“We Watched Him Stop Crying on the Baby Monitor”: ThumBee Founders Q&A

An understanding of babies’ development stages and their primitive reflexes. The rooting reflex is what every baby is born with, and it’s what makes ThumBee intuitive for them to use.

The first concept was a homemade sewn spandex tube, sealed on one end, basically a sock. A cut-apart pacifier attached to one side.

That very evening we put it on Harrison’s hand. Within a few minutes of him sleeping we watched him on the baby camera start crying, and then self-soothe with it. That was the moment we both thought, holy cow, we just made a baby stop crying on its own.

That’s when ThumBee was born.

Building in the US was the goal at first. I think most entrepreneurs start there, not just for the “made in USA” part, but because it seems like the easy way. I can drive to a shop and we’ll get this made.

We learned quickly that isn’t how it works. Most manufacturers are so specialized they aren’t willing to risk the investment on a new idea outside their comfort zone.

We approached almost twenty of them. Each one took multiple weeks just to get to a yes or no. NDAs, product descriptions, samples, board meetings, production testing, returning the samples, and then being told no.

We felt defeated at times. We just weren’t willing to stop trying different approaches.

That was when we still wanted the made-local name. It was a costly step and a very exciting one, because we got a piece manufactured. It felt so good.

But we were inexperienced, and we didn’t understand the difference between manufacturing something and just getting the parts. Ultimately it didn’t meet regulatory standards and testing once it shipped to China. Working with Gembah we were able to get a silicone nipple that met all the requirements.

I still hope to one day go pick up that very heavy, very expensive block of metal we own, sitting on a shelf in Minnesota.

At first we had a lot of business from friends and family, which was a good test of the web pages and all the components. Once that rush slowed down we had to figure out how to actually market and sell ThumBees.

We’re still figuring that out.

I’d been watching trends on TikTok and made a simple video I didn’t think much about. Overnight it went viral, to our standards. It ended up at about half a million views.

The best part was the whole family being all hands on deck. Packaging, printing,
shipping, taking loads to the post office.

The spike only lasted a few weeks. We still get some lingering effects from it.

We’ve tried to duplicate it and haven’t managed to.

The wings were added during testing, because we needed them to pass a safety test.

We found out from our customers that they also work as teethers.

It depends who’s asking.

New parents ask why they need it.

Parents who’ve already been through it say something more like, this is so great, you took an idea and made the solution, how did you come up with this?

And grandparents say, you’re going to be so successful one day, this would have made my life so much easier.

We both decided it’s better to fail trying than to wonder your whole life whether you should have tried that one idea.

We were so worried about the idea being stolen that we were probably too cautious early on. ThumBee was a product where we knew what the finish line looked like and we wanted to get there as fast as possible.

I wouldn’t say move slower. I’d say be more strategic with the moves, and be willing to let the experts in. Manufacturing and material sourcing is a hard road, and it was very difficult until we got Gembah’s help.

Expanding the colorways first. Further out, possibly another size and some other nipple shapes.