#225 How I Built an Ergonomic Baby Carrier To Help Postpartum Mothers

Hey, everyone. Hope you've had another great week. I've been getting a lot of feedback, great feedback on these interviews with physician entrepreneurs. You know, I love bringing you stories of physicians doing extraordinary things both in and out of medicine, whether it's in the areas of building up your own practice, modernizing things, and optimizing things within your practice, whether it's investing smartly or creating products. And so I'll continue to do that each and every week. This week is no exception. I know you're gonna love this interview with Dr. Leena Shabindar. She's a physician who created a product that you're all gonna want to know about. And just so you know, if you love these stories of physicians doing these really cool things, this week we have something called the Physician accelerator summit where 50 plus physicians are sharing their stories and actionable tips on how you can do these things as well, following their footsteps. It's an absolutely free summit. Go check it out@physicianacceleratorsummit.com in any case, enjoy this interview. Have a great week. Thanks, everybody. Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe.

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Let and let's get on with the show, everyone. I know you're going to love this story. This is a perfect example of a physician who took their expertise in medicine, was able to leverage that, create a product, you know, to change the world, do amazing things. She's an amazing physician who just goes and gets it and gets things done. So I'm excited to talk to Dr. Leena Shabindar. She's a PMNR specialist. She's also the creator and founder of a product and company called Nestle. It is a baby carrier that again, was built out of her experience, her own personal experience, and then also out of the experience of some of her patients. And we're going to talk about how she created this thing. It's out there now. She is selling to the public and she's making a big difference and impact both clinically and outside of medicine as well. Lena, I'm excited to talk to you. How are you doing?

I'm great. Thanks for having me. Peter. This is wonderful.

I'm excited to talk to you. Obviously, I've seen what you've done. I've heard about your product, heard about the cool things you're doing. You mind just telling people a little bit better? I didn't do a great job of explaining what it is. Do you mind telling what Nestle is today? Like what is the product?

Yeah, so Nestle is a company that we own a baby carrier that was designed for the health and well being of the mom. So with mom's anatomy in mind, because so much baby gear is just there to help the baby and it just hurts us. And especially with the female anatomy, after delivery of a baby, it can just be such a problem. So that's what we do.

All right, we're going to get into how that was all created. I'm curious. I mean, you have a PM&R background. I know you're busy there. When did the idea to create a product come about? Has this always been part of the plan?

You know, it's interesting. I, I think from the time I was a little kid, I always liked to invent things. Like, I remember I played clarinet in elementary school and I, I hated the flavor of the reeds because they taste like saliva. And so I like put them in Kool Aid and I would try to sel flavored reads to my friends. So I think I've always had this little bit of creativity in me. But honestly, when I started practicing medicine, I just loved taking care of patients and their musculoskeletal issues. And for me, it was always about balancing life with my family. And so that was my only goal. But it kind of came to me, you know, like this idea where I had back pain in my own pregnancy and I needed PT and I was able to resolve it was si joint dysfunction. And then one day I was treating a friend who had back pain. And so I brought her to my house. I was like, well, let me just take care of it at home. And as she was going back to her car, I saw she was carrying her baby in the car seat. And I was like, let me carry that for you so that you don't have to carry this heavy car seat. And as I'm carrying the car seat to the car, I re injured my back. And so I was like this stupid thing. And all the stupid things around babies are a disaster. And so that's when I felt this, like, compelling desire that like, this is not okay. And we've just ignored it for all these years. And so something has to change. And I guess I was the one who had to change it.

It's such a cool story, but I think there are a lot of people who, you know, they might relate to that. I mean, you do something, you're like, man, I wish there was a better solution, a better way, but a lot of times, nothing happens from there. How were you able to take that, like, feeling and then start to create something? What was that first step about?

You know, I think it's interesting, as I was looking back at this recently, and I realized that my first idea was probably in, like, 2014, 2015. And then I decided I turned 40 in 2016. And in 2016, I was like, I have had so many ideas in my life. I am going to patent something. So I was like, this is the most compelling thing I have right now, and I'm just gonna do it. And so I. I think what I did. My husband's an attorney. He's not a patent lawyer, but I was like, how do I get a patent? And so we called a patent lawyer. And I didn't know anything about patents, so, like, there's different kinds of patents. And I was like, well, I don't know. Let me just do the utility patent, which is the strongest one. And I sat down and I wrote down all my ideas, and I had a call with a lawyer, and we just started by filing a provisional patent. I was so afraid to talk about my idea to anybody that I was like. I was paralyzed. Like, I didn't know what to do. So he was like, you just need to file a provisional patent. You have. You get a year. So I was like, all right, if I. If I can do this, and I'll get a year and worry about things. And I think for me, it was literally just this mindset of, like, I don't need to solve all the problems right away. I'm just going to get curious and take the next step. And so I just kept taking one step and then another step. And that's.

