography | North America |
| Founding Team | Steven Dziedzic (solo founder of record) |
| Funding Label | Seed funding 2018; acquired by Talkspace November 2020 for undisclosed amount |
| Total Disclosed | ~$100,000 (pre-acquisition, per public filings) |
| Status | Wholly-owned subsidiary / product line of Talkspace |
Links
PUBLIC
- Website: https://getlasting.com/about-us
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/lasting-labs
- Founder LinkedIn (Steven Dziedzic): https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevendziedzic
- Acquirer announcement: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005199/en/Talkspace-Announces-Acquisition-of-Leading-Relationship-Counseling-App-Lasting
Executive Summary
PUBLIC
Lasting is a relationship-counseling mobile application that delivers short, research-based audio sessions to couples and, more recently, to parents, and it is now operated as a product line inside the publicly traded telehealth company Talkspace [Business Wire, November 2020]. The company was founded in 2016 by Steven Dziedzic, a repeat founder whose prior venture was the restaurant-discovery app Hoppit, and it built early traction by translating academic marriage research into five-minute daily exercises a couple can do together on a phone [Forbes, February 2019]. Differentiation rests less on the underlying audio-coaching format, which has multiple competitors, and more on the editorial product (sessions grounded in named clinical research) and on distribution through the Talkspace umbrella since the 2020 acquisition [TechCrunch, March 2022]. Disclosed pre-acquisition funding is modest (approximately $100,000, with XO Group named as an early backer per public databases), and the November 2020 sale price to Talkspace was not disclosed [Crunchbase, 2020]. Since the acquisition, Lasting has shipped a sibling product called the Parenting Guide app, signaling that the brand is being used as Talkspace's beachhead into self-guided, non-therapist-led behavioral content [TechCrunch, March 2022]. The most relevant question for an investor reading this report is no longer "is Lasting a standalone business" but rather "how much of Talkspace's consumer growth narrative is being carried by the Lasting product family," given that Talkspace itself is publicly listed and reports consolidated, not segment-level, figures. What to watch over the next 12 to 18 months: the cadence of new self-guided apps under the Lasting brand, any disclosure of Lasting-specific subscriber counts in Talkspace earnings, and whether employer and payer channels begin reimbursing relationship and parenting content the way they now reimburse individual therapy.
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Business Wire, TechCrunch, Forbes, and Crunchbase.
Taxonomy Snapshot
| Axis | Value |
|---|---|
| Stage | Acquired (subsidiary of Talkspace, Nasdaq: TALK) |
| Business Model | Consumer subscription (B2C), with parent company expanding into B2B2C |
| Industry / Vertical | Digital mental health, relationship and family wellness |
| Technology Type | Mobile application (iOS / Android), self-guided audio content |
| Geography | North America (primary), English-language |
| Founding Team | Solo founder, product background |
| Funding | ~$100,000 disclosed pre-acquisition; acquired November 2020 |
Company Overview
PUBLIC
Lasting was founded in New York in 2016 by Steven Dziedzic with the premise that the structured exercises used by marriage counselors could be delivered through a phone in five-minute increments, and that doing so would reach couples who would never sit on a therapist's couch [Forbes, February 2019]. The product launched as a daily-session app organized into modules covering communication, finances, intimacy, and conflict, with each session built around findings the company attributed to named relationship researchers, including the Gottman Institute body of work cited in early press [Business Insider, March 2018].
The company raised modest seed capital (publicly aggregated at roughly $100,000) with XO Group, the parent of The Knot, listed as an investor, a logical strategic given the wedding-to-marriage customer journey [Crunchbase, 2020]. From 2018 through 2020 Lasting accumulated press coverage in mainstream business and lifestyle outlets and was repeatedly framed as a consumerization of marriage counseling rather than a clinical service [Forbes, February 2019]. On November 12, 2020, Talkspace announced the acquisition of Lasting for an undisclosed amount, positioning the deal as an expansion from individual therapy into relationship counseling [Business Wire, November 2020] [MobiHealthNews, November 2020].
Since the acquisition Lasting has continued to ship product. In March 2022 the team launched a Parenting Guide app, a separate self-guided advice product aimed at parents of young children, again built on the short-session content format [TechCrunch, March 2022]. Founder Steven Dziedzic now lists his title as Chief Product Officer at Talkspace, indicating that the Lasting team has been integrated into the parent organization rather than run at arm's length [LinkedIn].
