Meet Techstars San Diego powered by SDSU Fall 2023 alum Dan Evans; a 2x hardware founder whose previous company, RecoverX, a battery power icepack and heating pad, was acquired by Hyperice in 2020.

Dan is now the CEO of Babba Care Inc. Their flagship product is a dual cooling and warming baby bottle that enables parents to easily feed their baby on the go.  Babba baby bottles cool milk for hours at a time and can warm the milk to body temperature in minutes.

We chatted with Dan on his startup journey. Check out our “5 Questions” interview with Dan below:  

Who inspired you to start Babba?

It all started when my wife and I got pregnant with our first child, Landon.  My wife is a travel blogger, so we were used to going somewhere new almost every weekend, but our friends warned us that the traveling would come to an end once our baby arrived. 

That’s because getting out of the house is such a challenge with a baby - they need a bottle every 3 hours.  We’d pack a bottle into a cooler bag, add an icepack, which was cumbersome and heavy, just so the milk would stay cold.  We also had to carry a thermos of hot water so we could warm the bottle back up. It was a huge hassle; I knew there had to be a better way, so I got to prototyping.  

How is Babba’s solution to this problem different from other solutions on the market?

There was no single solution I could find that both cooled and warmed milk. Every current cooling option relies on ice, which is the same “technology” cavemen used to store their food.  The only advancements were on the warming side - using heated wires to warm the milk.  

Babba uses a completely different type of technology that utilizes heat transfer. We pull heat out of the milk to cool it down to refrigeration-level temperatures. Then, when it’s time to heat, we transfer heat into the milk to warm it back up to body temperature.  

What advice do you have for fellow hardware founders?

We’ve likely all heard the common adage “hardware is hard”. But, I believe, it depends on your experience. 

In my eyes, building a software company is hard! Hardware is what I know and what I’ve been building since college, so certain things come naturally to me. 

The biggest mistake I see fellow hardware founders make is immediately getting an engineer involved. This is unnecessary out of the gate. Many startups need hundreds of versions of their product they can test with customers before they achieve Product-Market fit. With a goal of getting through as many of those versions as quickly as possible, you should create ugly, but quick, prototypes early on.  

You can draw an idea in 3 seconds, build it out of cardboard in 3 minutes, and 3D print it in 3 hours. The engineering work of creating circuit boards and professionally made mechanical parts takes 3 months or more.  

Have as many conversations with customers using quick prototypes as you can before you move on to the timely and expensive engineering process.  

What was your biggest challenge in building Babba? How did you overcome it?  

As an engineer whose expertise is in portable cooling and heating, product development is my wheelhouse, marketing is the challenging thing for me. Yet and still, I underestimated how much work the marketing would be. 

Sadly, many companies these days are just buying cheap products from Asia and slapping their logo on it without doing any of their own engineering development. Consumers realize this so they’re doing their own research to validate a company. 

When a consumer does their own research, they check many channels which means a company like Babba needs to be omnipresent - a professional website, positive customer reviews, consistent content on Instagram and TikTok, articles appearing in search results, unboxing videos on YouTube, discussions on forums, podcast interviews…

It’s a lot, but we’re tackling it the best we can. 

What’s your vision for Babba in the next few years?

There really isn’t another company out there doing what we do. No one is obsessing over creating innovative products to create convenient ways to help new parents feed their babies.

While Babba’s cooling and warming baby bottle is our flagship product, our goal is to create additional products that simplify life for new parents - whether at home, on the road, or in the air. Our goal is to become the go-to brand for on-the-go baby solutions, offering premium-quality products that make life easier for modern parents. The Babba cooling and warming baby bottle is just the beginning.

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To learn more about Babba, check out:

• The Babba Website: https://babbacare.com/

• Babba on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/babba_official/

• CEO, Dan Evans on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dan-evans-28b2bb2a/

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