How I recognized a market window, built a press relationship across three encounters at a conference, and landed PLACE's first major tech coverage without a PR team.
In early 2025, Google discontinued the Nest Protect. It had been the default smart smoke alarm recommendation for years. Overnight, there was no obvious successor and every tech journalist who covered smart home was looking for the story.
PLACE was already in market. It had many of the same features as the Nest Protect and several the Nest didn’t have. Nobody knew that, because nobody had written about it.
In May 2025 I was at the Parks Associates Connections Conference. Jennifer Touhy was one of the moderators. She’s the smart home tech editor at The Verge, and before that spent years at The Wirecutter writing the annual smart smoke alarm review. She was arguably the single most relevant journalist in the country for what we were trying to do. I knew who she was before I walked in the door.
On day one, she happened to be standing behind me in the lunch buffet line. I introduced myself. We ended up sitting together with my boss and one of the heads of the Matter consortium. I watched her interest visibly pick up when PLACE came up in conversation. The Nest Protect had just been discontinued. She knew the gap better than almost anyone.
Nothing concrete came of it. Later that evening we crossed paths again outside dinner. Still nothing concrete. That night I went back to my Director and our marketing manager to confirm I had the green light to be more direct about asking for coverage.
With their go-ahead, on day three I approached her again and asked how she typically handles reviews. She gave me her card. Several months later The Verge published: “This smart smoke alarm could be a worthy Nest Protect replacement.”
That was PLACE’s first major tech press coverage.
One moment worth noting: she asked almost immediately whether PLACE would support Matter. I told her we were investigating it. That was true, and I was careful to say nothing beyond it, because I didn’t know yet where it would land. (We’ve since determined Gen 1 hardware can’t support Matter. The careful wording mattered.)
The Verge article was broadly positive. Jennifer also covered PLACE in a Vergecast episode, in a segment reviewing the full smart alarm landscape. The host’s reaction when she introduced the product: “I had never heard of this until just now. This is such a good idea.” That’s the brand awareness problem in one sentence.
Marketing took the relationship from there. I participated in the original interview, kept nudging them to stay in contact, then let the right team own it. She’s expressed interest in a full product review. We’ve been deliberate about timing given some in-progress product fixes.
Move faster on the follow-up. The relationship was warm after the conference and the article published, but we slow-played the full review while fixing product issues. That’s the right instinct, but the Nest Protect window is finite. Every month that passes is a month where displaced Nest Protect users find another answer or give up on smart alarms entirely. The product and the press strategy needed to move in tighter coordination.