A few months ago my friend, Alon Metrikin-Gold, came to town. He was visiting Toronto to give a talk about his latest company, Skincubator Neocare, at two local hospitals.
I had known a little bit about what he was building, but hadn’t really had the opportunity to learn about this incredible (understatement) product that would not only save lives, but fundamentally change the way we care for pre-term infants in the NICU.
Before I go any further, I should take a minute to explain what Skincubator actually is. As he described it to me all those months ago: it’s a wearable medical device that enables skin-to-skin care for critically ill preterm babies in the NICU.
Incredible. Groundbreaking. Necessary.
The more he talked about it, the more I knew I had to be a part of bringing this into the world. But what was my in?
“Who’s doing your marketing?” I asked Alon.
“Me,” he answered sheepishly. Classic founder-wearing-all-the-hats response.
“How’s that working for you?” I prodded.
“I could use some help,” he admitted.
We started as I always do: with a deep-dive into everything the team already knows about their business.
I believe good marketing is ultimately a business development function. It starts with a real, deep understanding of your market, your customers, and what’s actually standing between you and your goals.
“Ok, tell me everything, and I’ll make sense of it later,” I instructed on our first intake call. “Tell me about the problem you’re actually solving. What’s going well? What’s missing? Tell me about your customers, users, upcoming milestones, pricing, business model - everything.”
And then, I just listened. He knows so much and can answer any question on any topic related to Skincubator. He’s been living and breathing this thing for four years. He knows it inside and out.
Here’s what I learned on our first few calls:
Skincubator has incredible traction, strong backing, an unbelievably smart and committed founding team, and a product that will absolutely change the world. Truly a winning combination. Sure, there are tons of obstacles to overcome, but they’re overcome-able.
But one thing that we kept coming back to stood out.
Adoption should be a no-brainer. The only reasonable response anyone should be having upon learning about Skincubator is: of course.
And in person, it is. When Alon stands in front of a room of NICU nurses and walks them through the device, the reaction is almost always exactly that. (Usually followed by a request for a pilot).
But most people won’t meet Skincubator in a room with Alon. They’ll meet a headline, a 90-second news clip, or a conversation with a third party distributor. And that’s where the story gets compressed.
Skin-to-skin care is one of the most widely accepted, evidence-based interventions in neonatal care. Nobody in a NICU argues with it. So when CNN covered a Houston NICU’s pilot of Skincubator last month and Parents magazine wrote about it, the response was overwhelmingly positive. But some comments pushed back - skeptical, even uneasy about the idea.
Most founders would scroll past those. Alon wanted to study them. Not because they represent the majority, but because they were telling us something important: what people assume about Skincubator when they get 15 seconds instead of 15 minutes.
That gap is the challenge. Alon can’t give every NICU nurse, every parent, and every journalist the 15-minute version. The story has to land without him in the room.
So we dug in. I read through the comments, especially the critical ones, and tried to understand - and more importantly, to articulate - what was getting lost in translation. It became clear that one of Skincubator’s main challenges right now is a positioning and perception one. My favorite kind.
Here’s what I noticed:
A category is a shortcut.
It tells people what something is, who it’s for, and what to compare it to before they know anything else about it.
In this case, the category we were leaning on was “skin-to-skin care.” But that was causing an unexpected problem.
At its core, “skin-to-skin” is a baby’s skin against a parent’s. But that same phrase describes a wide spectrum of activity: a healthy newborn napping on mom’s chest in the fourth trimester, a preterm baby held for a short session once they’re stable enough to leave the incubator, and a critical medical intervention for very sick infants that stabilizes, regulates, and supports their development.
We have a mental model for the first two, but one does not exist yet for the third - and that’s where Skincubator lives. So people were defaulting to what they know, and neither of those needs a device.
“Skin-to-skin” is too broad to do a category’s job. So the real work becomes defining and shaping a new one, built around three key ideas: immediate (right after birth), prolonged (8+ hours a day), and high-acuity infants (the sickest, most fragile babies.)
Defining the category makes the gap visible.
NICU nurses and parents heard “skin-to-skin” and thought: we already do that. And they do. But it’s the middle of the spectrum - short sessions once a baby is stable - not the immediate, prolonged care the most fragile babies need to stabilize, regulate, and develop.
As Skincubator’s co-founder and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Itamar Nitzan, puts it: one hour of skin-to-skin is still 23 hours of separation. He doesn’t say that to shame any parent who can’t offer it longer, but to show that the default in the NICU is still separation.
The team has mapped dozens of “rate-limiting” barriers behind that default: a baby’s temperature dropping, lines that can pull or dislodge, a nurse with no time to spare, a parent who needs to care for their other children at home, and so on. Solve one, and the next still stands in the way, because the infrastructure doesn’t exist yet.
So the problem to solve isn’t proving that skin-to-skin is necessary. It’s explaining why immediate and prolonged care for high-acuity infants doesn’t happen today, even though there is a global consensus that it should.
The category also decides what you get compared to. Measured against a cuddle, or against what already happens in the NICU, Skincubator looks unnecessary. Measured against what actually happens today - 23 hours in an incubator - it looks like what it is: the first practical way to give the most fragile babies the care they need, from the moment they’re born.
Get the category right, and the rest of the story has something to stand on. Get it wrong, and every message after is fighting an uphill battle.
A product needs to speak for itself in order to scale.
Skincubator has a huge mission:
To create the medical and technological infrastructure that makes immediate, prolonged, skin-to-skin care - already the recommended standard - possible and practical for the smallest preterm infants, globally.
But a mission that big can’t be carried by one person, no matter how passionate, committed, or loaded with air miles he may be. When Alon stands in front of a room full of NICU nurses and hospital administrators, the story lands every time. But there are thousands of NICUs around the world, and only one Alon.
As he puts it: “Skincubator is like the babies it helps. It can’t yet speak for itself.” Right now, the story lives with the founder. To scale, it has to live everywhere else: in a photo, a news segment, a sales deck, a conversation between two nurses at shift change, a parent telling another parent what it meant to hold their baby from day one. Every audience comes at it from a different angle, but the underlying story has to hold for all of them.
That’s why the story comes first. But the hardest story to tell is often your own. Alon knew every detail of his. He just needed someone to step outside of it, listen closely, and hand it back to him - untangled.
The problem isn’t solved yet, but it finally has shape. And once a problem has shape, you can start to build against it.
Lock the language. First comes a messaging framework: the single source everything else is built from. It defines the category - immediate, prolonged, skin-to-skin for high-acuity babies - in words clinicians, parents, and press can repeat, with proof behind every claim.
Map the messengers. The story won’t scale through Alon. It scales through the people who carry it: distributors talking to NICU leaders, nurses making the cas to their units, parents telling other parents, pilot partners sharing their results, journalists telling the public. Each one needs something different - a sales deck, a “bring it to your NICU” pack, bedside materials, a press kit - but all of it comes from the same source.
Show it, don’t just say it. New visuals that show closeness, not equipment: the parent, the baby, and the hours together the device makes possible.
All that is well underway, but for now, we have one clear goal: tell this story so well that the first time anyone hears about Skincubator, there’s only one possible response:
“Of course.”