Data Accuracy: GREEN -- Confirmed by Business Wire, TechCrunch, MobiHealthNews, and Crunchbase.
Product and Technology
MIXED
The core Lasting product is a mobile application in which a couple, working from their own phones, completes short guided sessions on a chosen relationship topic; the company's public description emphasizes a five-minute format and content sourced from marriage research [Forbes, February 2019] [PUBLIC]. Sessions typically include a brief lesson, a prompt for each partner to answer privately, and then a shared exercise, with the app tracking which modules a couple has completed [Business Insider, March 2018] [PUBLIC]. The product is positioned on the company website as "the marriage counseling company," framing it as a complement, not a replacement, to therapy [Lasting] [PUBLIC].
The newer Parenting Guide app extends the same self-guided, audio-led format to parenting topics, and was described at launch as a separate application rather than a module inside Lasting, which suggests the parent organization is testing whether the content engine can be reused under multiple consumer brands rather than sold only as add-on therapy modules [TechCrunch, March 2022] [PUBLIC]. This is a meaningful product-strategy signal: if the underlying content production pipeline is portable, Talkspace can spin similar guided-content apps into other behavioral verticals without commissioning new clinical infrastructure.
On technology, the public record is thin. The product is a native mobile app distributed through the Apple App Store and Google Play, and there is no public disclosure of an underlying ML or recommendation system; characterizing the product as algorithmically personalized would be speculative [PRIVATE inference, not asserted]. Specific stack details are not publicly available, and no Lasting-specific job postings were surfaced during research, consistent with engineering being absorbed into Talkspace's central organization.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Product description corroborated by TechCrunch, Forbes, and the company website; technology stack not publicly documented.
Market Research and Opportunity
PUBLIC
The market that matters for Lasting is the intersection of digital mental health and consumer relationship and family wellness, a category that pulled forward several years of adoption during the 2020 to 2022 telehealth expansion and has since had to prove it can retain users at price points below clinical therapy.
Demand drivers cited in the press around Lasting's launch and acquisition are consistent: stigma around couples therapy remains a barrier to in-person care, scheduling two adults into the same therapist's calendar is logistically hard, and the per-session cost of a licensed marriage and family therapist puts traditional counseling out of reach for a meaningful share of couples [Forbes, February 2019]. Talkspace's own acquisition rationale, as stated in the deal announcement, was that relationship issues are among the most common reasons individual users seek therapy in the first place, so a relationship-specific product is both a standalone offering and a feeder into the higher-ACV individual therapy product [Business Wire, November 2020] [MobiHealthNews, November 2020].
Adjacent and substitute markets are crowded and well capitalized. On one side sit the licensed-therapy marketplaces, including Talkspace itself, BetterHelp (owned by Teladoc), and a long tail of regional tele-therapy providers; on another side sit self-guided meditation and mental wellness apps such as Calm and Headspace; and directly adjacent are the consumer relationship apps named in the structured competitive set, including Coral, Paired, and Relish. The regulatory frame is comparatively light because Lasting positions itself as wellness content rather than as a medical device or a clinical service, which keeps it outside the FDA's software-as-medical-device regime but also limits its ability to be reimbursed by health plans or HSAs the way teletherapy can be.
No named third-party report cited in the captured research sizes the relationship-app sub-segment specifically; the public sizing claims available are at the broader digital mental health level and are not attributed to a single source in this dossier. Rather than fabricate a TAM, this report leaves the segment-level number out and notes that Talkspace's own publicly reported revenue (disclosed in its quarterly filings as a Nasdaq-listed company under ticker TALK) is the most directly relevant proxy a reader can pull independently.
| Sizing claim | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Lasting disclosed pre-acquisition funding | ~$100,000 | [Crunchbase, 2020] |
| Lasting acquisition price | Undisclosed | [Business Wire, November 2020] |
| Parent company (Talkspace) listing | Public, Nasdaq: TALK | [Business Wire, November 2020] |
Analyst takeaway: the headline number an investor should anchor on is not a TAM but the fact that a publicly traded telehealth company chose to acquire this asset in late 2020, which is itself a market signal that the relationship-counseling segment was viewed as strategically additive to a roughly nine-figure-revenue therapy business.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Demand drivers and acquisition rationale corroborated by multiple sources; no segment-specific TAM confirmed in cited research.