You mentioned that you were scared to talk to anybody. Were you scared because you didn't think your idea was great, or did you think that somebody else would take the idea? Like, what was the reason behind that?

Oh, I was so paranoid that another company would take the idea. So I was so afraid to talk to designers in the industry, right? Because it's like, well, if I talk to somebody at Graco or I talk to somebody at UPPAbaby, they're just gonna steal my idea, and I'm not gonna get anything for it. So I was super worried. And I know because my husband's a lawyer that a patent doesn't stop somebody from stealing the idea. It just is a barrier. And I was like, well, I don't have the funds to chase after them. So there was this, like, panic that. And also, I'm not in business. Like, I literally didn't know what to do. So I think what worked for me was that I hired a design agency who worked in apparel actually, so they were not at all in the field. And so I felt like, all right, I can talk to these people about this. And it just got me going. I think I spent like three years paying $7,000 per project. It was such a bad idea. But you know, $7,000 per prototype to prototype it through just to get enough ideation going to have like something that I could actually file a patent for. Because you get this time where like you're, you can send your patent so you're not like submitting it right away. You don't have to have it all done. And I think that was the biggest thing I learned is like, it doesn't have to be perfect. You just keep going until you get to the point where you feel like, okay, this is good.

I'm curious, how are you doing this stuff while practicing medicine? Like, what does the clinical side look like for you? Were you practicing full time and how busy were you with your own practice in addition to doing all this?

So I, I mean, I'm busy. I'm a department chair. But I have always set up my clinical practice that in a way that allows me to prioritize family. So, so this has actually been one of the big things in my whole life is just from the beginning I was like, I'm not, I'm not going to like just kill myself and not have any time with my family. So I did intraoperative neuro monitoring remotely two days a week for many, many years. And so part of that was that I could work from home, sometimes at the hospital, but I had a little bit of wiggle room there where I'm not like face to face with patients constantly. So it gave me a little bit of free time actually as Nestle launched into a business, like over the last couple of years it's been a lot more challenging to balance everything. And I think that for me is like my one of like my north stars is like family. And so I just incorporated my kids and my husband into Nestle. Right? So like my kids are like at the booth when we're at the trade show helping run it. And my husband is now the CEO because I dragged him in. You know, it's the only way that I could make it work.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a perfect example of not like the work life balance per se, but work life either integration or harmony as I think you, you figured out how to do that, putting both together. I mean, so you talk about you started doing these prototypes. I want to try to get a time frame or try to understand and maybe people out there like, how long did it take to, you know, you put, you did your provisional patent, then you started doing these prototypes and you started spending money on that. How long before you actually got to something where you're like, this is a product that I can go out there and sell my.

I finally filed for the official patent. I think it was in either 2021 or 2022. So from 2016 to then, so five to six years, I'm like ideating. So the first couple years I said I was doing it with this. It was literally called the apparel agency in Chicago, like a clothing design company who does a really great job, but they're not in the field. And then I ended up hiring a consultant who got me a factory. And so we interviewed a bunch of factories and we found a factory in Florida that would take me on, which I think is like one of the hardest things when you're building a product from scratch is like, who is going to take the chance on you? And so we hired a factory and then we did more industrial design with them and they do medical supplies and stuff like that. So that was, it was the right place in, in Florida. And that's where we really kind of fine tuned everything, got it to the point where it was like, this is a product that I can, I can go with. Right. And I'm. The problem with me is like my zone of genius is in invention and ideation. So like, I'm like, my brain is still like way over here, like version six and seven of Nestle and I'm trying to sell version one right now. So keeping my brain focused is a challenge. But yes, so I, I filed it officially, I think in 2021. 2020? Yeah. And then we got it in 22. And that was like a really exciting time because my patent lawyer kept saying it's. They always know in the beginning you're going to have a rejection and then you're going to have to come back with more claims. And we had 20 claims and we got 14 claims on our first try without a rejection. And then the other six claims we, we have to, you have to like kind of separate the claims out and then you get your like allowance for a certain part of the patent. And then I was able to get, I just like this past fall got most of the other claims. So it's, it's really exciting.

