When we built the AI at the center of AfterMatters, we didn’t set out to make it clever. We set out to make it feel like someone you’d actually want in the room on a hard day. So we named her after a real person: warm without performing it, knowledgeable without lecturing, steady enough that nothing you bring to her makes her flinch.

Meet Alice Campbell, mother of AfterMatter’s founder, Susan Campbell. Alice has been married to her husband Chris for 59 years: she is a mother, a Nan to two grandchildren, and one of twelve children raised in Lewisporte, Newfoundland.

She’s also the reason our AI agent has a name instead of a function.

Ask Alice guides people through the two hardest financial conversations most families have: getting organized before something happens, and finding their way through when it does. She holds space first and answers second, and when something is hard, she says so quietly, the way a person does, not a script.

The technology is new, but the instinct behind her isn’t. It’s the same instinct that’s kept families like Alice’s close for 59 years.

Because after matters.

At some point this weekend, it hit me that they were all saying the same thing from different directions, and that it all pointed straight at my why.

As many of you reading this article are aware, I spent time in the ICU this past January due to diabetic ketoacidosis. I was connected to several IVs and monitored by a heart monitor meant to alert staff if my heart stopped. This was the second time in my life that I faced death so closely. When you’ve come face to face with mortality twice, and then you watch a series about people seeking to live forever, it changes your perspective. It’s as if you’ve been given another chance, and you’re determined not to waste it. I watched all six episodes of the Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever series back-to-back.

I’ve also been listening to Kara for a few years now, especially over the past year, when I watch her podcasts almost daily. Truthfully, I have a full-blown hero crush on her. I find her to be so self-aware, knowledgeable, level-headed, endlessly curious, brilliant, completely confident, and somehow still kind, regardless of who she is speaking with or how heated the discussion can become. That combination is rare, and I find it magnetic. So when I say she’s become a mentor to me, I don’t mean we’ve ever met. I mean that I have spent a year letting her voice and her questions rearrange how I think, the way a good mentor does. This series was six more episodes of that, right when I unknowingly needed it most.

The one theme I started to recognize by the last episode was how Kara kept coming back to her point that trying to outlive death kind of misses the whole point of being alive. That you become so aware of how precious this is that you actually live in every moment as often as you can. It hit me that I can see the same theme that sits right in the middle of my why.

Technology shouldn’t be part of the problem.

Kara has spent her whole career watching the richest tech bros promise to fix us, only to quietly make us more anxious, more alone, more dependent on it. The longevity craze is just the newest version of that promise. Live to 120, track every biomarker, never stop optimizing. And she keeps asking them the same question that nobody in those interviews ever wants to answer: who is this actually for, and what is it costing the rest of us to chase it?

That question is my why for AfterMatters’ existence. I’m not interested in adding one more treadmill to anybody’s life. AfterMatters isn’t the overwhelming tool that dumps forty new responsibilities on you and calls it “peace of mind.” And it’s not the lazy version either, the digital junk drawer you toss things into that never keeps up with your actual life. It sits right in the middle. The place that helps you see the good, the hard, and the genuinely important, without making you feel like you have to be perfect or live forever to get it right.

Alice is a guide, not a replacement

The AI episode is where my whole company lives.

There’s a version of this technology that wants to replace people. Your therapist. Your lawyer. Your friend. I’m building the opposite of that. The AI agent at the heart of AfterMatters is named Alice, after my mom, Alice Campbell. That isn’t a cute branding choice. It’s one of the most important features. My mom is warm, knowledgeable, never in a rush, never makes you feel small, and always there. She’s the person you’d want sitting beside you on the worst day, the one who somehow makes a terrifying thing feel survivable just by being calm and kind about it. I wanted the support inside AfterMatters to feel like that, like her, so I gave it her name. Naming it after my mom is how I keep the help human. Alice is not a therapist. She’s not a lawyer. She knows exactly what she is not, and she opens the door to the right human the second you need one.

What she is is a presence for the moments when picking up the phone feels like too much. You know the ones. You’ve only had a few weeks since losing someone, now staring at paperwork nobody ever taught you how to do, and the thought of calling a person and asking what feels like a useless question is just more than you can manage right then. Sometimes asking Alice is simply the right fit for that moment. Just enough to get you through the next thing on the list, without anyone making you feel ill- prepared for not knowing something you were never taught. And she’s there for every single user, no matter what they can pay. Real support shouldn’t be locked behind a premium tier.

Support a person. Don’t replace them. It’s as easy as that.

Near death doesn’t care how old you are

Kara talks about losing her dad when she was only 5 years old, and about her own brush with death a few years ago. Both of those are sitting right at the core of why I started this.

Because here’s what I actually learned lying in that ICU bed: an emergency doesn’t check your age first. A stroke, an accident, a diagnosis. Any of it can show up at thirty- five or eighty-five and throw you and everyone who loves you into a much worse crisis, for the simple reason that nobody can find the information they need. AfterMatters was never about getting ready to die. It’s about getting your life organized so that the hard things hurt a little less when they come. So the people who love you aren’t going through your desk looking for information while they’re trying to grieve, or trying to keep you alive.

And it’s also about your wishes. Knowing what someone actually wants, and having said it out loud and shared before the worst day, takes some of the most painful conversations off the table at the exact moment you’re least able to have them. Nobody should be standing in a hospital hallway guessing what their best friend, mom or sister would have wanted. Planning isn’t morbid. It’s just kindness, done early.

