By Thomas A. Parmalee
Effie Anolik, 34, who grew up in Vancouver and Toronto, always knew she’d live in New York City. She just didn’t know it would be as the CEO of her very own company … serving funeral homes.
But life as she knew it took an abrupt turn in August 2018 when she found herself planning her father’s funeral. Doctors had discovered a tumor in Michael Anolik’s chest five weeks earlier. He was 64 years old.
“My interest in the funeral profession started the moment I called the funeral home from the hospital and the moment I Googled how to find a funeral home on my phone,” she said. “That is what I do for everything else. – any sort of purchase, I go to the internet to get information.”
She did not find resources online, however, and had to arrange her father’s funeral in person at a funeral home. “It was only the first or second time I ever made a purchasing decision face to face with someone,” she said.
Her father had not spent time planning a funeral or engaging in estate planning, Anolik said. “He signed his will two days before he died in the hospital,” she said.
But she did know he wanted a traditional Jewish funeral. “I didn’t know what that meant at the time,” she said.
His death, however, helped her get more in touch with her Jewish roots, she said. She’s always thought of herself as “more culturally Jewish” than being particularly religious, so she had some learning to do as she engaged in the funeral planning process.
“I feel like our grief rituals have really brought me closer to Judaism,” she said. “The structure Judaism introduces to grief is really comforting to me … there is Shiva and the 30 days of mourning. You light a candle a couple times a year.”
Now, Anolik volunteers at Toronto Hebrew Memorial Park, where her dad is buried, sitting on its communications committee. She has helped the cemetery redo its website while learning more about the cemetery side of the business. In her role, she has interviewed different rabbis about grief and dying, building up its video and content library.
A Winding Path to Becoming an Entrepreneur
By the time her dad died, Anolik already knew she had a taste for being an entrepreneur. She may have been born with it given that her father owned his own business.
Several years before his death – in 2013 – she made her first foray into business, starting Fe Hardware, which has absolutely nothing to do with home improvement.
“Growing up, I always had these side businesses as a creative outlet,” she said. “And in my early 20s, I learned how to make fine jewelry with an 80-year-old goldsmith. I started making jewelry pieces inspired by science, and Fe is the symbol for the element iron.”
She admits she may have taken the science gimmick a little too far.
“I took product photos of jewelry surrounded by beakers,” she confessed.
While the business never took off, it led her to the halls of Shopify, which changed her trajectory and made everything that came after possible.
“I was making clothing and jewelry for fun, and I needed a way to take payments,” she said. “I realized I could make an online store, and then I started to help my friends and people I know build Shopify sites.”
While she hasn’t made jewelry in at least 10 years and by her own admission may not even be able to weld anything anymore, she learned a lot about building an online store.
“I had more fun building the brand side of things and the website than the jewelry,” she said.
She also realized that even though she had completed her undergraduate degree in psychology and neuroscience, she’d find her passion elsewhere.
“I actually went to an event for Shopify in Toronto where I was living at the time, and I met people who worked there,” she said. “I assumed that most people who worked in tech were coders, but I found out not everyone does that. I met some people with their support team, applied for a job and then moved to Ottawa where its head office is.”
It was the perfect company to land a job at – and it was at the perfect time, too.
“I worked there in ton of different roles from 2014 to 2019,” she said, including user experience and the product division. “I worked with some of the smartest and most resourceful people I have ever met.”
She was always asking questions about what others did – and she wasn’t afraid to make waves.
For instance, when Shopify customers kept calling to complain about the same problem, she adamantly made the case that the company should change the product, so there weren’t so many questions about it.
“And they would tell me, ‘Oh, that’s user experience. It’s a whole department.’ And that kept happening. And I kept learning what other people did. It also got me interested in how you build a product from start to finish, which is product management,” she said.
When she started at Shopify, it had about 450 employees. When she left, it had more than 2,000, she said.
When her father died, she also found herself a business owner once again, having inherited his bread distribution company, Best Way Distribution.
She knew absolutely nothing about the bread business, but she had to keep it afloat while working full time at Shopify.
“I’d be at the bakery at 4 a.m. and then go to work and then go back at 8 p.m. – rinse and repeat,” she said. “It was never going to be a long-term thing for me, but I needed for it to be stable for the employees.”
After her father’s funeral, she continued her research into funeral service. She learned pretty quickly that an online planning option was something lacking at many funeral homes.
During this time, she also virtually met Zack Moy, 36, who is a software engineer who formerly served as director of engineering at Workday. She calls him “one of the smarted and most talented engineers I have ever worked with.” She added, “And he deeply cares about the funeral profession.”
When they first learned of each other, Anolik was living in Toronto and Moy was living in San Francisco.
“He was interested in grief and grief resources,” Anolik said. “Initially we started meeting virtually every other month. We both had other jobs, but we were talking about ideas.”
They began working together virtually and founded Afterword in 2020. Today, they both live and work in New York, where the company is based.
Anolik serves as the company’s CEO and Moy serves as its chief technology officer.
Launching Afterword
When she became interested in funeral service, Anolik began talking to funeral directors and “learning about software in general,” she said. “I knew that I wanted to build an additional tool, so that families who wanted to plan online could do so.”
When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted at the end of 2019, Anolik shifted her attention from building online planning software to helping families with livestreaming and hosting virtual memorials.
“It was not an intention of mine, but it was something the pandemic opened up for us,” she said.
The move came after a strict lockdown in Toronto.
