Before our daughter, Sydney, was potty trained, we tried everything from wearing pull-ups to only underwear, to bribing, disciplining, and we often lost our temper. We were so frustrated and felt like we would be fighting dirty diapers, urine stained laundry, bedding, and embarrassing accidents for the rest of our lives. She wet on our couch, on the carpet, and in her car seat several times. I felt like a failure as a parent and finally hit the Internet to seek help because I was too embarrassed to tell anyone how bad our potty training problem was.
I was shocked at how much information there was on the subject-over a million websites!
Many said the same things like:
• never lose your temper or show your frustration.
• try and make it fun
• try and give your child control
• monitor when they are wetting
• set a schedule to use the bathroom every 2-3 hours
Much of the advice was helpful, but I wished there was a product that could...
help to make it fun, give the child control, and help remind us to practice going to the bathroom every 2-3 hours. You know, like a watch the child wears that plays a song every 2 hours to remind them to go potty.
When I told my friends about my idea, they thought it was brilliant and encouraged my husband and I to invent it and bring it to market. My husband and I had never done anything like that before being a teacher and Inside-Salesman.
So, back to the Internet we went to research how to bring a product idea to market. Writing the fun potty training book, and producing the Hop to the Potty Place song was fairly easy, but the actual watch device would be $40,000 dollars just to engineer the chip to play ten seconds of the song every hour, two and/or three hours.
Before committing so much time and money to a project, we wanted to test the idea. So, we bought an $80.00 dollar hand-held digital recorder and put the song on it. We tried it, we had friends, family, neighbors, and friends of friends try it out on their potty trainers. Along with the digital recorder, we gave them a copy of the book, the DVD of the story and music video and a Potty Chart.
The results were very encouraging. We have testimonials from parents saying they tried the doll and that didn’t work, they tried everything, but this was the only thing that worked…. Within two weeks or two days…my child was potty trained… We had pediatricians, child psychologists, and medical professionals test our product and each one wished they had one for their children and endorsed it.
Now we sell our product on our website, Amazon, through a national distributor and in a few Walmarts in the US. We have learned a lot and have more product ideas we are bringing to market. It was hard-work, but we learned a lot and it was so worth it!
Oh and by the way, I can guarantee you will not be suffering through potty training forever! It is never hopeless. Remember, “Put a big smile on your face, and hop, hop, hop to the Potty Place!”
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