The reality of Shark Tank pitches: What founders can learn from Hollywood

Alex, show them how easy this is.

Come on, Alex, Kick it hard.

Come on, Alex.

Looks.

Alex, kick it.

How much you sell the deadlocks for?

All right, so let's talk about what you do when your demo actually fails.

All right, let's break down the top five best Shark Tank pitches today. Everything you can learn from them. But you're going to be very surprised. Surprise. About why I chose them.

Simply put, we're in the business to help you do your business.

Hold that business. The American toilet.

You know, there's very few people that realize that the toilet and the sitting position that it puts you in plays a big part in a lot of the colon issues that we have, such as constipation. Anatomically, we have a muscle called the pub rectalis muscle that wraps around the base of our colon, forming a kink. And when we're sitting on the toilet, this kink only partially relaxes.

And only when we are in a squat position does this muscle completely relax and allows us to have a complete and full elimination of our waist.

So what I really love about this is that in a very short period of time, you understood what the product was and what it can do for you. So when you can. In the first, literally this was like 41 seconds of the pitch. Educate the audience, you're gonna pull them in, they're gonna get curious. Let's see what happens next.

Here you just sold $2 million of Squatty Potties in the first two quarters. So how do you sell them to who?

They'? Online.

You know, we have a website and Amazon. We're not in retail yet. Holy crap.

You're selling crap. They said their stat and their metric and the thing that, like, trumps everything else, which is are you actually selling to customers? Are you actually making money? Basically said $2 million in two quarters. He didn't say six months. Quarters are what you say when you're a salesperson or you're thinking about sales. Why can't somebody just get a stack of books and lift their legs up?

I mean, squatty potty is designed specifically for the task. It's perfectly ang. The perfect width. It's like cutting a steak with a butter knife.

Right?

You're gonna get it, but it's not gonna be as good.

I'm not sure about the analogy of the steak with the butter knife, but I guess that does kind of work. But we're talking about potty, and we're talking about food, so maybe there was a little bit of a miss there. But here's actually the key lesson from it, you can easily negate a lot of things that folks say and easily deflect it. So the deflection here was like, hey, do you want to use the right tool for the job or not? Of course you want to use the right tool for the job. Really powerful way to dismiss something like that when someone's essentially proposing what I would call a hacky solution.

Guys, look, with those margins, you got to be pooping cash, right? What do you need 350,000 for?

So we have so many opportunities, we can't fund them all. One of the biggest thing that we want is FDA compliance and medical reimbursement coverage for this product and getting this as a medical device. And this is where this takes this from a as seen on TV direct response product to a real legitimate medical product.

You know what, that was fantastic. This is the exact strategy I use when people ask me or ask friends of mine and I tell them how to do this on what do you want the capital for? Here's a key thing. When you're getting money from investors, it's super easy to focus on what you did before, what you're doing now. What this guy did when he got asked the question about capital, he did the right thing. He said, hey, this is what I'm going to use it for. And here's essentially why that's important. But the implication is simply, we're going to go use it for these things. They're going to make us more money. All right, up next, jack sheets. Let's see what we can learn from it.

Pop quiz. How often do you think single men on average wash your bed sheets? Once a week?

Never.

Yeah.

Once a month?

Never.

No. On average, single men only wash their bed sheets every three months.

No way.

That's right.

It's so gross that their pillowcases, like thousands and thousands and thousands of times more dirty than a toilet seat.

Here's the awesome part of this. Every business, every problem for that business, that product, the startup, whatever it is, any category, there's always a stat. So basically, you could work backward into a narrative like this just based on a stat, as long as you can also find an obvious question that's rhetorical about the problem you're trying to solve. Now here's the thing. The most painful problems, they have these key questions and they have these key facts. This is a simple framework of question, answer, fact. You can use that for an intro to almost anything, any pitch. You just have to make sure that you have a key stat that's Mind blowing.

You're an honest guy, man.

I don't lie. I'm sorry.

So who's running this company with you?

It's just me, myself, in my garage, just hanging out, you know, with my lawn chair.

That's my setup.

I've been there. Wow.

It's a good time. My friends come over.

You're living the life.

I'm actually living it. Like, even being here, this is a big time.

That was so personal. It was just like, why wouldn't you want to root for this guy? And so when you have something that's like that deeply personal of, like, I'm working on it alone from my garage, and he's got the pics of it and he's enjoying himself because this stuff sucks. Let's just admit it. Startups, business, all of that, especially starting from scratch, it just sucks. It's grueling, so you got to find the fun in it. Now, here's the thing. When you're having fun, everybody knows. Your investors know, your team knows, everybody just knows. It makes people feel like you can make it through anything. Because if you can make it through the early days where you're working on your own and you're working on the idea, and you're even showing these, like, this messy garage with all this stuff and your experiments or what have you that you've been doing, if that's fun to you, why wouldn't an investor want to invest in that? Up next, we've got Haven's pitch.

