From Mom Hack to Shark Tank: How Busy Baby Founder Beth Benike Built a Million-Dollar Baby Brand

0:03 I was pumping while driving on my commute the next day to work, and I had an idea for a concept of a math that has suction, And when I got home, I got silicon cock out of the basement. Welcome back to the Running wind Mom podcast. I'm your host, Samantha Selinsky aka the Running Wine Mom. Today I'm sitting down with Beth Benekey, founder of Busy Baby Matt. What stands out about best story is how it began not with a big business strategy, but with a real everyday challenge that so many moms face. That moment led to the creation of a product that's now helping families across the country myself included, and eventually a spot on Shark Tank.

0:45 In this conversation, we talk about how it all started, what it takes to build something from the ground up, how her background in the military shaped her approach, and what it looks like to balance motherhood while growing a business, which I also experienced firsthand the other week. If you've ever had had an idea or felt like there has to be a better way to do something in your day to day life, this episode will resonate with you. So without further ado let's welcome, best welcome. Hello. I am so I was so excited that you guys were at the Prigo Expo because, seriously, your product was one of my favorites when my kids were like in the toddler phases, and just to meet you was like so cool. And to see that the product that I was using was made by someone who you know, a mom, which is like also really cool.

1:33 I think yeah, And I think. You know for your listeners when you say you were happy to see us guys at the expo, it was it was me and my son, who is almost nine years old. So you know, it's not like we're this big corporation. I'm the CEO and the CMO and the CFO and all the janitor and everything else. And my son is on my expo staff. Yeah, and he was. Doing such a cool like he was getting the credit cards and he was helping you and he was doing such a great job. So well, let's get right into it. It tell us about yourself. If someone has not heard of Busy Baby, Matt, can you. Tell us what it is? Yeah, I mean most important thing. First. The product. It is a silicone place mat. It has section cups on the bottom, so it will stick to any smooth, clean surface. And then I invented this teather system that you can attach things to the mat so that baby can't drop and throw them on the ground. So great for high chairs, restaurants, all kinds of other uses. But that's the basic concept of everything I've now developed. We have bungees that go on your stroller.

2:28 I have a bib for restaurants that has the same tether system. Everything I designed is to keep things within reach off the ground at home. And on the go. Yes, and it does stick like it liter I have tried other things, and that thing like you have to like kind of put your fingernails under it to get. It off of the table. And I love the attachments to it because that was so cool to just attach the toys and then you're not really having to go down and pick stuff up, and so the product was just really great. So before Shark Tank, before Busy Baby, Matt, what did your life look like in that season of early motherhood? Well before motherhood, I was in the Army for ten years and I had always wanted to be a mom.

3:10 I was thirty when I got out of. The military and single and didn't find a good partner that wasn't crazy until much later in life. And I thought, by the time I. Met my now husband, that you know, maybe motherhood just wasn't going to be in the cards for me, and I was just gonna be the best aunt I could be. And then I met my now husband, and surprise, we got pregnant and I had my first son when I turned forty, so I was an older first time mom. I had been working a corporate job and I took my maternity leave for three months, and when I went back to work, a couple of my stay at home mom friends took me out for lunch, just kind of check on my mental health. When you do that huge transition from being home all day every day for three months with your baby to then leaving him at daycare and going back to work and just you know, it's it's a lot.

4:00 And so they took me up from lunch and they brought. Their one year old babies and the entire meal was spent, you know, keeping things out of their reach, picking things off the ground. One of the moms was a germophobe, so she had this whole thing about, you know, everything had to get wiped down. You can't put baby's food on the table because you don't know what they cleaned the table with. And so I was like, oh my god, this is such a distraction. I want to go. I went on Amazon right then so that I could buy something for my son, someone old enough to join us at the table. He wouldn't be such a huge distraction. And what I wanted was something that would keep the toys off the ground. But my friend really insisted there had to be a clean place where you could put baby's food as well, so there was nothing that existed on Amazon the next day. It's kind of a funny story, I think for your audience it might be okay to tell.