Competitive Landscape
MIXED
Lasting competes inside a narrow consumer category (paid mobile relationship coaching) while sitting under a parent that competes in the much larger teletherapy category, and the most useful way to read the competitive map is to separate those two layers.
| Company | Positioning | Stage / Funding | Notable Differentiator | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lasting | Self-guided couples sessions, five-minute format, research-cited content | Acquired by Talkspace, November 2020 | Distribution through Talkspace; sibling Parenting Guide app | [Business Wire, November 2020]; [TechCrunch, March 2022] |
| Paired | Daily relationship app for couples, question-and-quiz format | Independent, venture-backed | Consumer-friendly UX, strong app-store presence | [CB Insights, 2022] |
| Coral | Intimacy and relationship coaching app | Independent, venture-backed | Intimacy-first content positioning | [CB Insights, 2022] |
| Relish | Relationship coaching with optional human coach access | Independent, venture-backed | Hybrid self-guided plus human coach model | [CB Insights, 2022] |
At the segment level (paid couples apps) the competitive set named in the captured research, Coral, Paired, and Relish, occupies effectively the same shelf in the App Store as Lasting [CB Insights, 2022] [PUBLIC]. The product formats are similar enough that switching costs for an end user are low: a couple decides which app's tone, content library, and pricing they prefer, and the differentiation is editorial more than technical. Where Lasting has a structural advantage is distribution. Being inside Talkspace means Lasting can be cross-sold to anyone arriving at Talkspace looking for individual therapy and identifying a relationship issue as the trigger, a funnel none of the independent apps can match [Business Wire, November 2020] [MIXED].
That distribution edge is meaningful but also perishable. Talkspace's enterprise and payer-led channels are oriented around clinically licensed services that can be reimbursed; self-guided wellness content does not yet carry the same reimbursement profile, so the cross-sell into employer book-of-business is an execution question, not a given. Where Lasting is most exposed is in the channel it does not own: the independent competitors are free to build their own employer and benefits-platform partnerships at the wellness tier, and Relish's optional human-coach layer in particular is a model that pushes toward a higher willingness-to-pay than a pure content app [CB Insights, 2022] [MIXED].
One plausible 18-month scenario: the winner if Talkspace begins to disclose Lasting-branded subscriber or revenue contribution in its quarterly reporting and that figure shows the cross-sell working, in which case Lasting becomes the template for a portfolio of Talkspace-owned guided-content apps. The loser if independent competitors close meaningful employer-benefits deals first and establish themselves as the default "relationships" tile inside major mental health benefits platforms before Talkspace ships an enterprise SKU for Lasting.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Competitor set confirmed by CB Insights; relative positioning is analyst characterization based on public product descriptions.
Opportunity
PUBLIC
The size of the prize for Lasting is not as a standalone consumer app but as the proof-of-concept for a multi-brand, self-guided behavioral content portfolio inside a publicly traded telehealth platform.
The headline opportunity. The single largest outcome Lasting can plausibly drive is to become the content engine that lets Talkspace expand from a clinician-bottlenecked service business into a higher-margin, content-led consumer business, with relationship counseling and parenting as the first two verticals and additional verticals (grief, caregiver support, life transitions) as logical follow-ons. The Parenting Guide launch in March 2022 is the strongest piece of public evidence that the parent company sees the format as portable rather than category-specific, and that it intends to ship more apps from the same content pipeline [TechCrunch, March 2022]. The reason this outcome is reachable rather than aspirational is that the underlying acquisition has already happened, the founder is in the parent company's C-suite as Chief Product Officer, and the second product is already live [LinkedIn] [TechCrunch, March 2022].