Hi, Sharks. My name is Alex Bertelli, and I'm a former army special operations helicopter pilot and the CEO of Haven, the world's strongest smart lock.

This one was just leaning on the intro being all about expertise and the person's role. It wasn't that powerful. Somewhat interesting, but kind of boring. And the connection of someone being in the military and building this kind of lock, it really didn't fit for me. But let's see the rest of the pitch, Sharks.

Not long ago, Clay and I both experienced a series of break ins in our neighborhoods. In reality, a break in occurs every 18 seconds here in the United States. We quickly realize it doesn't matter if you lock your doors or not. The traditional deadbolt just isn't getting the job done.

There you go. That is how I would have started. I would not have started with the expertise. Instead, I would have started with a personal experience and then put the expertise of military or whatever into it later. And if they would have started this way, it would have been way more engaging and pulling. You in why? Because they talk about a personal experience. And there's nothing more powerful than talking about a personal experience to help people level, set and understand why you might have started this business.

This is your standard deadbolt. While it may feel secure when, when you lock it, an experienced intruder can get in in about five kicks. Alex, show them how easy this is.

Come on, Alex, kick it hard.

Come on, Alex.

Alex, kick it.

How much you sell the deadlocks for?

All right, so let's talk about what you do when your demo actually fails. First of all, you do what this guy did. You kind of brush it over and you just keep going. But don't get frazzled. I think when people get frazzled, that's when it's like you're almost demonstrating that under pressure you don't know what to do. And I think that's the key, because everything when you're dealing with an investor, you've probably not met them a lot, you probably don't know everyone in the room, and you're trying to bring out your personality the way you do things and things like that. And any moment like this, it can help someone understand what you're going to do when there's actually a problem in your business.

This isn't going well.

Typically, a break in can happen in less than two minutes in the United States. One in 36 homes in America will have a break in. Smart locks based at the deadbolt are no better.

Alex? Sure. We're gonna show you how Haven works.

As you can tell, I'm not an experienced intruder. I'm good. But show them how Haven works.

Clay Haven sits at the bottom of the floor, right next to the existing threshold. When activated, the wedge based barrier lifts up. Using simple physics, this makes your entire door ten times stronger. To preventing home break ins.

An exercise here on products like Haven or something like that, where you have a demo is to actually think about before you do it. Kind of like what they call a pre mortem, where you actually try to think of what's going to fail, what's going to happen, what could go wrong, and then make sure you have some awareness that if it goes wrong, what will you do? And even if you just remind yourself, hey, if something goes wrong, it's okay, we're just going to keep going. And oftentimes if there's multiple people pitching, that can be really valuable. So you can both get aligned on what's going to happen or what do we do if these XYZ things happen. All right, up next we have Scrub Daddy.

I'M known as the daddy of the Scrub Daddy, the cutest but most high tech scrubbing tool in the world. It's the greatest kitchen scrubbing tool you ever used because Scrub Daddy completely changes its texture by just adjusting your water temperature. Here, I got some hot water here, we've got some cold water. When I merse the scrub that I use in the hot and cold water, a complete transformation occurs here. Under the 10 pounds, it's soft and compressible. And that's like a sponge. That's for your general scrubbing applications. But here, check that out. It's hard and firm. That's going to be for heavy duty scrubbing applications.

Wow. Wow. Scrub Daddy. It's like a very clear product pitch. And what I mean by that is they're actually demonstrating their product and it feels like they know the problems they're trying to solve because that pitch would just crisp like, hey, this is kind of like a multipurpose scrubber. This is clearly somebody that knows how to pitch their product at least. So people get excited about it.

When I hear qvc, no disrespect to Laurie, when a company's sales are completely dependent on QVC, that's a disaster waiting to happen. I've got 3,000 stores lined up right now that we're going to be in 3,000 stores. I understand, but even, okay, put aside QVC, you're still a one product company, right? Not for long. We've got Scrub Mommy, we've got Scrub Baby for doing baby bottles. I've got a holder that sits it on your sink and it's got drains in the legs.

To be honest, in almost all categories, you end up having to become a multi product company. When it comes to consumer packaged goods, you essentially need to do that even faster. And so I'm really impressed with the response. I'm also impressed with the question because an investor who doesn't ask that of certain types of companies probably doesn't understand how those companies scale. So this idea of, hey, this is a one product company guy, dude's like, no, I'm daddy, I got mommy, I got baby, I got all kinds of things going on. It's fantastic.

Our QVC does over 8 billion in sales a year and I've done over 500 million myself.

Yes, you have. And you rotate products in and out of there and once those products are out, they're out.

