Seniors Started a Business That Hit $250k a Month: The Snorinator

Unlike many seniors, Lloyd Ecker, 72, and his wife Sue Ecker aren’t particularly interested in retirement or slowing down.

The Pomona, New York-based parents of three and grandparents of four have enjoyed a decades-long run as serial entrepreneurs in baby-focused ventures, starting with their maternity-related apparel business Beegotten Creations in 1983. Then, realizing the value they’d amassed in collecting the names and addresses of expectant parents, they set up Babytobee.com, which provided “free stuff” for babies in exchange for data that sold to major companies like Huggies and Johnson & Johnson. Baytobee.com sold to Inuvo, Inc. in 2006 for $23 million. In 2011, the couple launched AllAboutTheBaby.com, another prenatal and postnatal database.

In 2022, Lloyd was still serving as CEO at AllAboutTheBaby.com (he remains in that role today), and he and Sue were aspiring to bring a passion project of theirs to Broadway — using funds from the sale of Babytobee.com to develop a musical based on Bette Midler’s material about an entertainer named Sophie Tucker. 

Lloyd’s snoring inspires a business idea: The Snorinator

In the midst of this creative, very much not-retired season, the Eckers were also battling an issue shared by 90 million Americans: Lloyd’s snoring was leading to some sleepless nights. He’d tried all of the run-of-the-mill solutions, from nose strips to mouth tape. None of them worked. So he resorted to a cumbersome CPAP machine. 

“ I didn’t need a CPAP machine,” Lloyd says. “I wasn’t diagnosed with sleep apnea or anything, but my wife said to me, ‘Either fix this or I’m kicking you out of the bedroom.’ So I thought, Okay, I’ll wear the stupid underwater equipment. I looked like Diver Dan. Very romantic.” 

However, later that year, an article came out announcing the recall of the CPAP brand; particles from the filter were linked to cancer. Lloyd ditched the CPAP machine — and was kicked out of the bedroom. 

Lloyd replicates the “High Fowler” with a foam pillow

Desperate for a solution, Lloyd scoured the internet in search of a fix. Ultimately, his efforts landed him on the 28th page of search results, where he discovered a little-known apparatus developed in 1888.  

Dr. George Ryerson Fowler had created a device that propped people upright and promoted oxygenation via maximum chest expansion to help patients recover after lung operations. The position became known as the “High Fowler.” 

Lloyd set out to replicate it and solve his snoring for good. He contacted a friend in the foam business and experimented with about 20 different prototypes for an anti-snoring pillow before landing on one he was happy with in 2022 — dubbed the Snorinator. “From the moment I started sleeping in that thing, I haven’t snored since,” Lloyd says. “It’s crazy.” 

The business faces typical startup struggles, strikes out with ads

Despite Lloyd’s personal satisfaction with the product, selling it was another matter. The couple bootstrapped the business with their savings, but pretty quickly ran into some challenges.

The product’s design, requiring people to sleep in an upright position rather than on their back or side, raised some eyebrows, Sue notes. People have to “sort of retrain themselves,” she says, adding that getting them to embrace it hinges on gaining exposure and growing sales until they think, Well, maybe there’s something to it. 

So the couple forged on. The Snorinator launched an Indiegogo in February 2023, hoping to sell thousands of units, and sold about 100.

They also attempted to make inroads with ads on Google and Facebook, to no avail. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Lloyd admits. “We never had gotten into any of that. And so we went to an agency that said, ‘No problem, we’ll just put up your ad.’” 

The first big ad is pulled for being “too pornographic”

The Snorinator’s ad went live on April 15, 2023. It featured the Eckers in bed: Lloyd in the Snorinator, Sue’s head on Lloyd’s shoulder, with a tagline that captured the idea that viewers could also stop snoring for life, just like Lloyd, if they purchased the product. Unfortunately, the ad resulted in a near-immediate ban by Facebook and Google. 

“ When we finally found out a couple of months later what we did wrong, they said, ‘Sorry, your ad was too pornographic,’” Lloyd recalls. Apparently, the simple bed set-up was too suggestive.

