Ashley Mooneyham, founder of Momease Solutions, discovered the sorry state of breast pump technology the hard way. As a new mother three years ago, she found she needed four 15-minute pump cycles just to fill one bottle—and babies drink a bottle every two hours or so.
She holds a doctorate in ovarian cancer research, so she got to work as a scientist does: through research. “The breast pump technology has been suction-based,” and suction-based only, for 30 years, she says, while studies show adding heat and massage speeds up milk flow.
“People are cranking it up to the highest possible setting,” she says of available pumps, or wearing the pumps practically around the clock. “At first it was my own desire to improve my experience,” she said, but her Google search found nothing.
“Man, oh man, what a bummer this is,” she remembers thinking at first. “And you sit with that long enough” until she started to tell herself, “You need to take that leap. I Googled how to do a pitch deck. I had no personal capital,” she recalls.
“I put out a survey on my own Facebook. Twelve hundred women responded in 24 hours, and I knew I had to see it through,” she says. “They’re desperate for a solution.”
With her business partner, Jennie Lynch, Momease Solutions now has a prototype of a nursing bra that incorporates heat and warmth and which Mooneyham says makes her job of pumping for her 5-month-old son efficient.
Momease attracted a lead investor, Superior Medical Experts of St. Paul. In 2022, Momease won grand prize of $30,000 at the Hy-Vee Opportunity Summit, and a prize at Walleye Tank, a regional junior version of Shark Tank, the hit TV show where entrepreneurs vie for investors. This fall, they won the grand prize at MN Cup, a statewide startup competition at the University of Minnesota.
Last year Momease won third in that competition. What made the difference in their pitch this year? No. 1, they had a prototype. “It really made our idea tangible and approachable,” Mooneyham says.
But more important was appealing to a bigger audience, which Mooneyham calls her “huge tip” to other entrepreneurs. “It takes time — how to create a pitch that will appeal to a wide swath of people. Our danger was, we were making assumptions on what people knew about this problem,” she says. “I used to say, ‘it’s time-consuming,’” but that didn’t mean much to most people in the room who hadn’t tried pumping.
Then, she started citing a weekly average from research studies. “I said, breastfeeding takes 18 hours, and all the men in the room sat up. ‘Oh, really?’ We’re appealing to investors. We’re appealing to men.”
Lynch’s job is to get the product to market. “I position myself as being the activator,” she says, “someone who balances the creative with the boots on the ground. We feel we have only one shot” to meet the needs of so many women, who often approach the pair after presentations, frustrated and in tears.
“When we meet these women, we wish we had a product right now. It’s solving a problem that needs to be solved,” Lynch adds — a classic and worthy entrepreneurial quest.
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