4:42 I was pumping while driving on my commute the next. Day to work, and I had an idea for a concept of a mat that has suction. And when I got home, I got silicon cock out of the basement, squirted it into one of the flanges of my pump, and then also squirted it into a sheet pan and started to like cobble together what I now know is like a prototype. And so that was kind of the inception. Is I had this. Idea while pumping and driving and From there, I cut and glued some things together. I ordered off of Amazon to. Make like a little bettertioning thing, you know. I bought different suction cups and glued them to different place mats and my husband's like fishing stuff I glued to the top of the mat. I made one for myself, and I made one for my best friend who had a baby eight days after me, And that was really all it was going to be. It wasn't at this point ever, it was a mom hack. We all have our mom hacks, we all have ways that we make life easier. And so then she called me about a month later and she's like, oh my god, I forgot your matt thingy last night and it was awful. She's like, you need to make this thing for real. I didn't realize how useful it was un till I didn't have it. That's what really started the journey. I was like, hmm, how would.

5:50 I do that? I absolutely love that even more that that is how it kind of came to be, which is really cool that just something so simple, it's such a simple idea, came into something so big. I also didn't know that it was veteran owned, which is amazing. Thank you for your service. How did becoming an entrepreneur like align with the experience that you had handling pressure, uncertainty, and leadership. Now, yeah, I think that being in the military helped me in a number of ways. The real obviousy one at the beginning is when I had this, you know, like, how would I make this for real kind of thought? I found out there's an organization that was called Bunker Labs that it exists to help military veterans and their spouses who want to start businesses.

6:36 It's like an entrepreneurship kind of course that's free. They've since been acquired by Syracuse University, but the program still exists and it's amazing. And so I took classes through Bunker Labs how to start a business. I did go to school and got a business management degree, but anybody with a business management degree knows it's very vanilla and not really specific to anything. So, you know, I was able to take those courses and have that assistance at no And then being in the military, we train and train and train, and then when you get deployed, things don't always go how you train them to go, and you can't just be like, oh, shoot, what do I do now? I guess I quit have to find to find a way to carry on the mission. So when things don't go as planned, you just keep going.

7:17 You figure it out, you find a way through, around, over the wall, whatever. And that's just you know, I think was beat into me for ten years. And so as I've grown my business, you know, every literally every single step of the way for the last almost nine years, I keep running into things that I don't know how to do. How do I do this? Or you know, what is this new obstacle? Never heard of this problem before? And then you just you just figure it out. And so I think that really came from being in the military. Right, so helpful for business owners because I am sure it is just so so many different things that can come up, and so there are so many baby products out there, but yours really solves a daily stress point.

8:00 What do you think that think makes busy baby resonate with so deeply with moms. I think because it's just common sense. When I first got the pat I have fifteen patents now on all my different inventions, and I don't even know how many times I've heard like, where was this when my kids? This is so simple, right, such a simple concept. It's just the place went down and have a thing to attach stuff too, Like how did this not exist before? But it? Yeah, but it also is so much better than the other one because there are mats out there, and like I don't know if there's mats that whole toys, but I just feel like any mat that I had come across, it was so like it just came off and you solved like that you know issue as well, where once you're out to eat, your kid can be there and you can kind of enjoy a little more, which I think is so wonderful.

8:52 Well, that was how it was for me and my experience. Yeah, And one of the things I really love about my product is I like, I get stressed out and my husband does not face him, but when baby makes noise it grunt, a moan, a cry, whine, my mom brain instantly needs to solve the problem. So it causes me additional stress. Even if it's like he's not having you know, he just dropped his toy and he's whining about it. Dad can ignore that my husband just didn't bother him at all. But if we're sitting and eating, the baby's grunting to make it some noise. I have to get up and solve the problem. I have to get up and solve the problem. And so for us to be able to what I would do is I would feed baby first, and it came in really handy with my second, and then set him up with the matt and toys and then the rest and scoot the high chair up to the table.

