It was about three weeks after their baby daughter was born that Davante Rowe and Brittany Harvey knew they had to find an easier way to burp her. The process was taking much longer than they expected. “Always trying to find the quick way to do things, I started putting her over the pregnancy pillow Brittany used to stay comfortable,” recalls Davante. “It took me about a week before I looked over to Brittany and said, ‘This would be a really cool product concept.”

The duo spent about 90 days creating a rough prototype, based on a sketch Brittany created, using Memory Foam mattress toppers they ordered on Amazon and cut up. They worked with a product design engineer to perfect the idea while Brittany returned to her nine-to-five job in public relations and Davante, a lawyer by training, delivered pizzas to Domino’s at night so he had more time to devote to the business.

Today, the co-founders of Burplee, a Charlotte, N.C.-based startup that projects $2 million in sales for 2024 from its patented pillow for burping babies, the Burplee Lounger. They raised $60,000 in a friends-and-family round of financing in January—“Many of those who have children remember those long nights,” says Davante—and used credit card financing to cover startup costs like getting their website up-and-running, advertising on Meta and ordering a first batch of 300 Burplee pillows as inventory. They went to market through an online store on the platform Shopify on August 30, selling the Burplees at $60 each. The product quickly sold out.

Baby products are a fast-growing industry that now brings in $320.7 billion globally and is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 5.9% from the current year to 2030, according to market researcher Grand View Research. Consumers are willing to spend on “high-quality, utlity-drven and premium baby products,” according to the researchers.

Marketing the product on TikTok helped propel them to success, with many desperate parents posting videos of trying to get babies to sleep or to burp them and others searching for solutions to their own late-night woes. One video Brittany created on why they created the Burplee went viral. I learned about Burplee through another e-commerce entrepreneur, Chris Meade, co-founder of the popular game CROSSNET, who noticed that the brand had “caught fire” and had an “American dream story that so many can relate to.”

One rewarding part of the couple’s work is getting messages from parents they’ve helped, like a recent DM from a mom on Instagram: “She sent us a video of her preemie son and said, ‘He’s not even supposed to be born yet, and we’re using this for tummy time. It’s helping with some of the delays his occupational therapist thought he would encounter from being premature,” says Brittany.

Some doubters write to say that babies should be burped the old-fashioned way. Brittany and Davante shrug off the naysayers. “If you don’t get it, you don’t get it,” says Brittany. “For a big portion of parents who do encounter these issues and challenges, there should be options and they shouldn’t feel like they’re bad parents if they’re saying, ‘I need something more than the regular way [of burping a baby]— I need more help.’”

Brittany is the public face of the brand in its social media marketing, but behind the scenes at the small company, she’s also the one who answers customers when they have a question about a baby who refuses to go to sleep. “I’m still the person who responds to every single Facebook comment, to every single email,” she says. “These people are reaching out to us when they’re desperate. We get a lot of emails from 1 am to 4 am.” If she’s awake with her daughter, she’ll respond on the fly, though, she’s up during the wee hours less often these days. “Luckily, she’s sleeping through the night,” says Brittany.

As they grow the business, they’re trying to fully embrace the mindset of entrepreneurship, after starting out with the idea of pursuing traditional careers. “We’re trying to make a way for more freedom, which is a big part of entrepreneurship,” says Brittany. “We can’t carry the mindset of just making enough to get by. We have to shake off scarcity and look at the growth that can happen. I challenge myself to make sure my mindset is truly shifting day by day and welcoming those opportunities.”