I Invented a Toothbrush Vibrator, Made a Million Dollars, And Moved By The Sea.

Lucy Lake 🌊

13 min readApr 25, 2018

Or that was the plan, at least.

Hi, I’m Lucy.

A failed entrepreneur.

Or am I?

That’s for me to cry in the shower about and for you to find out.

Here’s my story! (The short, funny version, at least).

Orgasms & Toothbrushes

Do you remember the first time you jerked off?
Do you remember how you felt like?

You probably believed that you invented it, because there’s no way somebody else knew about it and never told you.

So you were all like:

“Holy cow! This is fucking amazing. Can I patent it?

Well, this is exactly how I felt after 20 orgasms with my Oral-B Vitality.

Yes! That’s an electric toothbrush.

And the way I use it, IT BLOWS YOUR MIND.

But before going to the “Fifty Shades of SoloPlay” scenes, let’s take a step back, and look at how I came to invent a toothbrush vibrator in the first place.

Hate your job

Two years ago, when I wasn’t busy counting orgasms, I was working for a gaming company.

Money was good.
The people were nice.
The job was easy-peasy lemon squeeze.

Sure, I wasn’t saving kids in Africa, but we were making games… anybody would have been happy with the status quo.

But not me!

I was different. I had thick, entrepreneurial blood running through my veins.

We get it, Lucy! You’re a wannabe entrepreneur. Stop it with the motivational posters, please.

There was always an inspirational Ted Talk playing in the background.
Always a self-help audiobook whispering in my ear.
Always someone on my Kindle telling me to hate the 9 to 5. (Yes, Tim Ferris, I’m looking at you.)

And so I did.

I hated my job, my boss, my company.

Slowly, I became restless and impatient.

Clearly, my talent was wasted on people who couldn’t recognize that I have a giant living inside of me. I was there for almost a year, and they still haven’t made me CEO.

Such idiots!

I decided to leave.

Quit, move, and start your own thing

➜ Enough money to last me for a year? Check!
➜ An unrealistic business plan? Check!
➜ Plane tickets to Greece (low rent+beach house=great Instagram pics)? Check!

The first months in Greece were awesome.

My office view? The sea.
My desk? A lounge chair.
My coffee? What coffee? I’m sipping Ouzo all day.

I saw enough Instagram to know exactly how to be a successful entrepreneur, and I put everything into practice as soon as I arrived.

✔ I stayed up late and woke up late.
✔ I spent ridiculous amounts of time working from beaches and balconies—even though I couldn’t see shit on my screen.

Offices are for slaves. I’ll do my work in nature, how God intended me to. #homeoffice #livinglavidaloca

✔ I brainstormed with magic markers on windows.
✔ I kept a dream journal, a day journal, a travel journal, a random journal, and a mini journal.
✔ I meditated 12 hours a day.
✔ I smoothied for breakfast, lunch, and dinner (chewing is so 2017).
✔ I subscribed to 824 online marketing newsletters.
✔ I downloaded 11 productivity apps.
✔ I took long walks on the beach.
✔ I bought 16 sets of pyjamas.

Unsurprisingly, after applying all the productivity hacks above, I came up with my million dollar idea.

A toothbrush vibrator!

Eric Ries would have been proud. I had my MVP—mini vibrating penis.

Start-Up Lesson #1: Find something you love doing and make people pay for it.

The way I saw it was like this: if that guy made a million bucks selling pet rocks, why can’t I? How hard can it be to roll-out a product?

Surprisingly, pretty hard.

It’s one thing to make a vibrator-improvisation out of a toothbrush, some InstaMorph, and a condom, and it’s another thing to make ‘a product.’

Making something stick to a thin, vibrating stick is really hard.

Luckily, I have met the right people (a ZBrush elf, a 3D printing fairy, and a plastics expert) at the right time, and I was able to pull it off.

Was it easy? No way!

The first batch of prototypes looked less like a sex toy and more like a car part. Definitely NOT something you want near your vagina.

They were ugly, and they kept falling off the brush.

Things got better.

Somehow (250 changes in design+25 failed prototypes later) we managed to 3D print an attachment that worked and didn’t seem like something your uncle carried in his toolbox next to his skrewdriver.

It looked like an earplug on a brush.

And mind you… that was a huge improvement from looking like a spark plug on a toothbrush.

I was ecstatic.

I managed to jump over the first obstacle and to take my first step towards calling up my old boss to tell him this

“I WENT AND FUCKED MYSELF, LIKE YOU SAID, AND GUESS WHAT, YOU SONOFABITCH? I’M RICH!”

Actually, no one told me to go fuck myself, but it would have been really cool if they did because I could have used this line in my imaginary book “The Tooth(brush) Fairy: a Small-Town Girl with Big-Ass Dreams.”

Don’t steal my baby

So I have a product.

Now what?

Here’s an idea: Let’s panic!

After struggling so much to make this product work, I panicked at the thought that some Chinese company will steal the design once I released it.