The water, and the women who get me through

The episode that completely got me was the one where Kara faces her fear of open water and jumps in anyway, with all these women around her.

She cried while describing her experience. I cried watching them too. And I knew exactly why. There have been so many days in my life where the only reason I made it to the next one was laughing with my friends. Those moments, the ones that have nothing to do with being productive or having a plan, are the ones that pulled me through the dark stretches and back into the light. Strength in numbers isn’t just a slogan to me; it has literally kept me alive.

It’s also the shape of what I want AfterMatters to be. Not one lonely tool, but a coalition. A go-to ecosystem of referral or integrated partners for everything around aging, health, the end of life, death, dying, and closing an estate. Because no single person can carry all of that, and nobody should have to face it by themselves. My whole career has been built on one belief: if I can’t help you myself, I will know or find someone who can. Massage therapy, restaurant management, partnership development, consulting, start-ups and scale-ups. In every chapter, my instinct has been to find the right person for you. AfterMatters is that instinct, finally built into something.

Health span, not life span

Then there’s the other voice I keep in heavy rotation: Peter Attia, who was on Diary of a CEO recently.

He flipped an old mindframe for me. It’s not about your “life” span. It’s about your “health” span. Living to 100 doesn’t mean much if the last twenty or thirty years are spent in decline and pain. What matters is the quality of the life you’ve got, and that starts with the choices you make now. He talks about picturing what you want to still be able to do in your last ten years, and then working backwards from that. The kicker is that those last ten years might be your next ten, or they might be forty years away. You don’t get to know. So the only thing that makes sense is to protect your wellbeing today, so you’re ready whenever they show up.

The part that really stuck with me: looking at your family’s health history and going, “Well, I guess that’s my future too,” is actually the wrong move. The right one is to look at them and, if necessary, decide to change your own course, so it isn’t. Getting ahead of your future, your health, and your housekeeping is honestly one of the most loving things you can do for yourself and for the people who’ll have to step in for you one day.

It lines up perfectly with that Steve Jobs speech at Stanford back in 2005, the one everyone still quotes. “Remembering that you’re going to die is the clearest way to quit living someone else’s life and start living your own.” Death, looked at honestly, isn’t a morbid thing. It’s a clarifying one. It tells you what actually matters before you run out of time to do anything about it.

Golden Girls, the wealth that’s moving, and the women who’ll be holding it

Here’s something I talk about with my friends quite often. As wealth moves between generations, more and more of it is landing with women. And, statistically, women are the ones who end up taking care of everyone else, often including one another. Golden Girls is having a comeback for a reason. That picture of women building a home and a safety net out of friendship isn’t nostalgia. For a lot of us, it’s the forecast.

Which is exactly why we can’t keep organizing everyone else’s life and never our own. Working with your partner (or as a solo ager), so your life is set up the way you actually want it, so that, whatever happens, you’re not depending on someone else to figure it out for you. That’s not pessimism. It’s self-respect with a long memory.

What Capital MashUp taught me about trusting my gut

A few weeks ago, I pitched AfterMatters at Capital MashUp in Ottawa. The room was full of investors, fellow founders, champions, and wealth-management people, and the feedback was rich, some harsh but very informative. I spent the days after it really digging into it all.

And here’s the part I’m proud of: that feedback didn’t talk me out of my vision. It confirmed a gut feeling I’d been sitting with for a while. That I needed to pivot slightly, align with partners early, and build the go-to-market strategy with wealth management as the lead channel. That early alignment is what actually builds the moat. The hero feature we’re building, the document intelligence that takes a messy pile of uploaded paperwork and turns it into an ordered, province-correct plan, is what sets us apart from the platforms that look similar on the surface but stop at being a container.

Eight years in tech partnerships and a whole life before that, unknowingly building partnerships in all my roles, taught me that the strongest companies aren’t the ones trying to own everything. They’re the ones that build the right coalition. I trusted that experience and built with that mindset. Started with our brilliant CTO, Andrei Pop, with decades of experience and knowledge. Along with fractional support from Ollon, Klavan Security and Flying V Group. I am surrounded by mentors, partners and advisors. I trusted my gut, and I’m so glad I did. I have a few other partnerships in talks, and I will be excited to announce them in the coming months.

My promise, and the line I won’t cross

So here’s my why, my purpose, and my promise, all in one spot.

AfterMatters exists so that life’s hardest setbacks land a little more softly, because someone took the time to get organized and say their wishes out loud. It exists to be the place you reach for across aging, health, the end of life, and estate closure. Humanity, support, and kindness aren’t features I use to market AfterMatters. They’re part of the foundation of my mission.

And here’s what I will not let happen: I won’t let AfterMatters become another piece of technology that replaces human connection in the name of convenience. Alice guides. People connect. The two never get confused. AfterMatters will never be the overwhelming tool that piles on stress, and it’ll never be the neglectful one that stops caring. It lives in the middle, on purpose.

Kara’s whole message, and Attia’s, and Jobs’s, comes down to this: respecting death means actually living now. Doing the right amount of the right things to stay healthy, without getting so obsessed with living perfectly and forever that you forget to live at all.

