Before I got into tech sales I spent ten years as an undercover police officer working drug trafficking and human trafficking investigations. Long hours, young family, missed holidays. I wanted out. I had no idea what I was getting into next but I knew it wasn't that.
I landed in technology sales about five years ago. Remote work, flexibility, and a reason to get on planes a few times a year for conferences and retreats. Not a frequent flyer, but enough to know the pain. Every long flight I've taken I've landed stiff, groggy, and useless for the first day wherever I'm going. I've tried every travel pillow on the market. Cheap U-shaped ones, the Trtl, the Cabeau. Each one failed differently. No real support, ran too hot, took up too much bag space, just didn't fit my neck.
Last year I was preparing for a sales retreat in Portugal. Atlanta to Frankfurt to Lisbon, about 12 hours total. I went down the rabbit hole again trying to find something that actually worked and came up empty. So I decided to build one instead.
Building the prototype
I had no product design background. No manufacturing experience. I'm a salesperson. What I had was a clear picture of every way existing pillows were failing and why. I knew the product shouldn't be feature-driven. It should be benefit-driven. Every decision I made came back to that.
I found a manufacturer in China specializing in premium memory foam. About three months later I had a prototype. My wife and I used it on the Portugal flight. We both slept well. At one point the kid in the row ahead of us turned around and threw his pillow, which hit my wife in the face, so that interrupted things briefly. When we landed I felt genuinely good. I'll be honest, I wasn't completely sure if that was the pillow or the adrenaline of being in Portugal for the first time. Either way I came home convinced enough to keep going.
Family and friends tested subsequent versions on their own flights. Feedback was consistently positive across the board.
The name
I called it Nimbus. The name came from something personal. I can't sleep without noise. Every night I run rain sounds on the TV with a black screen. It's the best rest I get. Nimbus is a type of rain cloud. Felt right for a pillow designed to help you sleep above the clouds.
The numbers at launch
Total spend to get to market: $50 for prototypes, $750 for the first production batch of 108 units. I built the website myself. Added some shipping supplies. That was basically it. Fully bootstrapped, no outside money.
January through April I sold between 5 and 8 units a month. Enough to stay in it, not enough to feel like anything real. I'm a serial entrepreneur and I've started and stopped plenty of things. I think most people around me assumed this was another one. My three kids couldn't care less about the business itself, but they do think it's cool every time an order comes in and the label printer starts spitting out shipping labels.
The mistake I made early
I spent the first month of profit on UGC videos thinking I could accelerate things. They didn't move the needle. They're also more expensive than you'd expect. I've since switched to making all my own content. I'm not good at it. Probably not even competent. But it's working better than the stuff I paid for.
What changed in May
The real shift came when I stopped trying to promote and started trying to be useful. Someone in an online community asked about travel pillows and I answered honestly. That post got traction and brought a wave of orders. Most of what's working now is some version of that. Showing up where the problem is being discussed and being the person who actually solved it.
May has been 40 plus orders in 23 days. I've already passed my best full month.
What I keep coming back to
Building the product was the straightforward part. The website, the business setup, the manufacturing relationship, all of it figured out in a few months. Distribution is the whole game. Getting in front of the right person at the exact moment they're thinking about the problem you solve is genuinely hard and nothing I did before fully prepared me for it.
40 orders isn't a business. It's a signal. Now I'm trying to figure out how to make it repeatable.
If you've got a long flight coming up and you're still fighting with a pillow that doesn't work, Nimbus is here. Every order ships free and includes the hard case, a sleep mask, and earplugs. That's the whole setup.
Written by Justin Voss, founder of Nimbus Travel Pillows. Based in Gainesville, GA.
