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Necessity breeds invention. Steve Sudell works as a physical therapist at a clinic in Venice, California, where he helps athletes prepare for competition and prevent injury. His side hustle, the Neck Hammock, grew out of a problem he'd been carrying around for years: his own neck pain.
Steve had dealt with neck pain since his playing days in sports, and the one treatment that worked every time was cervical traction, something he confirmed both on himself and, once he became a PT, with his own patients. The catch was that getting it meant a trip to the clinic and a $2,000 machine. One day, after tweaking his neck again during a workout, he wrapped a long resistance band around a pole, lay down on it for ten minutes, and the pain was gone.
Turning that idea into a product took two and a half years. It had to fit snugly and securely around the back of the head, stay comfortable, and be portable enough to travel with, all while staying affordable, since nobody makes an impulse buy of a $2,000 machine. Along the way, Steve picked up digital marketing, product design, accounting, social media, and retail sales, skills he calls one of the biggest unexpected payoffs of the whole process. Since launching the Neck Hammock, he's sold more than 57,000 units at an average price of $50.
His biggest ongoing challenge has been imitators and counterfeiters. He calls it a systematic problem, and even patents and intellectual property protection only go so far. His advice to anyone with a physical-product idea: don't sit on it, because it's the people who take action who succeed. He also recommends taking accounting classes, since the creative side of a business is the fun part, but accounting keeps it afloat, and he points to relationships and connections as one of the most undervalued assets a founder can build.
On the sales side, Steve's site pushes buyers toward a three-tier checkout: the Neck Hammock alone for $49.99, a bundle with an eye mask, an ebook, and a cooling rub for $70, or a couples bundle with two of everything for $109, a setup built to lift the average order well above that $50 base price. He's currently developing a newer version of the device, with plans for a full line of affordable, portable products to help with pain relief throughout the body.