9:37 Now the rest of us can sit and eat dinner. Baby's sitting right. There with us, socializing, enjoying, you know, the family meal situation, and none of us is stressed out trying to solve baby's problems, or especially like the witching hour at night when after dinner baby's just he's a little bit winier needs to be held first. We used to, you know, one of us would have to eat quickly while the other one's holding the baby and then switch off. Mm hmmm. Well you got a situation where the baby is content and happy to be sitting with you and playing and you can both eat peacefully together. It just makes for a nicer a nicer night, a nicer Yeah. You have saved me for many ruined meals, So I thank you for that. A lot of moms have ideas, but they don't act on them. What do you think holds them back the most? I mean, probably the same thing that I did.

10:25 Is you know, one, it's just an idea that I had for me, mm hmm, So why would everybody else. Need it or want it? And having my friend use my idea and tell me like it took her telling me this is a great idea, you should make it for And even then after putting in all of the time and money and effort to actually turn that idea into a physical product, get it manufactured, figure out how to sell it online. Right when I first got the first shipment of the real thing, I was I had so much anxiety because what if nobody likes it? What if nobody uses this thing? What if it doesn't work? For like, you have all these fears, And those fears are there the whole time.

11:07 And so when you have to spend six hundred dollars here and twelve hundred dollars there on these different steps along the way, it's like, oh my gosh, I'm pouring all this money into it. Is it worth it? And so, you know, having a certain level of faith in what you're doing, and the idea, And you know, I do mentor a lot of women entrepreneurs who have ideas, So I welcome anyone to reach out to me if they just have an idea and maybe just don't know where to start. I have a lot of advice on how to start without spending money because you want to make something that I've had people come to me with ideas. It's solving one of their problems, but not really so much a problem that I've ever had, so I can't relate to it. And more people who anyway lots of tips and tricks for turning your mom hacks into potential real products.

11:53 I love that. So we have to talk about Shark Tank. What was going through your mind walking into that room, how did it art, how did you get there, and how did it feel after? But what an adventure that was. So I mentioned Bunker Labs earlier. I was taking this entrepreneurship course and that was in twenty eighteen, and that year Shark Tank reached out two Bunker Labs looking for veterans to feature on the show. I was nowhere near I didn't have a product yet. I just had this cut and glue thing, and so while I wasn't ready. I took the email address of the producer and I stuck it in my contact list in my Gmail. And fast forward a year and I'm now launching the product. I blasted my whole email at like literally high school boyfriends, probably anybody who's email adress I had.

12:35 I sent them an email saying, busy baby is here, buy one. And so the Shark Tank producer was in my contact list and he rode back. He's like, hey, I here on the market. How are sales? Would you be interested in Shark Tank? And I said, well, yeah, I just launched, so I've got about two thousand dollars in sales. M hm. I would love to do Shark Tank, but I don't know if I'm like ready yet. And he says, no, you. Know, we'd like to see people like we take businesses all stages, but we'd like to see you have a little bit more sales under your belt so that you don't get eaten alive. So that started a two year conversation that ended up with me finally landing in Vegas actually in twenty twenty. So I filmed during the pandemic.

13:18 Normally people who film Shark Tank go la film like in Hollywood. I got to go on a plane in September of twenty twenty, like middle of the pandemic, which was kind of awesome because the rule on flights then was one person per row every three rows. Wow, so there was like a total of whole place. Of course, I had a whole road to myself. I was quarantined in a hotel for eight days, could not leave my room at all. My kids were three and a half and eight months old. So people are like, oh my god, that must have been so hard. I'm like, no, it was like so I had room service for every single meal.

14:02 I didn't wash a dish, I didn't wipe the butt. I slept whenever I wanted to sleep and didn't get woken up. You know, my husband's an amazing dad, so he had everything under control. We facetimed multiple times a day, so the kids were fine and it was great bonding time for dad. And then yeah, then I so in preparation for Shark Tank, I watched literally every episode that had been released up to that point, which was over two hundred episodes. If you think about that, that's like over two hours. I got a lot. It's a lot and so, but I felt like I knew every shark, I knew every question they might ask. I felt like I was couldn't be more prepared. I practiced practice in practice. You know, you have your your pitch that you you walk out on the carpet and you do your pitch and then they just start asking questions.