I was waking up in cold sweats with clenched fists staring at the ceiling and repeating mindlessly: “My precious, my precious.”

It sounds delusional… but I was so afraid of copycats… that I decided to base my whole marketing campaign on NOT. SHOWING. THE PRODUCT.

Out-of-the-Box-Thinking: My creative genius at work

How exactly did I do that? That’s a great question.

I started a blog called Ohackers (Orgasm Hackers) — a secret community of women who hacked their orgasms.

In short, women who masturbated with home appliances (showers, toothbrushes, blenders… etc.).

As a member of this secret community, they were given the rare opportunity to buy my toothbrush vibrator, which I called THE ODAPTER (An adapter but starting with an “O” because ORGASMS!!! Obviously.)

Shoot me now!

Look, the word I coined even got a lousy entry in Urban Dictionary. By me! **#contentmarketing #fakeittilyoumakeit**

I know what you’re thinking. What the hell was I thinking?

The truth is that I imagined that the whole secrecy trick would make my idea spread like wildfire in the underground home appliance masturbation community.

I saw with my mind’s eye, hundreds of women marching the streets with toothbrush vibrators around their neck yelling:

“I HAD 20 ORGASMS IN 15 MINUTES. WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE LATELY?”

But it turned out there was no such thing as an underground home appliance masturbation community, and, shockingly, women don’t want to tell other people how many orgasms they had.

Who would have thought?
(Everybody besides me, probably.)

I think we can all agree here that my idea sucked.

The whole concept was not only out of the box — it was out of this galaxy.

I was in outer space selling vibrators to no one. Because there was no one there—just me and my stupid idea.

Start-Up Lesson #2: Fitting in is for losers. But standing out too much is for idiots.

Guess what happened?

Nothing!

Predictably, I had no sales. No customers. No fans.
Zero!
Nada!

Also, I was burning through money faster than Charlie Sheen was burning through condoms.

I needed a new strategy.

Start-Up Lesson #3: We never quit, we pivot.

Just make it pink, goddamnit

Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what’s wrong with it.
— Rex Harrison

Safe to say that after the Ohackers-incident my exhilaration level dropped significantly. I felt like an air balloon without air. Like a used condom tossed in a bush. Like a bird without wings.

Ok, so this whole super-out-of-the-box thinking was stupid.

No more orgasm hackers, secret communities, and being afraid of Chinese Louis Vuitton factories trying to steal my product.

As Daenerys Targaryen, I was about to show my babies to the world.

But first, my baby needed a facelift and a new name.

Bye-bye, Odapter!

Hello, Viberry!

(You don’t get it?! Vibrating berry!? Ok, maybe I’m not so good with names.)

Anyhow…

Finally, I had a product I was proud of.

It was cute. It was pink. And most importantly, it wasn’t a secret.

It was time to make some women orgasm, y’all.

Start-Up Lesson #4: “For every dollar, you invest in the product, invest one Bitcoin in advertising.”
—David Ogilvy

AdWords, Facebook Ads, YouTube, local newspaper… here I come.

Account Terminated Due To Nudity or Sexual Content

What!!!???

Who would have thought that in a world in which my 13-year-old neighbor organizes PornHub fuckathons with his friends and giggles teasingly when I dare to say I have to stop at an ATM, I can not sell toothbrush vibrators on Facebook?

Not me, obviously.

It hasn’t even crossed my mind that advertising could be a problem. But it was! Selling sex products was a tough market to pe-ne-trate. #dadjokes #eeew

Joke aside, my whole world fell apart.

I wasn’t the Mother of Dragons; I was the mother of dragonflies.

A moment of silence for all the hope that died in me that day.

You can imagine how desperate I was. After recovering from the shock, I started looking for alternatives. There are other platforms out there, right?

I started advertising on PornHub…

I wrote press releases…

I contacted journalists…

No one gave a fuck!

No matter what I was trying, it didn’t work.

No one wanted to buy my vibrator,
no one wanted to steal my idea,
no one even cared.

Start-Up Lesson #5: It’s not the idea that counts, it’s the execution.

Winners never quit and quitters ne… you know the drill

I refused to believe that my baby-dragons were stillborn!

So I did what anybody in my position would do.

I started praying to the Holy Trinity (Gary Vaynerchuk, Seth Godin, and Neil Pate).

Start-Up Lesson #6: When they close the door, climb through the window. Unless they have a restraining order.

Google didn’t want my filthy sex toy money for ads?
No problem. Now they are sending me traffic for free.

Some weird cucumber article I wrote ranks 2nd on their first page. This post still brings me around 400 visitors a day. Free of charge.

YouTube didn’t allow my filthy sex ads on their platform?
No problem. Now I get my views for free.

Not my best work, but for the budget of one pizza 🍕, I think it’s good.

eBay and Amazon didn’t want me? I sold on Etsy.

I was on fire and five steps closer to making that “go fuck yourself” phone call to my old boss.

During the time I was actively promoting Viberry, I sold THREE THOUSAND PIECES!!!

