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You don’t need a background in product design to invent a product. You need a problem you know better than anybody, and the nerve to start. Melissa Denning had both. She is a mom of three, a full-time real estate agent in Oklahoma for about 11 years, and the founder of Mom Aid, a postpartum and baby care line she built from nothing. In her words:
“I have launched a luxury postpartum and baby care product line. Our hero product is the Boob Aid nursing pads, and I invented those.”
She went from knowing nothing about inventing a product to holding a patent on one. “I don’t know that I’m an expert, but I do know a lot more than when I began.” On this episode of the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera and Melissa cover where the idea came from, the people who helped her build it, the machine that almost stopped her, the AI workflow she uses to make her own ads, and why she has no plans to sell.
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The best product ideas come from a problem you lived
Mom Aid started with Melissa’s own postpartum and breastfeeding journey with her third child. Between feedings, nursing moms deal with leaking milk, called the letdown. Moms wear nursing pads to catch it. What Melissa couldn’t find was a pad that would also protect the nipple between feedings.
“There was nothing that would help protect the nipple that would also absorb leaking milk that was on the market.”
She searched the internet for hours and found nothing. Talking to other moms, she found a lot of them in the same pain. Her description of the problem is specific: a cotton nursing pad sticks to a healing wound, and when you pull it off, it pulls the skin off with it. As she put it, her third child “caused the problems that created the idea.”
Then she waited six months, because life happens. If you have an idea sitting in a notes app right now, her turning point is worth stealing:
“Well, if I don’t start now, I’m never gonna start.”
Jeremy compared it to Téa Phillips and the MetaFlex glove, another product born from the inventor’s own problem, which had to clear medical-device hoops. Melissa’s products are not regulated by the FDA in the same way. She chose to voluntarily register her nipple ointment and diaper cream with the FDA and did all of the documentation herself.
Zero experience works when you find the right help
Melissa is blunt about where she started.
“So I had zero experience, except for the being a mom part.”
What she did have was the willingness to go find people who knew the parts she didn’t. Here is the order she built her team in:
- A university program. Oklahoma State University runs an inventors assistance program. They made her a prototype and connected her with a patent attorney.
- A patent attorney she could trust. She called that one of the big blessings of the whole process. If you are wondering what a patent actually protects, Richard Gearhart explained the four kinds of IP protection small businesses mix up.
- A design and engineering firm. She scoured the internet for a long time and found a boutique firm in California whose owner had past experience with panty liners. He knew the process.
Her first design did not survive contact with reality. She wanted a concave center pre-filled with ointment and a tab you pulled off. It would have touched too many human hands and wasn’t fiscally possible. So they changed it. The new design layers cotton, an absorption layer and a medical-grade, BPA-free, breathable silicone center that sits against the skin through a cutout. In Melissa’s description, it won’t stick to healing skin and lets the ointment absorb into the skin instead of the pad. They added a bit more absorption so a pad could last a mom through her work day, and a stronger adhesive so it stays put.
That is the same lesson Michael Gerard learned building Wildwood Ovens from an importer into a manufacturer: you don’t need the expertise on day one, you need to know who has it.
A $120,000 machine sent her back to a simpler design
The design firm connected Melissa with manufacturers in China. She interviewed them, picked one she liked, and planned to launch in summer 2025. Then the equipment quote came in. At first it was going to be about $50,000 in tooling added to equipment the factory already had. Then it was a new machine.
“The piece of equipment they have to purchase to make these is $120,000.”
Her reaction was “whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.” But she didn’t quit. She changed the question from “how do I make the perfect version” to “how do I find out if people want this.”
“So we went back to the drawing board on a more basic design that we could send out into the market to prove market validity.”
The test version uses a thin silicone center that works like a strong sticker. The pads are hand-applied and hand-packaged, and she plans a test run of 5,000 once the funding comes through. Her goal is to have the nursing pads launching in Q1 2027, though she admits that is a tight squeeze.
Meanwhile, she didn’t sit still. The formulation for her nipple ointment was already started, so she finished it and launched it first, to build brand awareness before the hero product arrives. Today you can buy Boob Aid Nipple Ointment (in an Original Formula and a Tallow Formula), and a month after the ointment she launched Tiny Tush Diaper Cream. If your hero product is stuck, ask what you can sell now that makes customers recognize your name later.
Fire the marketing firm that doesn’t understand your category
Melissa recently fired her marketing firm. They had real strengths, but she was their first consumer packaged goods company, and they didn’t really understand it. Her branding, packaging and website are strong. The open question was how to grow brand awareness on a new-brand budget. Her answer has three parts:
- Learn to run her own Meta ads, through a program she is working through now.