I recently started thinking about our long-term goal of entering the US market and licensing globally. I have now decided to add a new goal, which I’m going to share here so the universe hears me: I want Kara Swisher and her podcast partner, Scott Galloway, to invest in AfterMatters.

Scott, I’m thinking of that Pivot episode where you talked about your dad’s estate. Payments still coming out months later, things you didn’t understand until years had gone by. That gap, that lack of communication inside a family, is the exact wound AfterMatters is built to close.

And Kara, you will get the value of having your life findable before the worst day arrives. You’re the one who taught me, in six episodes, that the goal was never to live forever. In fact, the goal in life should be to be so grateful for this life that I’d go and build AfterMatters to help other people hold onto their lives a little more gently.

In fact, anyone reading this, please take this as both an article and an open invitation.

Because, after matters.

Susan

TechSkis V2 was, by every measure, exactly what the Canadian startup ecosystem should look like. Founders and funders in the same space, genuinely interested in each other. Reciprocity as a default setting rather than a strategy. Egos left at the door. The kind of event where you walk in feeling like an outsider and leave feeling like you found your people.

I have been building AfterMatters for four years. I have fifty pages of original notes, a co-founder, a team I assembled over two decades of relationship-building, an advisory network through Invest Ottawa’s Ignition program, and a launch date on the horizon. By most measures, things are moving.

And yet for the past several weeks, I have been paralyzed by something I am almost embarrassed to admit: I could not bring myself to ask for help.

AfterMatters is currently in a friends-and-family funding round. $300K to complete the Ontario MVP, fund our beta, and get us to a summer 2026 launch. It is the bridge between where we are and where we need to be before we can go to institutional investors with data instead of promises. It is, strategically, the right move. I know that.

But knowing something is right and being able to do it are two different things.

I wrote dozens of versions of an outreach letter. I lost sleep over them. I questioned everything, the timing, the wording, the vulnerability of it, the fear that asking would look like weakness or desperation rather than strategy and courage. I am someone who has spent 23 years being the person in the room who solves problems. Asking other people to solve one for me felt deeply uncomfortable.

Then I sat in a room in Collingwood and listened to Jake Karls talk about authenticity.

Jake is a founder and a storyteller, and he has built something remarkable by simply refusing to be anyone other than himself. His message, delivered with considerably more passion and colour than I will reproduce here, was this: stop hiding. Stop performing a version of yourself that looks polished and untroubled and certain, because it is transparent and it keeps the right people from finding you. Just be you. Tell your story. The people who are meant to connect with it will. The ones who don’t, they were never your people anyway.

I sat there and felt something shift.

I thought about all the versions of the letter I had written that sounded like a press release. All the careful, measured language designed to make the ask feel less like an ask. All the nights I had spent trying to find a way to be vulnerable without actually being vulnerable.

I came home, and I started over.

I wrote about being single twelve years ago, undiagnosed, thinking about death and realizing I would never want to leave a mess behind for the people I loved. I wrote about the Death App scribbled in a notebook that became the Widow’s App that became AfterMatters, named in a hospital bed four years ago when I nearly left exactly that mess behind for Jeff and finally understood with complete clarity what I had been trying to build all along. I wrote about the health scare six weeks ago that reminded me, again, that life does not give warnings. I wrote about Jeff pacing the house while I practiced my pitch with a karaoke microphone. I wrote about Graham Acreman reading fifty pages of unorganized passion and seeing a business plan inside it. I wrote about the team I built, not by luck but by showing up in every room for two decades and knowing exactly who I wanted beside me when the time came.

I wrote for hours. It was the easiest writing I have done in months.

Because I was just being me.

The letter has been posted on LinkedIn and Facebook, and the response has been more than I expected. Not because it is perfect. Because it is honest.

If you are a founder reading this and you are in the middle of something that feels too vulnerable to share publicly, I want to offer you what TechSkis gave me this week: permission. The ecosystem is full of people who want to lift you up. But they can only find you if you let them see you.

And if you want to read the full AfterMatters story, it is linked below. We are building Canada’s first platform for proactive life planning, emergency preparedness, and estate closure. We are raising a friends-and-family round. And we are very much looking for our first believers.

Read the Article Here

because, AfterMatters.

susan@aftermatters.ca www.aftermatters.ca

I’m a lifelong entrepreneur. I’ve built things, pitched things, and sold things. Asking for help has never been my strong suit. But here I am, at 4 am, writing this, because AfterMatters is too important to let my pride get in the way.

So let me tell you what I’m building. And why I’m asking.

Where It Really Began

Twelve years ago, I was single, living alone, and in the middle of what I didn’t yet know was an undiagnosed mental health journey. I wasn’t in crisis in the way people imagine. I was functioning. Working. Showing up. But I was also quietly carrying something heavy, and during that time, my mind went to dark places. I thought about death. Not in a passing way. In a real way.

And then, right alongside that darkness, something practical kicked in.

I remember thinking: I would never want to leave my family a mess. I would never want the people I love to spend what came after trying to figure out where anything was, what I owned, what I owed, what I wanted, who to call. The thought of them carrying that on top of everything else was unbearable to me. If anything ever happened, I wanted them to be able to grieve. Not scramble.

