Seniors Started a Business That Hit $250k a Month: The Snorinator

Key Takeaways

- Lloyd’s desperate search for a snoring fix led him to an apparatus developed by Dr. Fowler.

- With the help of a friend, he replicated the device with foam and brought the product to market.

- Now, fresh off a Shark Tank deal, the Eckers continue to grow their Snorinator business.

Unlike many seniors, Lloyd Ecker, 72, and his wife Sue Ecker aren’t particularly interested in retirement or slowing down.

Image Credit: Disney/Christopher Willard. Lloyd Ecker and Sue Ecker.

The Pomona, New York-based parents of three and grandparents of four have enjoyed a decades-long run as serial entrepreneurs in baby-focused ventures, starting with their maternity-related apparel business Beegotten Creations in 1983. Then, realizing the value they’d amassed in collecting the names and addresses of expectant parents, they set up Babytobee.com, which provided “free stuff” for babies in exchange for data that sold to major companies like Huggies and Johnson & Johnson. Baytobee.com sold to Inuvo, Inc. in 2006 for $23 million. In 2011, the couple launched AllAboutTheBaby.com, another prenatal and postnatal database.

In 2022, Lloyd was still serving as CEO at AllAboutTheBaby.com (he remains in that role today), and he and Sue were aspiring to bring a passion project of theirs to Broadway — using funds from the sale of Babytobee.com to develop a musical based on Bette Midler’s material about an entertainer named Sophie Tucker.

Lloyd’s snoring inspires a business idea: The Snorinator

In the midst of this creative, very much not-retired season, the Eckers were also battling an issue shared by 90 million Americans: Lloyd’s snoring was leading to some sleepless nights. He’d tried all of the run-of-the-mill solutions, from nose strips to mouth tape. None of them worked. So he resorted to a cumbersome CPAP machine.

“ I didn’t need a CPAP machine,” Lloyd says. “I wasn’t diagnosed with sleep apnea or anything, but my wife said to me, ‘Either fix this or I’m kicking you out of the bedroom.’ So I thought, Okay, I’ll wear the stupid underwater equipment. I looked like Diver Dan. Very romantic.”

However, later that year, an article came out announcing the recall of the CPAP brand; particles from the filter were linked to cancer. Lloyd ditched the CPAP machine — and was kicked out of the bedroom.

Lloyd replicates the “High Fowler” with a foam pillow

Desperate for a solution, Lloyd scoured the internet in search of a fix. Ultimately, his efforts landed him on the 28th page of search results, where he discovered a little-known apparatus developed in 1888.

Dr. George Ryerson Fowler had created a device that propped people upright and promoted oxygenation via maximum chest expansion to help patients recover after lung operations. The position became known as the “High Fowler.”

Lloyd set out to replicate it and solve his snoring for good. He contacted a friend in the foam business and experimented with about 20 different prototypes for an anti-snoring pillow before landing on one he was happy with in 2022 — dubbed the Snorinator. “From the moment I started sleeping in that thing, I haven’t snored since,” Lloyd says. “It’s crazy.”

Image Credit: The Snorinator

The business faces typical startup struggles, strikes out with ads

Despite Lloyd’s personal satisfaction with the product, selling it was another matter. The couple bootstrapped the business with their savings, but pretty quickly ran into some challenges.

The product’s design, requiring people to sleep in an upright position rather than on their back or side, raised some eyebrows, Sue notes. People have to “sort of retrain themselves,” she says, adding that getting them to embrace it hinges on gaining exposure and growing sales until they think, Well, maybe there’s something to it.

So the couple forged on. The Snorinator launched an Indiegogo in February 2023, hoping to sell thousands of units, and sold about 100.

They also attempted to make inroads with ads on Google and Facebook, to no avail. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Lloyd admits. “We never had gotten into any of that. And so we went to an agency that said, ‘No problem, we’ll just put up your ad.’”

The first big ad is pulled for being “too pornographic”

The Snorinator’s ad went live on April 15, 2023. It featured the Eckers in bed: Lloyd in the Snorinator, Sue’s head on Lloyd’s shoulder, with a tagline that captured the idea that viewers could also stop snoring for life, just like Lloyd, if they purchased the product. Unfortunately, the ad resulted in a near-immediate ban by Facebook and Google.

“ When we finally found out a couple of months later what we did wrong, they said, ‘Sorry, your ad was too pornographic,’” Lloyd recalls. Apparently, the simple bed set-up was too suggestive.

It took about six months for Google and Facebook to reinstate the Snorinator’s ads. Its first year in busines