And then when did you actually, first of all, congrats on getting all that through the patent process. I've heard it can be really challenging and obviously take a lot of time and money. When. When did you actually open up shop and actually start selling to people? Like, what was that? What. What year was that?

We, we put our first order in for our first 500 units in 2022, end of 22. I had some inventory and so we just started selling at that point. And it's just been over a year. We're not. We're still like working on the marketing side and all of that side. And actually that has turned out to be like its own series of barriers. Right. I think, like, my biggest message to people is like, you are going to have a million barriers, like if you're doing this, but you have to kind of figure out what are the barriers that I can just move through and ignore or like modify a little bit and then what are things that are going to make us have to pivot? And one of the biggest things that happened to us was that after we launched the business in this, like, 2022 time period, late 2022, I found out, I did this po. This, like this post that went viral, this reel. And my initial claim was that it's car seat compatible. Okay. So that it can sit inside the car seat. We crash tested it at a university. It was all this stuff. We're actually doing research with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, working on a, you know, research project with them, trying to really study this issue. But what I realized, this is like language that is fire for a lot of people, right? So it's like, you can't put anything between the baby in the car seat. Doesn't matter if you tested it. It's not okay. You can't do it. And so this was like one of these moments of truth where I was like, like, we tried to go to Bye Bye Baby before it went out of business. And they were like, we're not selling your thing. Like, we're just not selling it because you're making this claim and we can't. Even though you're showing us all the reasons why it's okay, we can't do this. So I was literally like, oh, my God. Like, I'm gonna have to stop all of this. I'm just gonna have to stop. And then I just sat down and I was like, okay, what is. What is the truth about Nestle, right? And then I was like, okay, the truth about Nestle Is that it is designed with the mom's anatomy in mind, number one. Number two is it makes it easy to transfer babies. So whether you're transferring the baby from changing table to your body to a stroller, back to your body to a car seat, all of that still is true. And so we realized that we can just, like, get rid of the whole claim around car seats. And the fact that it is compatible with car seats is nice because people use car seats as strollers. And the whole thing is now, like, you get to wear this waist strap that operates like an SI joint belt from pregnancy through the birth of your baby, use it as a carrier, and basically it uncouples the whole idea of what a carrier is. And so you're just like putting this little sheath, their baby in the sheath. You lift the sheath and click it with this mechanism into this waist strap that you're wearing. And then you can just simply pull it down and put the baby somewhere else. And so people who are using it love it, because if they have a toddler who's walking and their baby's in the stroller, they. And then the baby, the toddler's like, I want to sit in this stroller. The baby can just come onto the mom's body or dad's body, and then the toddler goes in the stroller and nobody's disturbed. It's just super easy. So. But it was one of these things where it, like, literally took me. I was so depressed. Like, I was like, I'm gonna just fail all these hundreds of thousands of dollars in the toilet. And then I was like, no, you know, we can just move from this claim until we work on the industry on the backside. And so that's my, like, back secret mission is to, like, fix the industry. And then for now, we're just marketing the carrier.

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Yeah, I think it's the power of your idea, right? So for me, it's not just that it's a baby carrier, but like, what I feel so firmly is that doctors are needed in things that are relevant to our patients. Right. And so when you think about back pain, right, one of the biggest costs in healthcare, in US healthcare dollars in this country, 50% of pregnant women have back pain and a quarter of those people end up with chronic pain as a result. Like, what if it's because all the gear is messing with us because we're postpartum and our bodies don't just snap back to normal? What if, you know, nobody. Like, if people started asking doctors, well, what could I do to reduce the burden on the spine or on the joints or on the carpal tunnel? You know, could we work to prevent medical issues? And so to me, it's like, what if all these patients who come into my door don't end up with chronic pain because their gear is right? And so could I push the needle on back pain by 1% or 2%? And I think it's like that scale of impact that I can't let go of. It's like, I can't quit if I want to quit sometimes. And I just can't because it's like, we could do this. I mean, we literally could do this. And all these companies claim all this stuff that is health related and it's not based in fact. There's no data to support it. And here we are with the data. So I feel like we just need to be there where those people are making the decisions.

I mean, what do you think the potential is for other, other physicians to do this, to innovate, to build these products, to do these kind of things? I mean, again, what's the possibility for them?

