Falling in Love With the Problem: How Lauren Makler Built Cofertility

Top Takeaways

• 01

  Fall in Love With the Problem, Not the First Solution: Cofertility exists because Lauren didn’t start with a clever business idea—she started with lived pain. After a rare medical diagnosis threatened her fertility, she deeply explored the real problems within the process of egg freezing and egg donation: cost barriers, transactional encounters, and lack of dignity. By staying obsessed with those problems (not a single solution), she remained flexible enough to design a model that worked for all sides at scale.

  Lesson: If you want to build something that lasts, anchor your business to a real problem. Regularly ask: “If this solution stopped working, would I still care about solving this problem?”

• 02

  Design Your Business From Lived Empathy, Not Assumptions: Lauren’s experience as both a patient and a future parent shaped how Cofertility operates. She noticed how traditional fertility models felt transactional, judgmental, and emotionally tone-deaf—and intentionally built a “big sister” brand that guides people through an overwhelming process with dignity and clarity. The result: trust, adoption, and real product–market fit.

  Lesson: Your strongest competitive advantage is often empathy earned through experience or proximity. Talk directly to customers who are emotionally invested in the outcome. Identify where your industry makes people feel small, confused, or judged, and design to remove that friction. Build language, onboarding, and support that feels human. When people feel understood, they don’t just buy—they commit.

• 03

  Trust Your Gut When Data Can’t Decide: As CEO, Lauren often faces moments where data points in multiple directions—investor opinions conflict, teams disagree, and no clear answer emerges. In those moments, she relies on gut instinct—not as impulse, but as accumulated wisdom from years of experience. She reframed gut instinct as “stored pattern recognition,” not guesswork.

  Lesson: Great leadership requires judgment when spreadsheets run out. Use data to narrow options—but accept that some decisions are still yours alone. When torn, ask: “What choice would I make if I had to live with this for five years?”