Growth scenarios.
| Scenario | What happens | Catalyst | Why it's plausible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content portfolio | Talkspace ships three to five Lasting-style guided apps under a unified consumer brand family | Successful monetization of Parenting Guide post-launch | Parenting Guide already launched as a separate app, not a module [TechCrunch, March 2022] |
| Enterprise wellness SKU | Lasting and Parenting Guide are bundled into Talkspace's employer and payer contracts as the self-guided tier | A named EAP or benefits-platform partnership | Talkspace already sells into employer and payer channels under its core brand [Business Wire, November 2020] |
| Cross-sell funnel | Lasting becomes the top-of-funnel acquisition channel for Talkspace individual therapy, lowering blended CAC | Disclosure of segment cross-sell metrics in Talkspace earnings | Acquisition rationale explicitly framed around relationship issues as a common driver of individual therapy demand [MobiHealthNews, November 2020] |
What compounding looks like. The flywheel, if it works, is content-led. Each new self-guided app under the Lasting umbrella reuses the editorial and production muscle built for the original product, lowering the marginal cost of launching the next vertical. Each app then feeds qualified leads into Talkspace's clinician-led services, where the unit economics are higher per user but capacity-constrained by therapist supply. The compounding effect is that the content side scales with engineering and editorial spend (which compounds), while the therapy side captures the higher willingness-to-pay users the content side surfaces. The Parenting Guide launch is the first observable data point that the content pipeline is being reused, though it is too early to claim the flywheel is spinning [TechCrunch, March 2022].
The size of the win. A useful comparable is the public valuation history of consumer mental wellness platforms that built portfolios of content-led apps, with Calm and Headspace as the most-cited private comparables in the category. Talkspace itself trades publicly as TALK on Nasdaq following its 2021 SPAC merger, and its market capitalization is observable in real time, which means a reader can independently mark to market what an incremental contribution from the Lasting product family would be worth at current trading multiples (scenario, not a forecast). If the content portfolio scenario plays out and Lasting-branded products contribute a disclosed, growing slice of Talkspace's consumer revenue, the re-rating of the parent stock would be the most direct way the win shows up in public markets. If only the cross-sell funnel scenario plays out, Lasting becomes a margin tool rather than a revenue line, still valuable but less visible to outside investors.
Data Accuracy: YELLOW -- Scenarios are analyst constructions grounded in confirmed product launches and the disclosed acquisition rationale; no forward financial guidance has been published for the Lasting product line specifically.
Sources
PUBLIC
[Business Wire, November 2020] Talkspace Announces Acquisition of Leading Relationship Counseling App Lasting | https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201112005199/en/Talkspace-Announces-Acquisition-of-Leading-Relationship-Counseling-App-Lasting
[TechCrunch, March 2022] Talkspace-owned Lasting launches new 'Parenting Guide' app, its latest self-guided advice service | https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/21/talkspace-lasting-parenting-guide-app/
[Forbes, February 2019] Relationship Health App Disrupting Traditional Marriage Counseling | https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertreiss/2019/02/05/relationship-health-app-disrupting-traditional-marriage-counseling/
[Business Insider, March 2018] A couple's fate can be decided from their first 3 minutes of conversation, here are the biggest mistakes they make | https://www.businessinsider.com/the-biggest-mistakes-couples-make-in-conversations-and-how-to-fix-them-2018-3
[MobiHealthNews, November 2020] Talkspace dives into relationship counseling with acquisition of Lasting | https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/talkspace-dives-relationship-counseling-acquisition-lasting
[Crunchbase, 2020] Talkspace acquires Lasting, Acquisition Profile | https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/talkspace-acquires-lasting--27e8a80e
[Crunchbase] Lasting, Crunchbase Company Profile and Funding | https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lasting
[LinkedIn] Steven Dziedzic, Chief Product Officer, Talkspace | https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevendziedzic
[LinkedIn] Lasting (acquired by Talkspace), company page | https://www.linkedin.com/company/lasting-labs
[CB Insights, 2022] Lasting, Products, Competitors, Financials, Employees, Headquarters Locations | https://www.cbinsights.com/company/lasting
[PitchBook] Lasting Company Profile, Valuation, Investors, Acquisition | https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/279904-42
[Tracxn] Lasting, Company Profile, Team, Funding and Competitors | https://tracxn.com/d/companies/lasting/__CINBIobu79sBD_U68h6wAWNTGzQgFxpgUI-o-x7tEKY
[Lasting] About Lasting, The Marriage Counseling Company | https://getlasting.com/about-us
[The Org] Lasting, HQ | https://theorg.com/org/lasting/offices/hq
[ZoomInfo] Lasting, Overview, News and Similar companies | https://www.zoominfo.com/c/lasting/445988994
Articles about Lasting
- Lasting Is Betting Five Minutes a Day Can Save a Marriage — The relationship counseling app, acquired by Talkspace in 2020, has expanded into parenting and now sits inside one of telehealth's largest brands.