How Getting Featured In The New York Times Led to the Demise of My Brand We seemed to be rocking it — lots of press, major partnerships. Then we learned a harsh lesson.

Three months after I launched my company, we were featured in The New York Times. Other national outlets followed. The attention led to partnerships with Shake Shack, Bombas, Urban Outfitters, and hundreds of other major brands.

You might think this sounds good. I sure did when it happened. Hockey stick growth is a sign of success, right?

Related: Go Small or Go Home: Why Fast Growth Isn't the Best Solution for Your Startup

But it wasn't. My company, This App Saves Lives, had fallen into one of the most surprising and ultimately fatal traps for entrepreneurs: We grew before truly understanding our product-market fit. That mistake would ultimately result in the demise of our business.

Here's why this problem is so deadly — and how, with my new company, I'm plotting a slow-growth strategy to avoid it.

For the uninitiated, product-market fit (PMF) means building the right product to satisfy a specific type of customer's needs. It's a simple concept, but executing it is complex. To achieve PMF, you must deeply understand the wants and desires of your target customers.

I thought I had the answers. Our mobile app rewarded drivers for abstaining from phone-based distracted driving, a theme that resonated with me personally after having been injured and nearly killed while cycling by a distracted motorist. That got us a lot of media attention and brand partnerships — but in truth, we didn't fully understand our users. What kind of people used our app? What rewards and incentives encouraged them to drive more safely? Were they motivated by a desire to do good and save lives, or did they just want free products and services from our brand partners?

Because we didn't know these answers, we didn't know which customers to target — or how to serve them when they arrived. Press attention drove tens of thousands of users, but they didn't stay for long. To improve customer retention, we scrambled, launching new products and adding new brand partners to serve their many needs.

It felt like we'd thrown a party and invited everyone: teenagers and adults, musicians, athletes, West Coasters, East Coasters, and everyone in between. You can't please all these people at one party, or with one offering. And when you try to, you just upset them while spreading yourself too thin. This is what it means to grow without knowing your product-market fit. Sadly, we had to sunset our company in January 2024.

Looking back, I wish we'd grown differently. We should have started with a small base of users, conducted more detailed customer interviews to determine what they liked, what they disliked, and how we could improve our product so that it would become something that they couldn't live without. Then we should have targeted those people, assembling our early adopters, and only then pushed for media attention and invested in growth marketing.

Related: The Truth About Achieving Exponential Growth in Business, Exposed

Ask yourself: Do you really know what products and services your customers are looking for? Or are you spending your time, capital, and other precious resources inviting everyone to the party, only to lose them down the line?

The lessons learned have left an indelible imprint on my mind. I'm now building a new company called Workup; it's a marketplace for consumer health and wellness solutions, almost like an Expedia for healthcare.

This time, my team is starting with audience research. We're learning what drives people to make healthcare decisions, when and how they focus on prevention instead of treatment, and how to earn their trust in a marketplace full of misinformation. We need to know what their problems are, how they articulate those problems, what would drive them to us, and what would make them stay.

It is slow, steady work. It's a lot less glamorous than early coverage in the Times. But it's more sustainable. I now believe that the best way to grow big is to grow slowly. Become the foremost expert on what your customers want, and then throw a party for them. Scale will follow.

Related: I Worked at Google for 14 Years — Here's What I Had to Unlearn When I Started My Own Company