How Our Medical Device Business Grew 50% YoY

This is a follow up story for Pain Care Labs a dba of MMJ Labs. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 6 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

We’re Pain Care Labs, a 7 woman scale-up in the medical device industry. Our mission is to eliminate unnecessary pain, and we’ve been preparing for this pandemic for 15 years.

The backstory: As a pediatric emergency doctor, I knew needle pain mattered to patients, if not necessarily doctors. I invented a vibrating ice pack bee called Buzzy(r) to block the pain from my kids’ vaccinations, and it worked. As I got more disturbed by kids’ unnecessary pain and the fear that comes from a bad medical experience, I decided to go part-time to develop the device and see if it worked for other kids besides mine. To qualify for a $1.1 million NIH small business grant for R&D, I had to start a company, so that’s how all this started.

The first shiny object research distraction: We launched Buzzy in 2009, and as part of the research I discovered needle fear had skyrocketed 252%. I published why and did a TEDx and TEDMED.