It took about six months for Google and Facebook to reinstate the Snorinator’s ads. Its first year in business, the Snorinator saw $100,000 in sales. Then $200,000 the next. Eventually, though, annual sales dropped off, to between $10,000 and $15,000 — a disheartening reversal compared to the early days.

After $500k invested, the Snorinator sees slumping sales

By July 2025, the Eckers had invested $500,000 of their own savings into the business, and they weren’t seeing anywhere near the desired return.

Then the couple received a call from the producers of Shark Tank. The Eckers jumped at the opportunity to appear on the show and arrived on set with Snorinators in tow. 

“ It was such an exciting moment because we didn’t know if we were going to get a deal,” Sue recalls. “We had practiced our routine, and then you get there, and you’re doing it in front of them. After you do your 90 seconds, they start throwing questions at you. We knew all the answers because we had been immersed in this business for two years.” 

Michael Strahan and Lori Greiner invest in the Snorinator

Sharks Michael Strahan and Lori Greiner tried out the anti-snoring pillows set up on a bed inside the studio — and were blown away by the product and its comfort. The production cost was $38 per pillow, and it retailed direct-to-consumer for $160. Strahan and Greiner offered $100,000 for 25% equity. The Eckers accepted the deal. 

After the episode aired in October 2025, the Snorinator enjoyed a sales spike that month — about $250,000. However, because the Eckers still hadn’t quite cracked the code on Google and Meta ads, and had no social media presence, direct-to-consumer sales began to slow again. By that December, Lloyd started to doubt the business’s future and considered calling its quits. 

“But before I did that, I threw everything at the wall,” the founder says. The Eckers had a connection who knew someone who was “supposedly a savant at TikTok and Instagram.” 

So the couple decided to take one last shot, harnessing the power of social media, revamping the Snorinator’s website to include other use cases for the pillow (like acid reflux) and lowering the product’s price by about $20 despite Lloyd’s initial hesitations. 

The new strategy paid off. On Valentine’s Day 2026, the Snorinator went from selling about five units a day to 30 units a day. Thinking the uptick came from the reduced price, Lloyd called up his team to apologize for his initial resistance. But they told him it was all thanks to the social media expert: She’d posted a video on Instagram that racked up 1 million views in one day.  

Sales only grew from that point. Two weeks after the viral video, the Snorinator saw 40 orders per day. That figure jumped to 50, then 60, in March. As of mid-April, The Snorinator had seen sales reach nearly 100 orders daily on several days. The brand is averaging about 3 million views on social media every week. 

‘Simple’ videos unlock rapid business success

And the best part of this rapid-success strategy, according to Lloyd? He doesn’t know how to do it. 

“They tell me to get on my phone and make these videos [with the pillow],” the founder says. “They’re ridiculously stupid. I don’t get it. They’re just simple. I love it. We went from the business almost dying to having seven containers coming in over the next three weeks to replenish the stock. It’s lunacy, and there’s no end in sight.” 

Now, the Eckers look forward to bringing the Snorinator around the world. Lloyd trademarked the brand in 17 countries before the Shark Tank appearance and says the business receives frequent inquiries about its product availability from people in Canada, Mexico, England, Japan and more.

“I guess people snore all over the world,” Sue quips. “We are more than happy to try to figure out how to get the Snorinator to them.”

Unlike many seniors, Lloyd Ecker, 72, and his wife Sue Ecker aren’t particularly interested in retirement or slowing down.

The Pomona, New York-based parents of three and grandparents of four have enjoyed a decades-long run as serial entrepreneurs in baby-focused ventures, starting with their maternity-related apparel business Beegotten Creations in 1983. Then, realizing the value they’d amassed in collecting the names and addresses of expectant parents, they set up Babytobee.com, which provided “free stuff” for babies in exchange for data that sold to major companies like Huggies and Johnson & Johnson. Baytobee.com sold to Inuvo, Inc. in 2006 for $23 million. In 2011, the couple launched AllAboutTheBaby.com, another prenatal and postnatal database.

In 2022, Lloyd was still serving as CEO at AllAboutTheBaby.com (he remains in that role today), and he and Sue were aspiring to bring a passion project of theirs to Broadway — using funds from the sale of Babytobee.com to develop a musical based on Bette Midler’s material about an entertainer named Sophie Tucker.