14:51 So I'm really glad I practiced it so many times because I think I blacked out, honestly, Like I walked out to. The little clock and I stopped up in work. And then I did it and then they just start asking questions. So yeah, I was in there for about an hour. I think you see like ten or twelve minutes on TV, so you don't get to see the whole conversation. But it was great. It was great. We saw a huge spike in sales when it finally did air. So you film and you walk out of there, and they make sure you know there's no guarantee you're gonna be on TV, like we filmed you, but you know they don't guarantee that you're gonna make it on the show, and so then you just wait and wait. And wait and wait, and they email you two to three weeks before you get an air date.

15:31 So for me, that meant I had to produce enough products that if I did make it on air, I would have products to sell, right, But if I don't make it on air. I was thinking, well, if I'm weighing the risks silicon products, they don't need special storage. They don't they're at temperature control, they don't expire. So I'm gonna take the risk and buy a metric ton of products and if I don't air, then I'll sell them eventually. Yeah. Unfortunately, I did air the twenty twenty one and I think we sold about six weeks, where the like sales in three days. Wow. So it was it. Was and then and then two weeks later I did a Prego expo and someone saw me do the demo and said, oh my god, this is genius.

16:15 You should go on Shark Tank. You're like, I was just one Shark Tank two weeks ago. So that's what I get all the time. Now. I think I had a lot of people say it at the expo we were at, was you should go on Shark Tank. I'm like, it's it's right there on my banner. You're like that. I was gonna say, I did see it because I didn't realize that it was on Shark Tank. I just knew the product, but I didn't know that I didn't know it from Shark Tank. I just knew it. I forget how I Yeah, I think that was five years ago. Out, Yeah, that was five years ago. I don't think anybody at this point really remembers it from Shark tanker knows that I was on Shark Tank. And it's honestly the hardest part of the business is to let people know the products even exist. Yeah, well, that's awesome. So what's something about the Shark Tank experience that people would be surprised to know?

16:59 Besides that you might not get on air. Yeah, I mean there's horror stories about that. I have friends who were actually shown on the season premiere promo where it's like this season on Shark Tank. When my friend saw herself on the promo, because you're sworn to secrecy, mm hmm, you can't tell anybody the films or did any part of the process until they let you. Know you're gonna be on air. Well, when my friend saw herself on the promo, like, okay, it's public. Now I'm on the. Promo and so she's so excited and told all her friends and then they never aired her episode. Oh so it just crushed her soul and heart. And I know a few people that's happened too.

17:39 I think the other thing too, A lot of people don't unders realize that we're in there for a lot longer than what you see on TV. They do a great making it look like it's just one real quick, concise conversation, but some people are in there two hours or more. Wow, my gosh, I did not realize that it was that long. That's a lot. Yeah. No, it's great. It's great. They're they're they're fun to talk to. It's a really great experience. There's no doubt downside to it. It gave me more confidence than myself and my business. I don't know if we do the spoiler alert thing with letting people know I got an offer from Lori and I walked away. So that's kind of how that ended up. Are you happy with that or do you regret that? No, I'm super happy with it.

18:21 I wanted to take the I At the time, I only had the busy baby Matt and then the prototype for my teether and training spoon, and I had showed them. It didn't make it up here, but I showed them a prototype, and I wanted I knew I wanted to expand the product line to like all the products we have now. Lurie wanted to license the Busy Baby Matt to Munchkin and sit back and let the money roll in. And so we just had a really different vision for the for the company. And so no, I'm really glad that I was able to grow the product line up until this last summer. My brother ran the business with me, so almost four and a half five years. My brother and I it was like a family thing we did together. So it was great to be able to do that.

19:02 So there's a pressure to do it all. When did you realize that balance might not look the way that we were taught. Oh, you know, I think it has nothing to do with Busy Baby. It's just like the pressure of being a mom right on its own. I feel like he has to do it all. It's so true. And you know, I've had so many conversations with my husband because he lets me. He's like, you just do it all. So I let you. If you want me to do something, ask me just that He'll do it. I'm like, you know what needs to get done, you can He's like, but you do. It all so but I made a pack very early on when I started this business that from four pm to seven pm, And I think it's a good thing for anybody who can do it.