- Join Impact, an affiliate marketing platform with UGC creators and affiliates who work on commission.
- Test, then put the effort where it works.
“Growing brand awareness through user generated content is where we will excel.”
Underneath it all is a constraint you probably share: “As a new brand, you do not have the funds to spend on huge marketing firms and things. And so it’s kind of like trying to figure out how to be scrappy and make the best of your dollar.”
She is still self-funded, with no investors. Jeremy has watched SaaS companies take funding and then spend a year chasing the investor’s goals instead of their own. “Somebody else has a stake, that means somebody else has a say,” he said. Being bootstrapped means you pull yourself up, “but they’re still your bootstraps.” Melissa’s version:
“I understand that I probably most likely will not be able to hold on to a hundred percent forever. But I sure am trying to for as long as possible.”
If she does take money, she wants an investor who brings knowledge and connections along with it, and only enough to bring the nursing pads to market and start reinvesting.
AI built her animated ad, but a human still has to check it
“So AI has been my friend,” Melissa said. She saw a Pixar-style animated ad for another brand, watched the whole minute, and wanted one. So she took a screenshot and asked Claude how to make it. Claude wrote the character sheets, what the song should say and the prompts. ChatGPT built the still images. Runway turned the stills into animation. Suno made the song. CapCut put it all together into a 45-second ad.
Two honest details make this useful instead of hype. She hasn’t run them as paid ads yet: “I haven’t ran them as ads yet. I posted them on social media.” And the review step caught something:
“One of the bunnies though has like two faces in the nursery.”
We turned her workflow, plus the review step, into a free, step-by-step guide: the AI Animated Product Ad SOP.
She pays for both Claude and ChatGPT and uses them for pitch competition copy, the “two sentences, tell us what you do” prompt, and the terms of a convertible note she is offering. “Claude and Chat have been with me since the beginning. So they know the business and they know me well.” Jeremy told her about Melyssa Jaskiewicz of Leveling the Fields, who was surprised to learn Claude Code can pull your analytics and report on every marketing channel for you. Melissa wants to use AI next for buyer analytics and the keywords moms search.
Jeremy’s rule for the time AI saves you is to reinvest about half of it into quality: review the output, refine the prompt, add human checkpoints. Otherwise you rush to market with AI slop. He also had a word for companies using AI as an excuse to cut people:
“If you said, you know, in two thousand, hey I can make your people 25% more efficient, their response would be amazing, let’s grow by 25%, not let’s cut 25% of our workforce.” – Jeremy Rivera
Melissa sees the cost of skipping review in her other job. Realtors post AI-written property descriptions nobody read over, and list $400,000 homes with iPhone photos. Her advice to those sellers: “Find an agent that pays for professional photos. The end.” David Levine makes the same point from the customer side: AI on a broken process only speeds up the problem.
Grow to help people, not to sell
Mom Aid is priced higher than the drugstore shelf, and Melissa will tell you why. The all-natural ingredients she sources cost more.
“Like lanolin is cheap. That’s why you can buy it for seven dollars a tub.”
She calls her products “intentionally designed.” She always hated digging a finger into an ointment tub, so she spent a long time finding an angled applicator that lets you apply it directly. The products are anhydrous, which she says means bacteria can’t grow in them. Her six-month plan is to get the nursing pads launching. After that, she wants two new products a year, three in a good year, and for Mom Aid to become a household name. Her line: “Neosporin, I’m coming for you.”
When she questions whether it’s worth it, she reads her Amazon reviews. Moms write, “I wish I had this with my first pregnancy.” Moms have texted her about the diaper cream, “this is magic.” Helping moms and babies, she said, “makes it all worth it.” That is also why she’s wary of venture capital, whose end game is usually a sale in five to seven years.
“My end game is not to grow to sell. My end game is to grow to help people.”
Podcasts are part of how she grows. “Even if a show has one hundred listeners, that’s a hundred people that I can reach in one hour of my time.” She works at home by herself, likes talking shop, and listens to a show before she applies. Most shows she has been on stay on the pregnancy and postpartum side. She came on Unscripted Small Business to talk about the business side: inventing, patenting and building.
Melissa’s open question for future guests is pricing strategy. If you have a strong method for pricing a premium consumer product, she wants to hear it. Jeremy will bring her pricing question to an upcoming guest.
Connect with Melissa
- Website: Mom Aid (Mom Aid is also on Amazon and Walmart.com)
- Her story: Meet the Maker
- Products: Boob Aid Nipple Ointment and Tiny Tush Diaper Cream
- Read: The Ultimate Guide to Nipple Care for Breastfeeding Moms
- Instagram: @my_momaid, where she answers DMs herself
- Facebook: My Mom Aid
- LinkedIn: Boob Aid
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