So I started looking for something that could help me get organized. Something that could hold the map of my life in one place and make sure the right people could find it if they needed to. What I found was a complete void. No tools built for someone like me. No organized, accessible way to say: here is my life, here is what matters, here is what to do if I can’t tell you myself.

I scribbled some notes. I called it, rather bluntly, the Death App. It was functional as a name but deeply unappealing. I moved on. Life got better. I got my diagnosis, got the right support, and built a life I was genuinely proud of.

But the idea never left me. Because the problem that sparked it never went away. It just kept showing up in other people’s lives in different forms.

A few years later, I tried a different name. The Widow’s App. It felt warmer, more relatable. And then I realized: not everyone will be married. Not everyone’s loss looks the same. Not everyone’s life fits that shape. Back to the drawing board.

The name I was looking for didn’t come from a whiteboard session or a branding exercise. It came from a hospital bed.

Then Life Made It Personal. Twice.

About four years ago, I had a serious medical emergency. Lying there, I watched my then-fiancé Jeff navigate the uncertainty of not knowing what came next. And in that moment, everything I had been thinking about for years collapsed into one very clear and very uncomfortable truth: I had nearly left a mess behind for someone I loved.

We had built a life together. But none of it was organized in a way that would have helped him if I hadn’t made it through. No consolidated documents. No clear instructions. No one designated to step in and handle the things that still need to be handled just because you’re in a hospital. Jeff would have been left trying to piece together my world while also falling apart.

It was in that moment, lying there thinking about the Death App idea I had never let go of, thinking about how the Widow’s App still wasn’t quite right, that it finally clicked. After does matter. What happens after a crisis, after a loss, after a moment that changes everything, matters enormously. And the only way to protect the people you love from carrying that weight alone is to prepare before the moment arrives.

AfterMatters. That was it. Not from a conversation at a dinner table. Not from a brainstorming session. From a hospital bed, four years ago, thinking about Jeff, thinking about the mess I had nearly left behind, and knowing with complete certainty that this platform needed to exist.

Six weeks ago, it happened again. Another health scare. Another moment of lying still and thinking about the people on the other side of that door. Another reminder that life does not give you a warning before it gets complicated.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters: I am not building AfterMatters because I am fragile or because my health defines me. I am building it because my health has given me clarity that most people spend a lifetime avoiding. I have sat in the moments this platform is designed for. I know exactly what it feels like to be on the wrong side of disorganization during a crisis. And I am not willing to let that be someone else’s experience when it doesn’t have to be.

Every one of those moments, the quiet reckoning twelve years ago, the hospital bed four years ago, six weeks ago, confirmed the same thing. The need is real. The gap is enormous. And I am the right person to close it.

What AfterMatters Is

AfterMatters is Canada’s first province-aware platform for proactive life planning, emergency preparedness, and estate closure. Think of it as the organized, empathetic guide that no family has, walking you through every step of what needs to happen, in the right order, in compliance with your province’s requirements, with your documents stored securely in one place.

But it is not only an estate tool. That is the part most people don’t expect, and the part that changes everything.

AfterMatters is built around a secure digital vault that stores everything from passwords and banking details to home renovation records, pet microchip numbers, business information, insurance policies, and final wishes. And critically, it gives you the ability to assign different trusted people to different sections of that vault. Your accountant can access your business finances without seeing your medical records. Your neighbour can reach your home and pet details without touching your bank accounts. Your daughter can hold your legal documents and final wishes without having access to everything else.

Those trusted people can be pre-credentialed. If something happens and a friend or family member reaches out to tell them you need support, they can step in immediately. No waiting. No scrambling. No calling institutions that have no incentive to help them find what they need.

This is not a death planning tool. This is a life organization tool that is ready for whatever life throws at you.

It is built for the hospitalization no one saw coming. The small business owner who needs someone to manage things if they can’t be there. The aging parent whose affairs are completely undocumented. The adult child still living at home with a career, savings, a pension, and no one credentialed to access any of it if something goes wrong. The solo ager planning a future without an obvious next of kin. The long-term traveller who needs trusted people managing things at home. The executor who inherits a drawer full of questions and no answers.

And yes, it is also for the person who simply wants the people they love to grieve, not spend years sorting through the mess of an unorganized estate while also trying to heal.

In Canada alone, over one billion dollars remains unrecovered by banks and government programs every year. Not because families don’t want it. Because no one left them a map. Banks and investment firms require certified death certificates, probate orders, proof of executor status, and proof of relationship before releasing a single dollar. Pension programs require separate claims, separate forms, and separate timelines. Families who give up, and many do, walk away from money that belonged to the people they lost. AfterMatters exists to make sure that never has to happen.

Phase one launches in Ontario in the summer of 2026, with the secure vault, guided checklists, and estate-closure tools built to address the realities families actually face. Phase two brings AI-driven proactive features and national expansion across every Canadian province, fully bilingual, built for every income level and every family structure.

The Team Behind AfterMatters

I did not build this alone. And I want to be honest about that, because the people who have chosen to stand behind AfterMatters are a significant part of why I believe we will succeed.

What I will also say is that this team did not fall into my lap. Twenty-three years of building partnerships throughout all my different roles and career choices, working alongside incredible people, and showing up consistently in every room I entered meant that when the time came to build something of my own, I knew exactly who I wanted beside me and how to ask them.

