After leaving engineering jobs at Amazon three years ago, Brett Skaloud and Jeff Feiereisen built a showerhead startup with social media virality, thousands of customers and $5 million in projected annual revenue.
They still couldn’t land a deal on Friday’s episode of ABC’s “Shark Tank” due to making what billionaire investor Mark Cuban referred to as “the biggest mistake startups make”: trying to grow their brand too quickly.
Skaloud and Feiereisen co-founded Boona, a Seattle-based company that makes a $249 showerhead called the “Tandem.” It attaches to most standard extant showers, turning them into couples’ showers by adding a new stream of water on the opposite wall.
On the show, they asked for $400,000 in exchange for 10% of their startup — saying they wanted to expand Boona past the Tandem, into additional product lines and revenue streams.
“We want to build a brand,” Feiereisen said. “We have a lot of [intellectual property] around this product, but we’re not banking the business on it. I mean, the next obvious opportunity for us is just the handhelds.”
The statement raised a red flag for at least a couple of the show’s investor judges.
“I don’t buy it as a company yet, I see it as a very interesting innovation as a product,” said Kevin O’Leary. “Some of the greatest deals in ‘Shark Tank’ history [are] when the entrepreneur focused on that one application and maxed it out.”
“That’s our focus right now,” Skaloud responded.
“Well, I’m not sure. You were telling me about building a business, other SKUs, a brand strategy, which scares me,” O’Leary said.
Cuban backed up O’Leary, adding that when startups make this mistake, “they want to be a brand, as opposed to just executing on selling their product. [But] what builds a brand is your execution.”
“That’s why for us, the absolute focus is definitely on Tandem. And if we do create new products, it’s to support Tandem,” Feiereisen said, trying to reel investors back in.
‘You came to the advice tank’
At the time of…
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