Healthcare, Dental & Direct-to-Consumer
Bringing custom jaw pain relief home, no dentist's chair required.
Venture Overview
Duration / Aug 2024 - Nov 2026
The Venture
Clench Relief, Inc. A direct-to-consumer, custom-fit mouthpiece for TMJ pain that patients fit themselves at home, without the need for a dental office visit.
Challenge
Millions of people live with jaw pain and are let down by treatments that cost a lot and don't last. Could we deliver custom relief at a price and convenience people actually want, and turn it into a real business?
End Deliverable
Led customer discovery and the customer experience from incubation, and designed and built the storefront. Then created the go-to-market strategy and launched the business. Now, as Co-Founder & GM, I run it from head to toe, covering operations and full administration.
The Team
(1) Co-Founder & CEO
(1) Co-Founder & Chief Dental Officer
(1) Co-Founder & Investor
(1) Principal Venture Builder, Now Co-Founder & GM (me)
My Role / Principal Venture Builder, then Co-Founder & GM
Core Responsibility
A live, revenue-generating D2C business: a Shopify storefront with a go-to-market engine across Meta, TikTok, and content, and a product line for individuals and dental offices.
Introduction
In August 2024, I joined Clench Relief as Principal Venture Builder. The idea was a custom-fit mouthpiece for TMJ pain that people could fit themselves at home, built on a sports mouthguard that Dr. Frey, a dentist, had designed. My mission was to find out whether that idea was a real business, and if it was, to get it to its first customers.
I started with the people living with jaw pain, then shaped the product, the offer, and the launch around what they told us. In February 2026, I stepped in as Co-Founder & GM, and I now run the business day-to-day.
The Challenge
About 26 million Americans live with TMD, the jaw condition most people call TMJ. Three in four of the patients we interviewed were strongly dissatisfied with what they'd tried. Mouthguards that protect your teeth and do nothing for your jaw. Treatments that cost a lot and don't last. Specialists who were mostly guessing.
The spark was a happy accident. When Dr. Frey added an alignment guide to his sports mouthguard, it seemed to ease jaw symptoms. Cool story, but a cool story isn't a business yet. So I framed the question we'd chase: could we give people real relief that costs less and doesn't need a dentist's chair?
Key Takeaway
Even after years and thousands of dollars, many people hadn't found anything that worked. The job wasn't only relief. It was earning back their trust.
Pain was only part of it. Money, trust, and feeling alone kept people searching.
Learning Their Pain
Before anyone built anything, I went and talked to people. Three groups: folks living with TMD, Dr. Frey's own patients, and dentists. Fifteen pains came out of those interviews, and most weren't about the jaw. Cost, no insurance, guesswork, and the feeling that nobody knew how to help.
Key Takeaway
Choosing Who Goes First
Pain wasn't the only thing that moved people. I plotted every pain by how often it's felt against how much it keeps someone searching. Four rose to the top:
Unbearable jaw pain
No affordable options
Fear it gets worse
Embarrassment.
Willingness to pay followed pain and emotion, so I called it: start with millennials in severe pain. They'd pay to make it stop.
Key Learnings
The first customer isn't the biggest segment. It's the one who needs it most.
Choosing Who Goes First
We ran a 15-person pilot. Average pain dropped from 7 to 3 after a week. That's a small sample, so I call it a strong signal, not proof.
Key Learnings
The biggest learning was about the model. We couldn't sell it as a prescription, so we scrapped that version and went direct-to-consumer.
Fitting the guard at home confused a lot of people.
Patients wanted to see the research before they'd buy.
Sizing the Opportunity
Before we spent a dollar on growth, I sized the market and mapped the competition: custom prescription devices, stock guards off the drugstore shelf, and mail-in impression kits. Few of them go after TMD directly.
Our model says about $2.4B total and $102M we could realistically win. Those are assumptions on a slide, and I say so.
Key Learnings
A big market only matters if there's a gap in it. Here, the gap was convenience and trust.
Planning the Go-to-Market
Now I knew who to go after and what they cared about. The next question was how to reach them. I wrote the go-to-market plan around community. People with jaw pain feel like they're dealing with it alone, so I didn't want to just buy clicks. I wanted to build a community of advocates.
Key Learnings
Ads can find people. Community and education are what make them trust us enough to buy.
Earn trust with education
Rank for the way people actually search, like "TMD relief" and "at-home TMJ treatment." Then work with Dr. Frey on blogs, videos, and patient stories that answer the questions people already have.
Testing told us two things. The product worked, and the first fitting was the shaky part. So the customer experience became part of the product.
The first fitting
The biggest risk to the business was simple. If people couldn't fabricate the mouthpiece the first time, they'd leave reviews saying the product was a bust. I gave it a whole page of its own.
A dedicated fabrication instructions page on the storefront.
Revamped instructions on the packaging, with detailed steps, pictures, and a full walkthrough.
Fabrication videos we recorded and added to the page.
The product line
Two sides, built for two different buyers.
For consumers: the Starter Kit, plus Replacement Fit Material for people who keep using it.
For dentists: a Bulk Kit for dental offices to sell to their own patients.
Clench Relief is still going, and so is the learning. This is what we're producing today, and what I've picked up along the way.
We haven't stopped at our own storefront. As of October 2026, Clench Relief is live on TikTok Shop, which gives us another way for people to find us and buy.
I'm building a new community there too, through TikTok ads and affiliate and UGC marketing, with real people sharing their own stories. It's the same community-first plan from the start, in a new place. And more to come.
Today’s Results
Clench Relief went from $0 to a six-figure annual run rate.
It holds a 55% profit margin after ad spend and cost of goods.
Customers keep coming back, and the storefront converts.
What I’ve learned so far
People weren't only buying relief. They were buying trust: research they can see, and a guide that holds their hand while they fit it.
Launching was the fun part. Running the business is where I learn the most, because I run the ads, support, shipping, and the numbers, and every call I make shows up in the results.
Community first
Partner with micro-influencers, and the occasional macro-influencer, in wellness, dental care, and chronic pain communities. Give patients a place to share their stories and successes, and keep showing real testimonials, educational posts, and product tips on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
Paid media to feed it
Meta and TikTok to reach people with jaw pain, with testimonials and creative that show how easy and comfortable it is. A little Google spend catches people who are already searching.
Building the Experience
The research for crediability
People wanted proof, so we built a blog and articles page. It's filled with Dr. Frey's 30 years of experience treating TMJ: what he knows about the market, the products he's tried, and the patients he's worked with.
The articles cover the whole picture, from identifying TMJ, to low-cost treatments, to how treatments are developed, to other solutions people can try.
Where It Stands Today