These kind of interactions on Shark Tank and other places where you can see multiple people willing to discuss the startup and idea in front of the founder, you kind of get to see this idea of what are the different opinions that might be in the room about our business. Now, if I take this to a very basic level, I'm gonna give you one tip. What are the objections an investor would have and how can you make sure you understand them all the way to the point where I would recommend writing them down and analyzing your pitch deck, your pitch against those objections and making sure they're either addressed or at least semi addressed so that they don't come up when they actually talk to you. And the way you do this is by essentially writing these down, writing the potential objections, prioritizing like the top three or five, depending on how long your pitch is, and seeing how you can address them right in the narrative. And now we've got Tree Tipi's pitch.

My name is Johnny Georges and I'm the creator of the Tree TP water containment system. I'm asking for $150,000 for 20% of my company.

I have to point this out. This is a reason I included this scene from this pitch. It's that you never really want to tell an investor exactly how much you want to raise for what percentage of the company. So that's very much a shark tank. How do we commercialize startup land or investment, things like that? So I just want to make this clear. You're not really going to start a conversation talking about the valuation that you're going for, because that 150k for 20% implies a certain valuation, which is exactly what people start writing down. And now they already have this misconception in their heads and all this stuff. So in real life, this is not how you want it to go down. This is something you literally never want to do. There's some rare circumstances, but in general, you don't really want to do this, especially if you're pitching someone who's going to be a lead for the business in terms of leading the round. You should definitely talk about how much you want to raise, but you don't need to talk about what the valuation is going to be.

3Tp is water conservation and frost protection at its finest. Instead of using 25,000 gallons per tree per year, we're now only using 800 gallons per tree per year and doing a better job with a 30% increase in the growth of new trees and letting the farmer get his return on his money a whole lot faster.

25,000 gallons versus 800 gallons because of the tree TP. Yeah, call me convinced when you have such a clear value prop of how Your innovation is going to save time, money, resources, et cetera. You got to lead with that.

When good people come together.

When good people come together.

With a noble cause, great things happen. And water conservation is what 3tp is all about.

The thing about this one is typically when people get emotional like that, they kind of lose it. Or you can really, like, feel it in a different way than him. But, like, he recovered and he just kept going and you kind of pulled you in and it made it more relatable because there's something there that got at least me curious about, well, what's he gonna say? Why is he kind of tearing up kind of thing or, you know, speaking much softer than he normally does. And it's because I think it, it like kind of pulled a heartstring for him, what he was saying. And this whole business, very relatable, very pull you in sort of thing. And I don't think it's a strategy. It felt really genuine. Can you tell us how it works?

The normal way it's been has been without any kind of containment. A farmer crank on his pumps and run them 10 hours, 12 hours. With the tree TP, you contain the water around each tree. In about 30 minutes, you're going to have 3 inches of rain on this tree. And if I pull this tree teepee off, we're watering nine feet that way and nine feet that way, and it's just really wasting the water. About 10% gets to the tree.

And nobody figured out a way to make a nozzle that shoots down towards the tree roots?

Yes, sir. But you still get the wind diffusion from that.

When you're talking to investors, a lot of times they'll just throw something random at you. It could have been intentional. It could have just been random and off the cuff. But usually, let's just say it's harmless, assuming kind of positive intent. The person is just trying to see if you can engage with it. They're just trying to get a better understanding of your product and some of the considerations around it. So I was really happy to see kind of this interaction because we can learn, we can all learn a lot from it. Bottom line is, when you're asked a question, just be ready to answer it and be ready to answer it with the proper answer that helps someone else understand your product.

This last phrase, I go out to a grove. I'm putting out five teepees. This woman gets out and she walks up to me and she says, you're trespassing in my grove. And I said, yes, ma' am, but I'm trying to show you something that's getting ready to freeze. We have the best frost protection device on the market right here we could put on. And she says, you've got to go or I'm calling the police. And I said, yes, ma', am, here's my card. I'm sorry. You know, because these are farmers. This is their land, this is their livelihood. So a week later, I get a call from the same woman. Hey, Johnny, this is Mrs. I said, yes, ma'. Am. She says, I want to pay you for them five TP trees. And I said, yes, ma', am, that's okay. Don't worry about it. She says, well, I want you to bring me 4,995 more. The only five trees I got alive today.

Wow.

And my whole grove is these.

The number one thing we can learn is that story is the most powerful thing in the world. We are. We all kind of know that there's all these pithy statements and quotes about stories and narratives and Pixar's Heroes Journey and all that, but you don't really understand it until you actually have a story to tell and you see that story resonate with other people. It has this sort of framework. It's like, who's the customer? What was the experience you had? What was the narrative behind it? How did you get there? How did you get to the point of even being able to talk to that customer? And then what problem did you actually solve for them?