How I turned ADHD and anxiety into a successful wellness company

I started building Simple in 2019 with a vision that one day, a digital product could help people fix their health as effectively as a human. Five years later, we turned this vision into a company with 160M in ARR, and a team of more than 150 people across multiple countries.

If you only look at the highlights, my story can look like a straight line of an entrepreneur’s journey. However, getting there required me to rebuild my own thinking and habits. You see, I have ADHD, and a mind that constantly scans for what can go wrong. For years, I treated that as a bug. It only became my superpower once I learned how to direct it. That isn’t an easy journey, but these lessons helped me master my mind and turn a bold idea into a sustainable, fast-growing business.

Consistency beats intensity

When you see most weight-loss products, they’re usually based on the principles of intensity—whether that’s a 30-day challenge or extreme dieting. They sell well, but they rarely stick. I’ve tried most of these methods myself—7-day water fasts, restrictive eating, vegan, keto, and much more. However hard I tried to push through, nothing worked in the long term.

In Simple, we tried a different approach where consistency beats intensity. That means designing features like daily check-ins and context-aware prompts around this idea of helping users sustain effort.

The same principle changed how I work. Early in my career, discipline meant 18-hour days, which led me to rock bottom. Discipline doesn’t mean doing it all. It means focusing on what actually matters. It means saying no when necessary, doing the tasks that you find boring, and avoiding the temptation to fix everything at once.

Your anxiety is helpful if you learn when not to listen to it

When my cofounder left the company in 2021, about a year and a half after we started, I suddenly became responsible for everything at once. Frankly, it wasn’t what I expected. If you have an anxious brain, you probably know this well: your mind runs endless “what if” scenarios. I was constantly thinking about what could go wrong, and I couldn’t relax. Overtime, I realized that most of my fears had no real basis, but a few were extremely useful early warnings, so my job was to learn the difference.

I wrote down everything that was bothering me, then asked myself these three questions:

1.     Is this a real problem, or just me spiraling?

2.     If it’s real, can I do something about it in the next 24 hours?

3.     If yes, what is the smallest concrete action?

You need to believe that it will work, regardless of how irrational it seems

When we first pitched Simple, there was little evidence that an app could coach health as well as a human. Given the fact that it was prior to the AI boom, not many believed we could do it. The early version product focused on intermittent fasting. It worked, but we knew it was only one piece of the puzzle.

Moving from a simple fasting tracker to a full weight‑loss coach (and eventually to a holistic AI health coach) required out-of-the-box decisions. If you want to innovate, many people will disagree with you, but you should still move forward. We had to redirect resources from a working funnel toward a vision that didn’t yet exist in our metrics. If you don’t radiate a basic conviction that things will work (even while you are brutally honest about risks), nobody will bet their career on your idea.

Discipline and high standards are an ultimate form of self-love

For a long time, I thought self-love meant giving myself more rest or treating myself gently. Some of that is important, but in moderation.

The more honest definition of self-love I came to is this: Loving yourself is also discipline, confidence, and high expectations. It’s wanting the best for yourself, and asking the maximum from yourself.  When you’re scaling a company fast, it’s easy to become the weak link—you’re sleep-deprived, which means that you’re slow to make decisions. You avoid hard conversations, and you keep the wrong people in the team too long. When you’re not consistent in your standards and habits, not only do you betray yourself—you also betray your team, because you’re not showing up as a leader when they need you to.

Decisions that concern other people will hurt, but you still have to make them

One of the hardest parts of scaling Simple was making changes to the leadership team. Some hires were clear mistakes, while others were great at an earlier stage but became a brake on the company later. Firing or moving on from such people can be emotionally painful because you invest trust and hope in them.  

What helps me with this is to separate the person from the role. You can value their contribution, and still accept they’re no longer the right fit.  Giving them more time won’t turn a bad hire into a great fit. It’ll only make the situation more expensive, so rip off the band-aid, but don’t forget to show your appreciation.

Your company scales at the same speed you do

In 2023, I realized our biggest bottleneck wasn’t our market, investors, or team. It was me.

I placed my attention on growth and marketing, and I struggled to see what the company really needed to improve. I vividly remember the day I realized, because it was the day Simple’s growth trajectory drastically changed. I cut back on experiments and focused on the product and science behind it. Within a year, we repositioned Simple from a tracking app to a weight‑loss coach, and our AI coach became a central part of the product. At the same time, retention improved, and so did our financial metrics.

Around the same time, I wrote a phrase in my notes that I come back to often.

 “The universe gives me exactly as much energy as I need to handle my goals. If the goals become bigger, more energy will come.” And since then, I’ve learned that every new stage of company growth is also an invitation to become a new version of myself.

View the full article