I mean, I think that anybody can do it. If you're a physician, one, you're smart, two, you know how to look at data. And three, despite our idea that we hate marketing, a lot of us actually marketing is like what we do every single day with our patients. And this is what one of my mentors who I met actually through this, which is Manasa Matravati, who does ahimsa. She. She told me she was like, you're every day talking to your patients about their plan of action and plan of care, and you're giving them good facts that help them become compliant patients. And that is marketing. You know, you're not selling something that is not needed. You're selling something that people want and those. That's all you really want is the people who need this to. To have it. And so I think that we have all the tools. We are just totally like, the problem is that we're rule followers so much. Like, our idea in medicine is like, you don't take the next step until it's perfect, right? Like, you would never do a procedure if you don't really know how to do it. And in business, it's like the inverse. Like, you have to take the step because you have to figure out what goes wrong and what goes right and how to make it better. And without taking the step, you're not going to know. So I think we just have to kind of stretch our minds a little bit. And I think doctors can do this, and it's super relevant to almost every consumer good.

I mean, I believe you and I trust you and I'm with you on that. How do physicians get over that, though? I mean, how do they enter that kind of, like, mindset that you've talked about, all these great inspirational things, like, how are they able to do it? What tools or resources are out there for them to be able to do this?

I mean, I think a lot of it is, is in these kinds of communities where there's networking. I did a lot of this. I felt like in the wilderness, like, between 2016 and 2019, in social media, there was nobody. I mean, there were people doing these things, but I didn't know them right. There was no way for me to know them. And so it was a lot harder because I didn't have those connections. So many people get in business school or, you know, in other industries, we just don't have those connections. Now. I think that there's a lot of community out there and getting, you know, just getting the mindset of, like, I can do hard things, I can do things that are difficult if I make a mistake. So what? You know, one thing I think a lot of is like, so what if I failed? Like, if. Even if I threw all of this into the toilet and I didn't make any money, like what came out of it? I learned a lot. I developed as a person. I stretched myself, I did all these other things. So I think it's just reminding yourself, like, you can do this and the imposter syndrome, it might not go away, but it, you can recognize it for what it is and then find the people around you to support you. And even if it's not somebody who knows the exact thing that you need, it's just like you talk to one person who talks to the next person, who talks to the next person, eventually you get there.

I mean, how does it feel now to have that side of, you know, that side from. You have your medical side, your clinical medicine. You have now Nestle. You're doing the family, you're doing the family business. When you think back on it and you look at it right now, maybe take a step back, how do you feel about everything and the way it's come together?

I mean, I feel proud. I do. I think it's interesting because, you know, I, I had to get coached on this before the call today, right? Because it's like I haven't finished the book, right. Like I'm in the middle of the book. I'm just sell, right. I'm not at the point where I'm at economies of scale or any of this stuff. And. But I think taking that moment and saying, gosh, I. I got pretty far and I can keep doing this is. Is pretty cool. It really is. And I think that it's not easy and I think just kind of having that understanding that it's not going to be easy, right? When you're trying to provide value, it's, you know, you, you move away from exchanging time for money and you start to provide value. You're putting in like time and there's no money. And eventually you, you start to see this return and you just being, being proud of the moment, being proud of the process and not necessarily focusing on the outcome is, is I think where you can take that celebration.

It's such great advice. I know people are going to listen to this and for many of them, it's. They're gonna say, they're gonna resonate with something you said. They're gonna want to find out more about Nestle, find out about you and all the great things you're doing. Where's a great place for people to do that?

Well, if you're interested in Nestle, definitely come to our website. It's nestle.com n e s s l and our whole thing is like, we Nestle the parents so they can nestle their baby. You can reach out to me on Facebook or Instagram or anything and I'm more than happy to chat and help. I think that our communities are amazing. Doctors are great at helping each other and we're definitely there for others.

So cool. I mean, you've already shared an amazing story and so much good advice, but we love to leave people with some sort of tip or advice. For someone who wants to pursue something, perhaps even following your footsteps, what's a great tip you have for them?

I think that just lead with curiosity, right? So if you want to do something, the best way to do it is not to put pressure on yourself and make it feel like an all or nothing, but just start with curiosity, like, what if I could do this? What if I could do it and have fun with it? Right. Or whatever that is. And I think starting from that curious perspective will get you to the place where you really want to be.

So good. Thank you so much for this time. I mean, congrats on all your success. Again, a story of perseverance, you know, creativity, resourcefulness, and I know so many people can get a lot out of this. Again, appreciate your time doing this. I know you're really busy. Congrats on your success and excited to see where this goes from here. Everyone should check out Nestle. Go ahead and do that. Thank you again, Lena. Great talking to you and let's talk again soon.

Thanks, Peter. This is wonderful. And keep on going with what you're doing too.

All right, thank you. Bye.

Bye.

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