Andrei Pop, Co-Founder and CTO. Andrei is the brother-in-law of my best friend, and if I’m being completely honest, I began laying the groundwork long before he knew it. I first pitched the idea to his wife at my friend’s bachelorette party, when she mentioned almost in passing that her husband was a software developer with startup expertise. I filed that away quietly for a few months. Then at the wedding, I found my moment. What looked like a casual conversation was, in fact, a very deliberate elevator pitch. Andrei brings deep expertise in scalable SaaS architecture and technical infrastructure, and he is not just the person building the platform. He is a co-founder who shares my belief in the mission. That matters enormously when you are building something this important.

Chris Ellefson, Mentor and Financial Expert. Chris brings 30 years of expertise spanning software development, CTO leadership, and venture founding. My existing relationship with Ollon as a consultant gave me the foundation to bring Chris into AfterMatters, and his guidance has been invaluable in ensuring we are building on a scalable foundation. He has seen the full arc of what it takes to go from idea to institution, and I am grateful to have him in our corner.

Denise Enriquez, UI/UX Lead and Design Expert. Denise is one of the most talented designers I have ever worked with. She understands that a platform like AfterMatters cannot just function beautifully. It has to feel safe, human, and compassionate to people who are often using it during some of the hardest moments of their lives. She brings that sensitivity to every single design decision.

Flying V Group, Marketing Expertise. Our fractional marketing partner is driving brand strategy, demand generation, and go-to-market execution. They understand what it means to build a brand that must earn trust before earning a sale.

Jessica Tidd, Marketing and Social Media Support. Jessica brings the on-the-ground marketing and social media presence that keeps AfterMatters visible, consistent, and connected to the people who need to find us.

And then there is the advisory layer that made all of it possible.

I am proud to be part of Invest Ottawa’s Ignition program, and I would not be here without it. The program connected me to an entrepreneurial ecosystem I genuinely did not know existed. It gave me the structure, the mentorship, and the community to take something that lived entirely in my head and turn it into something real. If you have ever wondered whether those programs actually change anything for founders, the answer, at least in my case, is yes. Completely.

And at the very beginning of all of it, before the program, before the team, before any of this had a name that felt right, there was Graham Acreman.

Graham was the first person outside my own head to hear about AfterMatters. At the time, it was fifty typed pages of ideas, observations, frustrations, and half-formed solutions that I had been carrying around for years without knowing what to do with them. Graham sat down with it all, took it seriously, and helped me dissect it into something that resembled a business plan. That business plan got me into the Ignition program. The Ignition program opened doors I did not know were there. I don’t think people talk enough about the person who shows up before the proof of concept, before the pitch deck, before anyone else has any reason to believe. Graham was that person for AfterMatters. His support, his knowledge, and his willingness to take a chance on fifty pages of unorganized passion changed the entire trajectory of what this becomes.

And then there is Jeff.

My husband has been with me through every version of this journey, the health scares, the late nights, the long winded conversations where I talk through AfterMatters out loud not because I need answers but because I need to think, and he has learned, graciously, that sometimes the best support is simply being the person in the room who listens without needing to fix anything.

He has sat through more pitch practice sessions than any spouse should endure. He has watched me pace the house with a karaoke microphone, rehearsing out loud to conquer what I will freely admit is one of my top three fears in life: public speaking. He has cheered me on for every pitch competition I have applied to, celebrated the ones I have been accepted to, and reminded me that the ones I have not been accepted to yet are simply a matter of timing.

Yet. That word matters a lot in this house.

He has shown up to events, supported the early mornings and the late nights, and never once made me feel like the enormity of what I am trying to build was too much. For someone building a platform about being there for the people you love when life gets hard, I could not have asked for a better person to prove that exact point every single day.

The Part Nobody Talks About: Fundraising in Canada While Still Building

Here’s the thing about being a Canadian founder that rarely makes it into the inspirational startup content: the system is a catch-22.

Canadian VCs, broadly speaking, want to see a working MVP in the market with proven traction before they invest. Which is completely reasonable. It de-risks their decision. But here’s the problem: you need capital to build the MVP that proves the traction they need to see before giving you the capital.

Unless you have a name, a pedigree, or a track record that makes investors take a leap of faith, you are expected to find another way to the starting line. That way is called bootstrapping. And bootstrapping at any meaningful scale means asking people who believe in you before the market does.

I’ve done the research. I’ve read the articles, taken the courses, and sat through the programs. And I came out the other side understanding one thing clearly: the friends-and-family round is not Plan B, even if I couldn’t get VC funding. It is the strategic choice that gets AfterMatters to market faster, keeps me in control of the vision during the critical early phase, and positions us to approach institutional investors with real data instead of promises.

Phase one, the $350K friends and family round, builds the MVP, funds the beta, and launches us in the summer of 2026. Phase two, the institutional raise of $2 to $3 million, funds the AI-driven proactive features and national expansion. By then, I’ll have the traction to negotiate from a position of strength.

It’s uncomfortable to ask. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Why I’m Writing This

I decided to write rather than call.

Not because I’m avoiding the conversation, but because I think there are people out there, people who follow this journey, people I know, people I haven’t met yet, who might see something in AfterMatters that moves them. Who might have the capacity to invest and have the same gut feeling that this is real. And a phone call only reaches one person at a time.

