Vacation Frustration Inspires Seven-Figure Cleaning Product

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Manufacturing a product has some complexity, but if you have a simple idea, it makes a lot of things easier. Now here, I am reminded of my friends who made the step-in-pole, which allows you to open doors with your foot instead of touching the handle. This is especially helpful in public restrooms, and perhaps not surprisingly, we've talked about it a couple of times on the podcast, it took off even more once the whole planet began to be more conscious about hygiene. I thought about that because today's story is also a physical product that does something simple, but important. It makes it much easier to clean showers, pets, and even people.

This former pharma sales reps invention is an Amazon bestseller, cleaning the pets and showers of happy customers and bringing in more than $2 million in sales last year. All of it happened with low startup costs, no outside investors, and just with one woman deciding to figure it out. It is, of course, the side hustle school way. I need to order one of these tools for myself, but first, I need to tell you the whole story. Vacation frustration inspires seven-figure cleaning product, that's the story, it's coming right up.

[Music]

Lisa Lane is cleaning obsessed. After a summer trip to the Jersey shore with extended family, tested her patience, she came up with a new idea and turned it into a best-selling Amazon product. It started with those 15 people and four dogs on the Jersey shore, all at the grimy showers, visitors with sandy feet and dirty dogs threatened to ruin their vacation. Lisa filled a bucket over and over to bathe the dogs and clean the showers. Then she made a rule that everyone had to use the outdoor shower.

But again, we're talking about 15 people. There was always a line and the hot water quickly ran out. That frustration sparked an aha moment and inspired Rinseroo, a long hose with a flexible attachment that slips onto a shower or faucet, making it easier to rinse people, pets and objects without constantly refilling a bucket. You can also use it to fill up a water cooler or aquarium and hose down shower walls. Lisa knew it was a powerful idea, it solved a common problem, but her challenge was how to go from imagination to physical product.

For inspiration, she turned to a book called "The Mom Inventor's Guide." The 2015 movie "Joy" offered further motivation. The story is loosely based on the life of Joy Mangano, inventor of the self-wringing miracle mop. At the time she watched it, Lisa was in the product development stage, a crucial time when she had to decide if she planned to go all in or pack up and stick with her part-time job in medical sales. Lisa saw herself in Joy's story and she decided to go all in on Rinseroo. Now, since the product was relatively simple, she was able to make her own working prototype and then found a manufacturer who could build it at scale.

She invested a couple of thousand dollars on molds and also a few hundred dollars to trademark the brand. Once she determined that the product actually worked, she placed an order and had it built. This wasn't a 30-day startup from idea to launch, working part-time took about two years. Lisa's first sale was to the owner of a large fitness chain. It solidified her belief in the product.

She felt giddy for a whole week knowing that someone actually thought it could be useful. She didn't clean up overnight though because she first had to correct a frustrating snafu. Her entire first order of units was assembled improperly. The only solution was to open every single box, remove the contents, reassemble and re-tape every box. And of course, Lisa had no employees, but she did have that large family, so she recruited them to help.

After they resolved that problem, the business picked up. The grommet, a website and marketplace that curates useful products, featured Rinseroo on their platform and sent out an email to all their followers. That exposure in a Buzzfeed article helped Rinseroo rank well on Amazon. And Lisa says the beauty of selling on Amazon is that they already have the customers, hundreds of millions of them in fact. So if you do your homework and come up with something unique, you can tap into that.

She started with a product that solved a problem. She made a detailed listing. And then once she got some sales, she invested in Amazon ads. Now, in addition to Amazon, the product is sold on chewy.com, walmart.com and the Rinseroo website. In its first year, Rinseroo did about a million dollars in sales, and this year they will exceed 2 million.

The best part of Lisa's experience was seeing her hard work bear fruit. She gets emails all the time from customers thanking her for inventing the Rinseroo. And that positive word of mouth has helped to propel more sales. She now has cleaning influencers, like who knew that was a thing, but it's true. Cleaning influencers who have bought it and posted it to TikTok.

And that's also helped boost sales further. As the business grew, Lisa hired her son to help. And her five-year plan is to scale the brand with him so that he can make a career out of it. She jokes that eventually maybe he can do all the work and pay her to go away. [Music]

All right, I took a peek at Amazon and looked up the Rinseroo for myself.

The Rinseroo has thousands of product reviews. And here's what's interesting. Lisa is now trying to diversify into some new product lines, especially in the cleaning and bath space. So I'll be curious about that because often the product extensions in this kind of scenario are harder than you'd expect. Like you think it's logical.

You think, oh, well, the first idea is the big hit. Great, I can do this over and over. And sometimes it works out that way, but most of the time it doesn't. Most of the time there really is something special about that first idea or at least that particular idea, how it hits, how it kind of works. And so it's difficult to replicate even with a similar product.

And then the other challenge is with an Amazon dependent strategy for a simple product, like something that doesn't have a lot of complexity can be easily duplicated. Like you also face the challenge of competitors cropping up who makes something similar. So those are the challenges or the difficulties of something like this. Obviously there are lots of advantages as well, and it's worked out quite well so far. So I'll be curious to see how it develops in the future.

That's just kind of the reality of selling in that marketplace when it works really well, fantastic, but when it works really well, you also then face the problem of not being the only seller. So we'll have to see how Lisa and her son adapt to that challenge in the future, but well done. Amazing story, so inspiring. Now listeners, I always say inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. I hope this gets you thinking about an idea of your own, maybe something that you didn't think would be possible, but now because you heard Lisa's story or one of the other stories or a question from another listener, you know, whatever it is kind of pushes you a little bit, nudges you, let's say, toward that next step.

That's my hope for you today. If you want to find the show notes, including links to the Rinsaroo, anything else I mentioned in the episode, those are at sidehustleschool.com/1758. Thank you so much for tuning in today. I hope you will subscribe or follow wherever you like to get your podcasts and come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.

This is "Side Hustle School." [Music]

from the Onward Project.