Shark Tank is such an interesting concept for me. You have a bunch of multi-millionaires in some set in Los Angeles waiting for people to enter the boardroom and pitch their ideas for a product or service. The products that get pitched to them range from pretty normal items like a sponge that looks like a face to a service where a guy draws a cat for you. There are so many different things that get pitched to the Sharks, as they are called. (The show is called Shark Tank.) And a few of them manage to land an offer from the Sharks. But often the pitches weren’t enough for them to bite.
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Even though I watched the pitch that Joe Moore gave the Sharks for First Defense Nasal Screens, I was still a bit confused by it. So you have non-woven filters that you stick on your nose and it covers up your nostrils. And that’s pretty much it. You can basically go on with your life like you normally do. It’s a fairly straightforward pitch that Joe made to the Sharks. He was only asking for an investment worth $500,000 for a 10% stake in the company. While it doesn’t seem like that much money from the five billionaires that he was pitching to, $500,000 is still a pretty hefty investment for a company that you aren’t will take off.
As the pitch goes on, each of the five Sharks are throwing questions towards Joe to better understand what they would potentially get into. Joe mentioned that he had already sold 1.7 million units of the product at the time that he was pitching it and he was actually had a deal in Saudi Arabia to produce about 8 million worth of units within the next six years. He even showed the Sharks the contract that he signed for that specific deal. The Sharks got more interested in the product once they heard of that deal.
Barbara Corcoran didn’t really bite because as she mentions, it’ll take a bit of money to do an educational campaign for the product. That’s one of the biggest things that you have to overcome whenever you build a relatively new product that many people haven’t tried yet. The application for the product is simple enough to understand. But how the product works, with regards to the science behind it, is what would confuse a lot of people. Joe explains that we breathe in more through our noses than our mouths. And bacteria and viruses grow more in the nasal cavities that in the mouth, esophagus or stomach linings.
Eventually, the rest of the Sharks put in their offers. Some of the offers escalate they’re giving more money for a larger stake in the company and a certain percentage of royalties. It came to a point that Joe was offer $4,000,000 for a 100% stake in the company, one of the largest offers made in the history of the show. But Joe didn’t accept that deal, because he probably wants to still be able to have a stake in the company that he built. Eventually they settled on $750,000 for a 30% stake and season tickets to Dallas Mavericks games. Joe accepted the deal but it didn’t really materialize into anything.
Joe still pretty much owns the company as president and CEO. He has managed to leverage the attention he got through the show to expand the product to other territories. He had signed a deal with a healthcare provider in India to help sell his products there. It seems that the product is relatively popular in countries like Saudi Arabia and Japan where air pollution is a big factor why people wear masks frequently. Fast forward to now, where we have gone through a global pandemic. It seems that a lot of people bought First Defense Nasal Screens to augment the efficacy of filtering germs along with regular mask wearing.
It’s definitely interesting how television still plays a huge role in getting people to notice a product. If a million or so households watched that episode of Shark Tank, you have a million or so people interested in trying your product. While the product may look weird when you look at it up close, there’s still a likelihood that you’re going to be less likely to breathe in any allergens or bacteria.
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