19:46 In the life in general is four pm to seven pm is like family time only. I love that there's no scrolling the phone, there's no like having work meetings. Obviously there's exceptions, but you know, I try my best every day from four to seven to be engaged with the kids, engaged with my husband, making dinner together. Yesterday we were sledding. Just at least I can look back and know that I gave them some part of me every single day. And when I have this like boundary set around four to seven, yeah, it's really not that hard because it's just there and that's just the way the day goes. And I know I. Can feel good about giving my kids that time and the engagement, you know when they need it the most.

20:33 All right, well, you've given us so much great information. I want to end on one question. When you see a mom using busy baby Matt today, maybe she was overwhelmed, Maybe just trying to get through a meal. What do you hope she feels with your product? Oh my gosh, well, one do you know I have never seen it in use in the wild. No way, Oh my goodness. I've never seen it swot one time in my city and I was like, oh my god, oh my god, somebody has and I walked over like all excited, all nervous, tears in my eye, like this is the first time I'm seeing it. And it was one of my girlfriends. I like that one because one of my girlfriends I'm just happened to be at the same restaurant as me.

21:13 And then I was on a cruise once. And I saw someone had one of my bungees around their stroller, so that was pretty awesome. But I get really really awesome emails from people, reviews on the website, comments on Facebook about like how much, especially from multiple moms twins strollers for those formies, especially when you're trying to manage multiple kids, Like just like it's amazing, how helpful just fifteen minutes of the baby being content so that you can get supper ready for the family members or just like actually drink your coffee while it's still warm or eat your own food, Like fifteen minutes of a intent, happy busy baby really can make a big difference in a frazzle new mom's day. And so that's honestly what keeps me going. It's been a really hard year for me. It's been I make all my products in China, and so the tariffs this year have really devastated my business. It's been the hardest year of my life by far. And I've deployed to Iraq and this is by far been the hardest year of my life.

22:15 And getting those messages from moms who truly are so grateful that I bring a little bit of sanity and peace into their day, that's what keeps me like, Okay, this is not something I want to give up on good. Even though it's. Hard right now, it's still a great thing, still helping people. Yeah, And that's like, I mean, I had a million baby products, but that, like the Busy Baby Matt is definitely like my top five favorite things that I had from like, you know, one to three years old, and I recommend it to you. So I's another favorite. Well, I guess this would be before, but I loved the baby Breeza. The formula thing was like a really it was so helpful once they were Once I started giving the uh formula, I really loved that.

23:02 I loved well the stroller like I loved the upper. Baby system and the that was one of my favorite ones. The hatch is one of my favorite. And then let's see a fifth one would be I'm trying to think. Oh the we still use our Yeah, we still use it too. The chair baby be Orange chair was my top was that that you put them in and they like kind of go. Those are my top ones that I always recommend. And like I said, and we were like a big go out to eat person like family, so that was with us, like all the time, out to eat. But well, thank you, this was so awesome. This is going to bring us to the end of another episode of The Running Mind Mom. I keep coming back to that final question and the idea that something as simple as a product can create a small moment of ease for a mom in the middle of a busy day, because those moments matter more than we give them credit for. Best Your story is a reminder that some of the most impactful ideas don't come from those perfect plans. They come from paying attention to what is not working and being willing to do something about it. So thank you so much for coming on for that, and.

24:11 Oh, thank you for having me. Thank you so much for spending time with us today on The Running Wine Mom. Don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, and share this episode with a mom who needs to hear it. You can follow me on. Instagram at the Running Wine Mom underscore and Beth, where can the listeners find you? A busy baby Matt on all the socials perfect. And I will link that. Thank you so much for joining us today. Remember you are strong, you were capable, and you were all amazing. Until next time, keep running, keep sipping, and keep embracing the joy of motherhood. Cheers and I will be back next Tuesday.