At Habits, we’re excited to share that Northwestern Mutual has become our newest and fourth-largest investor and selected Habits to participate in its accelerator program. We’ve been building our relationship with Northwestern Mutual for years, and this partnership is an exciting step forward in our work to help financial professionals build better relationships with the next generation of clients.
How we got here
In 2022, we began helping small RIAs grow their practices, and business was good.
In 2024, we launched Habits as a free-to-use marketplace connecting millennial families with financial advisors. The product went viral on social media, and we raised a round from Atlanta Ventures.
By 2025, we had scaled beyond 200 partners and were on pace to reach 3x our ambitious revenue projections.
But something didn’t feel right.
It became clear that lead generation was becoming an increasingly expensive and unpredictable business. At the same time, established advisors and larger firms were finding ways to get more out of what was already working.
We also kept hearing the same feedback from advisors:
““It’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out, say something meaningful, or start a conversation without it coming off as a sales pitch. Financial professionals need a better way to understand the people they’re reaching out to and find the right reason to start a conversation.””
Jack Boudreau, CEO & Co-Founder, HabitsThat realization led us to build the Engagement Engine.
Building the Engagement Engine
The Engagement Engine started as an internal tool we used to attract, match, and reach millions of millennials. As we continued building, we realized the same technology could help financial professionals better understand the people they want to reach and turn that information into meaningful conversations.
Today, financial professionals use the Engagement Engine for research, meeting preparation, prospecting, and finding meaningful reasons to reach out.
We tested it with a pilot group of roughly 50 financial professionals, and the early results were encouraging:
The results reinforced what we were seeing firsthand: financial professionals don’t simply need more leads. They need better information about the people they want to reach and better ways to turn that information into meaningful conversations.
Why Northwestern Mutual
We’ve been building our relationship with Northwestern Mutual for many years, making this partnership a natural next step.
Through its accelerator program and investment in Habits, Northwestern Mutual is supporting what we’re building while giving us the opportunity to learn from a company with deep experience in financial services.
We’re excited to work alongside their team, continue improving the Engagement Engine, and help more financial professionals spend less time searching for information and more time building meaningful relationships.
We’re grateful to Northwestern Mutual for believing in Habits, and to our team, advisors, and partners who have helped us get here.
We’re just getting started. Want to give the Engagement Engine a try? Sign up here.