Suddenly, Anolik had people reaching out to her asking how their families could come together virtually. After the third time someone asked, she decided to help.
“We did that for two years, but I always knew I wanted to build a tool for families to help them make decisions online,” she said, noting that Afterword worked with almost 500 families in two years who wanted to livestream services.
“We did pretty well,” she said. “Our version of livestreaming was a little different than others as we would send a videographer on site. They would follow the family from the service to the cemetery. They would manage it in person, and someone would manage it virtually.” She added, “We no longer do that, but if someone wants a videographer, send me a note.”
While COVID-19 led her to take a detour, it paved the way for her to learn about consumer preferences directly from families. “I asked them a ton of questions,” she said. “It was an interesting and fascinating time.”
When the pandemic eased, she rolled up her sleeves and got to work on software to help families plan online.
Fast forward to today, and Afterword is serving a growing number of funeral homes as they support families in person and online.
As for how Afterword is funded, Anolik said she and her co-founder raised some money through a friends-and-family round of financing. It recently began inviting its customers to invest in the company.
“We are not choosing to go the venture capital route,” she said. “We want to keep this in the profession.”
If there are funeral professionals interested in investing in the company, they are welcome to reach out to her via email.
Products and Services
Afterword’s flagship product is its Online Planner, which uses videos to guide families through their options.
“Instead of showing families three packages and asking them to pick one, it will ask questions similar to what a funeral director would ask either over the phone or in person,” Anolik said. “For instance, ‘Do you want to see Dad before cremation?’ or ‘Would you like to witness a casketed cremation?’ We are providing them information, so they can make an educated choice.”
The company also offers a Digital Whiteboard product that can be accessed from anywhere as well as a Case Management product.
“Say goodbye to the days of taking photos of your whiteboard and wondering who made changes. Our Digital Whiteboard keeps everything organized, accessible, and transparent,” the Afterword website states.
For Case Management, its website states, “Our reporting engine gives you unprecedented control and visibility into how your business is doing and how you can improve your core business drivers.”
All of Afterword’s solutions are “built in a modular way and personalized to the funeral home,” Anolik said. “If they collect something specific, we will add it.”
According to its website, the Online Planner starts at $179 per month; the Case Management product starts at $325 per month; and a Task Lists product starts at $99 per month. Those prices are based on a firm that serves 200 families per year, she said.
As for how those products work together, it’s “choose your own adventure,” Anolik said. “You might be really happy with your case management software but are looking for an online planner – and we are happy to do that. We are happy to connect with any existing solutions. I would say for the most part, funeral homes tend to end up using us for all of the things – they may start with one and end up using us for everything.”
The company is working with funeral homes in 11 states as well as some funeral homes in Ontario.
“It feels as though the United States is a little faster to innovate and open to trying new things,” she observed. “But the markets are pretty similar.”
Most funeral homes that use Afterword’s flagship product – the Online Planner – allow anyone to access it on their website. “A few will send it out as a link after they talk to the family on the phone,” Anolik said.
Asked what her customers love most about working with Afterword, Anolik said the company, which leans on five full-time employees and a limited number of contractors, is always innovating as it collaborates with customers to build products. “We just take all of their feedback to heart – that is the only way we build,” she said. “Our software is user friendly … and we answer the phones.”
While Afterword is based in New York, she and Moy briefly ran the business above Kolssak Funeral Home in Wheeling, Illinois, which was its first funeral home customer on the software side. It remains a customer to this day, Anolik said.
When she and Moy began working with the funeral home and its owner, Jon Kolssak, they only intended to build an online planning tool. She never thought they’d end up temporarily running the business above the funeral home – it just happened.
“Before we built anything, we actually tried to understand how they actually worked,” she said, noting that they went on removals with funeral home staff and sat in on arrangement meetings in the spring and summer of 2022. “We wanted to build tools to fit into the workflow.”
“I consider that funeral home family at this point,” she said. “We are lucky we met the right people and got to work together. We have an adviser, and he apprenticed at this funeral home when at Worsham, and he was the one who introduced us. It was not a sales call – we just wanted to get some feedback on what we were doing. And they said, ‘If you build that, we will use it.’”
Afterword’s biggest challenge remains the fact that it is a relatively new company, Anolik said. “Most funeral homes are really established and have been around awhile,” she observed. “The last few people we have brought on had been using the same software for 20 years, and most of our competitors have been around 15 plus years.”
But with that said, there are still many funeral homes that want to innovate and are excited by what Afterword can provide, she said.
“Generally, the funeral homes that work with us are supporting at least 200 families per year, but we would love to support some of the smaller firms, too,” she said.
There are so many fun tools that Afterword has in the works, Anolik said. “We are working on a body tracking system for funeral homes in state that require a chain of custody,’ she said. “And internally, we are building a number of AI tools to help us onboard funeral homes faster.”
For now, AI is something Afterword is using more internally than anything else, she said. “We also have an AI obituary writer … but I am still leery in the ways we use it to interact with families. It is exciting, but it is in its very infancy as a technology. We are thinking about it a lot but proceeding with caution.”
Anolik also hosts a podcast, “Groundbreaking: The Business of Death,” in which she interviews visionary entrepreneurs redefining funeral service.
While Anolik has embarked down a path that she never anticipated, living in New York has been all that she dreamed.
“There’s something about the energy of New York that really excites me,” she said. “I love it here – the food, the theater, it has anything you would like to do.”
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