I’m currently in a friends-and-family funding round. I’m not going to lead with numbers here. If you’re curious about the specifics of the opportunity, I’d love to have that conversation directly. What I will say is that this round is the bridge between where we are and where we launch. It funds the completion of our Ontario MVP, our beta testing, our summer 2026 go-to-market, and development costs for the remaining provinces and territories to complete the reactive models’ reach across Canada.

What I need is for people to believe in two things: that the problem is real, and that I am the right person to solve it.

On the first: 68% of Canadians don’t have a will or estate plan. Over one billion dollars goes unrecovered annually because families lack the documentation and proof of relationships required to claim what belongs to them. Estate closures routinely take years. Solo agers have estates that are never properly closed. Young adults living at home have no one credentialed to access their accounts if something goes wrong. The problem is real, it is wide, and it does not wait for death to show up.

On the second: I have 23+ years across healthcare, hospitality, technology, and partnerships. I have lived this problem three times, across three different chapters of my life, and each time it made the mission clearer and the urgency greater. I completed an intensive founders program with Invest Ottawa. I’ve spoken with dozens of families who desperately need this. I reduced my client work to half days so I can pour the rest of my time into AfterMatters. I am not going anywhere.

The moments that could have stopped me are the same moments that built the founder I needed to become to do this right.

The Ask

If any part of this resonates, if you’ve navigated an estate closure and wished something like this existed, if you’ve been the person scrambling for information during a crisis, if you’ve watched someone you love carry a weight that preparation could have lightened, if you believe in the mission, if you know someone who might, I would genuinely love to hear from you.

You can reach me directly at susan@aftermatters.ca.

And if you’re not in a position to invest but you know someone who might be, sharing this is one of the most meaningful things you can do. AfterMatters needs to find its first believers. Maybe you’re one of them. Maybe you know one.

Either way, thank you for reading. And for not sending me to voicemail.

Sue Campbell is the founder of AfterMatters, Canada’s first AI-driven estate and loss management platform. She’s also the Director of Business Marketing & Strategic Partnerships at Ollon. She lives in Ottawa with her husband, Jeff, and is grateful every day for Canadian healthcare, insulin, and the people who show up to care for strangers even when the system makes it hard.

Learn more about AfterMatters at www.aftermatters.ca or follow the journey on LinkedIn and Substack.

If you’re interested in beta testing AfterMatters when we launch in early 2026, visit our website to join our journey.

I am 48 years old. This was my second near-death experience in less than four years.

And once again, I wasn’t prepared.

The Numbers That Changed Everything

For weeks, I’d been telling myself I was just tired. Burned out from working too many hours in the fall. Grieving the loss of my dog, Scruffy. Dealing with what I thought was the “flu of 2025.” Maybe perimenopause. Maybe depression. I’d lost 35 pounds, but I figured it was stress, and my September diagnosis of Type 2 diabetes, which had medication that I thought was working.

I had no idea my body had stopped producing insulin entirely.

When I arrived at the hospital, my beta-hydroxybutyrate level was 6.01 mmol/L. Normal is below 0.27. Anything over 5 is classified as severe DKA. My blood was dangerously acidic. My organs were at risk of failure. Without treatment, this condition is nearly always fatal. Even with treatment, the mortality rate is 1-5%.

Over my week-long stay, I had nearly 150 blood tests. I watched nurses work around the clock in a system stretched beyond capacity, seeing patients in hallway “rooms” made of privacy dividers that provided no privacy at all. I heard a patient who happened to be a prisoner in the next room raging at the very people trying to save his life. I experienced one nurse, who made me afraid to ask for help, treating me like a task to complete rather than a terrified human being, most likely burnt out from the day-to-day grind of being an overworked ICU nurse.

But mostly, I experienced extraordinary care from people who had every reason to be overwhelmed, frustrated, and burned out, but who showed up anyway with compassion, skill, and genuine concern for my well-being.

My hospital bill: $560 CAD.

The same care in the United States would have cost between $75,000 and $150,000. Even with insurance, I’d likely be looking at $5,000 to $20,000 out of pocket.

What I Was Thinking About in the ICU

Here’s what goes through your mind when you’re hooked up to monitors that beep every time your arm bends, with IVs in both arms, your phone dying on the bedside table, and a doctor asking if you want to be resuscitated:

Not “I’m scared I’m going to die,” though that’s there too.

But “How am I going to tell my clients I can’t work? How do I cancel 25 meeting hours for the upcoming week? How does Jeff access my bank accounts if something happens to me? We just got married—we don't even have a will. How does he know what bills or subscriptions for my business need to be paid? How does he contact my team?”

I had to text Jeff any information I could recall, with what little energy I could muster, asking him to be my communication conduit. It was messy. It was stressful for both of us. And it highlighted, yet again, how unprepared I was for a crisis I should have seen coming.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. In 2022, I was hospitalized for a stretch due to a severe internal abscess that developed post-surgery. Eight weeks of wound packing. Close calls with organ damage and necrosis. I knew what it felt like to be that close to the edge.

And still, I hadn’t prepared.

Why AfterMatters Matters More Than Ever

I founded AfterMatters because I’ve lived the gap between “I should get my affairs in order” and “I wish I had gotten my affairs in order.” I’ve experienced it as someone struggling with mental health, wondering what my family would be left with if I couldn’t hold on. I’ve experienced it as a newly engaged woman building a life with someone, but with our finances still separate “for simplicity.” I’ve experienced it twice now as a patient in a life-or-death situation, unable to communicate basic information because everything was scattered across apps, accounts, and my own overwhelmed brain.