Not enough to become a millionaire, but closer every day.

I was optimistic.
I was in the zone.
I was secretly shopping for beach houses.

Then a friend sent me this:

Actually, this is something I sent myself right now because I can’t find the other messages.

Either way, I was fucked!

First off, are you kidding me? I wasn’t the only one who thought about a toothbrush vibrator?

Such a disappointment…

Having a dirty mind was my biggest asset, and now I find out we’re all a bunch of perverts? Great, just great!

Second off, that LoveHoney vibrator is a joke. It goes over the toothbrush head? Over???!!!

The toothbrush head barely vibrates, you knuckleheads!
Have you at least cracked opened a toothbrush to see how it works?

Toothbrush vibrators generally suck.

Most of them feel like putting your iPhone on vibration, waiting for your mom to call, and wank off.

Not a winner, I’ve tried. (Sorry, mom!)

Let me explain why!

Because toothbrushes, iPhones, and vibrators, rely on a wobbly motor to make them vibrate. Something like this:

For the vibration to be strong, the motor needs to be big. That’s why big vibrators are better than bullet massagers. And that’s why phones and toothbrushes suck at making you cum.

You feel something… but unless you’re super-sensitive and are patient for 45 minutes, it’s not enough to make you scream for more.

This wobbly technology is outdated and ineffective because the vibration spreads all over and it’s weak.

Which is why badass vibrators don’t wobble, but oscillate. Meaning, they move super-fast from side to side.

Medical vibrators oscillate. Magic Wand vibrators — I mean, neck massagers — oscillate. And that guy’s tongue you’re so crazy about oscillates.

Well, sort of…

And do you know what else oscillates?
Yep! The metal tip on the Oral-B toothbrush.

This explains all the mind-blowing orgasms I was telling you about.

Because by attaching something like — I don’t know, A VIBERRY!—to the oscillating tip of an Oral-B, you create a truly badass, oscillating vibrator.

You must be wondering:

“Since oscillating vibrators are so great, how come Walmart’s not full of them?”

That’s what I thought as well, so I started digging around and found that there’s a US patent numbered 5.067,480 which prohibits sex-toy manufacturers to use this oscillating design in vibrators.

Toothbrush manufacturers don’t have any restrictions, apparently.

Third off, if LoveHoney was afraid of Oral-B’s lawyers, can you imagine how fast I’d shit my pants if they ever contacted me?

Fast, light-speed fast.

Start-Up Lesson #7: You don’t quit when the going gets rough. You quit when you know you’ve invested more than you’ll get out of it. Or when lawyers make you shit your pants.

After conducting a quick risk-benefit analysis in my head

Me: Do I want to shit my pants?
Me: No!

I decided that I will no longer invest time in promoting the Viberry.

Girl, don’t make a scene. It was just sex…

I’m still selling the Viberry.
I still think it’s the best vibrator EVER.
But I doubt it’s the best business idea ever…

Was this whole thing a failure?

I don’t know… *sigh*

On my bad days, I feel I wasted 2 years of my life chasing unicorn farts.

On my good days, I look back at all the things I’ve done, and I’m proud.

I managed to turn some abstract idea in my head into A REAL THING.
And that’s a BIG DEAL.

I also learned some unexpected lessons.

✔ I learned that working from home is cool, but also boring.
✔ I learned that there’s some good advice online, but mostly garbage.
✔ I learned that being an entrepreneur offers a lot of freedom, but sometimes you’re too stupid to know what to do with that freedom.
✔ I learned that even though I hated being employed, it’s pretty rad to know that you will be paid at the end of the month.
✔ I learned that it feels great to wake up to new orders and think Damn, I make money in my sleep.

✔ I also learned that I didn’t technically make money in my sleep, because I was working for free for 2 years before I could make a couple of bucks “in my sleep.”
✔ I learned that it takes time for people to notice you, but if you’re doing something helpful, you don’t give up, and you try to improve yourself constantly, something, somehow will happen, and people will hear your story.
✔ I learned that an idea doesn’t need to make you rich to be worth pursuing.
✔ I learned that even $1.000/month in ‘passive’ income makes a big difference.

✔ I learned that sometimes it’s better to be an optimistic fool who tries crazy stuff and ‘fails,’ than a realistic, smart ass who finds fault in all ideas and does nothing.

✔ I learned that some women are disgusted by their vaginas and think I’m a sick-sick person for using a toothbrush ‘down there.’
✔ I learned that most women think that their vagina is yummy and they have no issue putting a toothbrush handle near it.
✔ I learned that men buy vibrators too. Surprisingly, about 60% of my customers are actually guys.
✔ I learned that people who ask a lot of question, make unreasonable requests, and have lots of objections won’t buy no matter how well you handle them.
✔ I learned that finishing something that isn’t perfect is better than working forever at something you want to be perfect.

I learned this, and a lot more…

And at the end, isn’t this what being an entrepreneur is all about? Learning…

Like my dad used to say:

“Every kick in the ass is a step forward.”