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PROVO — Tired of having to turn on the light for those late-night trips to the bathroom? A Provo man has created a product to solve that problem and launched it on Kickstarter.
As a business management student at Brigham Young University, Matt Alexander said he has been “entrepreneurially minded for a long time.” In August 2013, he was throwing around some business ideas with his brother-in-law and now business partner, Mike Kannely, when they came up with the idea of the IllumiBowl.
“I absolutely hate turning on the light in the middle of the night and waking myself up,” Kannely said. “If you are a boy and you pee in the dark and you miss, then your wife gets mad at you.”
IllumiBowl serves as a motion-sensor night light and eliminates the need to turn on a light by illuminating the toilet bowl. The light attaches to the outside edge of the toilet bowl, but doesn’t touch the areas inside the toilet, Alexander said. The LED light and motion sensor are battery powered.
Alexander said he built a mockup prototype and launched the product on a few Facebook yardsale pages to gauge people’s interest.
“In, like, three hours, we had sold 120 of them,” he said. “I knew I was onto something. It gained a lot of popularity, so we decided to throw it on Kickstarter.”
The Kickstarter was launched Oct. 18 and it had raised over $70,000 as of Wednesday evening. Alexander said he was surprised at the response the product received from a wide variety of demographics.
“We’ve had college students buy it because they think it looks cool,” he said. “We’ve had moms buy it for potty training with their little kids. It’s kind of every spectrum has ended up buying it.”
The IllumiBowl will initially be sold only online, but Alexander said he’d like to branch out to retailers in the future.