AfterMatters exists for the “just in case” moments that become “right now”:

Just in case you’re too sick to connect with work and need your partner to handle communication.

Just in case you fall into a coma, and someone needs to pay your bills while you’re hospitalized.

Just in case you don’t make it, and your family or partner needs access to your affairs without spending months hunting through frozen bank accounts and forgotten passwords.

Sixty-eight percent of Canadians have no will or estate plan. Over $1 billion sits frozen in Canadian bank accounts because families can’t access it. These aren’t abandoned funds. They belong to people whose loved ones are stuck in administrative hell while trying to grieve.

I’ve now been on the edge twice before turning 50. I’m not unique. Medical emergencies happen. Accidents happen. Life happens faster than we plan for it.

The Gift of Living in Canada (And Why We Can’t Take It For Granted)

I need to say something about the healthcare I received, because it matters deeply to AfterMatters’ mission and to the broader conversation happening in Canada right now.

The Ottawa Hospital saved my life. Full stop. Despite being stretched thin, despite staff shortages, despite patients in hallways and nurses managing impossible workloads, I received extraordinary care. The kind of care that, in the United States, would have bankrupted me.

$560 versus $150,000.

My new daily insulin regimen costs me just under $350 a month after benefits. In the United States, it would cost over $2,500. People there often have to choose between insulin and food. Between life-saving medication and rent. Between survival and financial ruin.

So when I hear of a large group of Albertans talking about separating from Canada, talking about how they’d be better off joining the United States, I have to speak plainly: you’re out of touch with reality in a way that feels almost willfully blind.

You want to leave a country where Mark Carney is strengthening our global reputation and finding ways to make life more affordable for Canadians? Where healthcare, however imperfect and underfunded, saved my life for $560? Where I’ll deal with temporary vision changes and diabetic edema and daily medication, but I’m alive and
not bankrupt?

Go. Go to a country where they have stripped millions of people of their basic healthcare, and saving your life could destroy your financial future. Go where insulin rationing is a real, deadly problem.

We absolutely need better funding for healthcare and education. Doug Ford has a lot of explaining to do based on what I witnessed. Our system is strained. But the alternative is terrifying.

We are so damn lucky to have what we have. The nurses who stopped by my room, even when they weren’t assigned to me that day. The staff members who hugged me in the hallway as I walked with my dad. The team who cried with me on discharge day, hoping they’d never see me back at the hospital again.

They didn’t have to care like that. But they did anyway.

Living With the Long-Term Effects

I’m writing this with my eyesight changing daily as my blood sugar stabilizes, a process that will take 6 to 12 weeks. I’m dealing with diabetic edema causing false weight gain, swelling, and discomfort. I’m learning to recognize diabetic headaches and blood sugar crashes. I’m carrying life-saving medication everywhere I go for the rest of my life. I can’t drive until my eyes stabilize, making me dependent on Jeff, friends, or Uber.

These are the side effects of survival. The alternative was coma, organ failure, brain damage, or death.

I’ll take the side effects.

What I’m Asking You to Do

If my story resonates with you at all, if you’ve ever thought “I should really get my affairs in order,” if you’ve ever worried about what would happen to the people you love if something happened to you, I’m asking you to do one thing:

Stop procrastinating.

You don’t need AfterMatters to start (though we’ll be here when you’re ready for a comprehensive solution). You can start today by:

• Having a conversation with your partner about what they’d need to know

• Making a list of your accounts and where to find login information

• Writing down who should be contacted if something happens

• Creating a simple document outlining your wishes

Because here’s what I know after coming close to death twice at 48 years old: The moments we celebrate are all we plan for. Weddings, retirements, vacations. We invest time, care, and intention into life’s milestones.

But the inevitable? We avoid it until it’s too late.

AfterMatters is my answer to that gap. A platform that recognizes estate planning isn’t just for traditional families with money. It’s for everyone. Single people and married couples. Chosen families and biological families. People with support systems and people without them. Anyone who will eventually pass away (which is 100% of us) and anyone who might be responsible for handling someone else’s affairs.

We’re building in the open, transparently, with care. Our Ontario MVP launches in summer 2026. We’re seeking beta testers in early 2026.

But whether you join our beta or not, whether you use AfterMatters or another solution, please: prepare.

The greatest gift you can give the people who will handle your affairs is organization. Not because you’re pessimistic. Not because you’re giving up. But because you’re practical enough to know that life happens fast, and the people left behind deserve better than bureaucratic nightmares while they’re trying to grieve.

I’m alive today because of extraordinary care, a healthcare system that works despite its flaws, and frankly, luck. I’m building AfterMatters because the next crisis might not leave me time to get my affairs in order.

But you? You have time right now.

Use it.

Because, after matters.

Sue Campbell is the founder of AfterMatters, Canada’s first AI-driven estate and loss management platform. She’s also the Director of Business Marketing & Strategic Partnerships at Ollon. She lives in Ottawa with her husband, Jeff, and is grateful every day for Canadian healthcare, insulin, and the people who show up to care for strangers even when the system makes it hard.

Learn more about AfterMatters at www.aftermatters.ca or follow the journey on LinkedIn and Substack.

If you’re interested in beta testing AfterMatters when we launch in early 2026, visit our website to join our journey.

What happens when scaling quietly erodes the care that earned people’s trust in the first place?

Lately, my days have been filled with conversations with people who have lost someone and had to navigate the chaos that follows. With healthcare workers who see families struggling with end-of-life decisions. With those in estate planning who witness, again and again, the heavy burden of unpreparedness. These conversations have shaped my understanding of what it means to truly help people through some of life’s most difficult moments. They are also the foundation of what I am building with AfterMatters.

AfterMatters is still in its earliest stages. I am bootstrapping, researching, and listening deeply. I am preparing to launch my beta in early 2026, so I am in the phase of learning from people who have closed estates for loved ones. From those who found passwords scattered across sticky notes. From families tracking down insurance policies while making funeral decisions they never expected to face alone.

This is not about building another tech platform. It is about creating something that honours how people want to age and die, with clarity, dignity, and their wishes clearly documented and accessible.

When someone dies, their family should not be drowning in bureaucracy while they are grieving. They should have what they need. They should know what their loved one wanted. They should be able to focus on closure, not chaos.

So when I watched that Black Mirror episode and saw technology and subscription models exploiting people in moments of desperation, it no longer felt like distant fiction. A life-saving technology becomes a financial trap. What began as hope slowly turns into a system that commodifies desperation. It hit me because I have seen quieter versions of this in the real world. Systems that look helpful on the surface but quietly shift toward profit-first thinking once scale comes into play.

It made me pause and ask myself:

“Am I building something that will always put people first, even as it grows?
Will my drive to expand ever tempt me to compromise on compassion or quality?”

These are uncomfortable questions, but they are necessary ones.

Building with caution and compassion: reflections of a new founder

Stepping into the role of founder, even after years of consulting and building partnership programs for other companies, feels both exhilarating and daunting. Some days, I stand firmly in my hard-won experience. Other days, impostor syndrome still whispers that I am figuring this out as I go. Both can be true at once.

I have spent years helping organizations scale. I know how exciting growth can feel. New features. New markets. Bigger opportunities. I also know how quickly things slip when momentum outpaces care. Customer experience gets thinner. The human touch fades. The very thing that built trust at the beginning quietly dissolves.

Healthcare AI systems that offer different advice based on insurance coverage. Algorithms are making life-altering recommendations through black boxes that even clinicians do not fully understand. When technology stops being transparent and starts prioritizing efficiency over humanity, people are harmed in very real ways.

That is why I constantly check in with myself as I build. I want to remain the founder who pauses, reflects, recalibrates, and keeps people at the center of every decision.

Personal branding: more than a logo

AfterMatters is not just a platform to me. It is a reflection of my values, my reputation, and the experience I want every person to have when they engage with what I am building. Personal branding is not aesthetics alone. It is what people feel in the moments they rely on your service.

I have learned that clarity about what you stand for ultimately builds trust. Not the tagline. Not the logo. Not the pitch deck. The lived experience matters most.

Scaling without sacrificing quality

True scaling does not require sacrificing care. It requires adaptive systems, thoughtful growth, and strong process design that protect quality as volume increases. I have seen what happens when organizations grow too fast without the capacity to support that growth. Promises fracture. Relationships thin. Trust erodes.

That is not the path I intend to follow. Growth can be steady. Sustainable. Human-centred.

Trusting my experience and my instincts

My path from retail floors as a teenager to boardroom consulting, from two decades in healthcare to building technology ecosystems, has given me instincts I trust. I know what works. I see what breaks. Most importantly, I have learned that the best leaders never stop learning, questioning, and caring.

Uncertainty does not weaken leadership. It keeps it honest.

The power of strategic relationships

Every meaningful chapter of my career has been built on relationships. Mentors. Collaborators. Clients who became long-term partners. Relationships built on transparency, mutual respect, and shared success scale far more sustainably than transactional growth ever will.

The promise I am making

As I build AfterMatters, I am making a promise to myself and to the people who will one day rely on this platform:

I will not sacrifice quality or compassion for the sake of growth.
I will keep people’s best interests at the center of every decision.
I will stay vigilant against profit-first thinking in moments of vulnerability.
I will trust my experience and continue showing up with humility and care.

Right now, I am building the reactive model. This is the part of the platform that supports people who are suddenly tasked with closing an estate. In Canada, most people say they want to die at home, yet the majority do not. Their loved ones are left navigating a fragmented mess of documents, passwords, policies, and paperwork scattered across dozens of systems.

AfterMatters is not another will provider. It is a central ecosystem where everything can live in one place rather than being fragmented across multiple services. A place where people can age and die with their affairs organized, and where the people they leave behind are not drowning in administrative chaos while they grieve.

The weight of building this responsibly is immense. But that weight is precisely what keeps me honest.

The Black Mirror episode shook me, but it also clarified something deeply important. The choices I make today shape the future this platform becomes. And if I ever feel myself drifting from the values that led me here, I hope I dare to pause, reflect, and realign.

Because at the end of the day, I do not just want to build something successful. I want to build something I can be proud of. Something grounded in integrity, empathy, and genuine human connection.

Here is to building with eyes open and heart engaged. 🫶

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