“You guys don’t sell wine … You sell fun.”
Subscribe to
NextShark's Newsletter
A daily dose of Asian America's essential stories, in under 5 minutes.
Get our collection of Asian America's most essential stories to your inbox daily for free.
Unsure? Check out our Newsletter Archive.
“We became complete stalkers. We watched all the episodes and read up on each of them. We ultimately assigned different values to each shark, based on how much we thought they could help us out. We also had friends who knew the show pretend to be each shark to try and match their personalities.”
“Tons and tons and tons of practice. We constantly recorded ourselves and watched the footage back. We planned for the absolute worst, and hoped for the best. We didn’t want lack of preparation to be the thing that prevented us from getting a deal.”
“On the business side, we really tried to remove all (as many as possible) of the risks associated with a consumer products startup. We worked hard to outsource our manufacturing and sign on with a distributor. This allowed the sharks to feel confident that money they put in was going into a well-oiled machine … a bright neon machine!
On a personal level, we really tried to bring the energy! Our product is fun and we wanted to convey that. At the end of the day, the sharks have to want to work with you as people, and who doesn’t want to work with fun people?!”
“We knew we wanted Mark from the start. He got what we were trying to do with BeatBox right away. He’s in Texas and he’s a genius.”
“Mark is incredibly hands on! We kicked off with a three-hour strategy session (only days after his hip surgery by the way) and are in constant contact with him on email and Cyberdust. We haven’t quite received an ass-kicking just yet, but he is QUICK to tell us about things he disagrees with.”
“Most importantly, the importance of staying focused. We went into the strategy session with hundreds of ideas on how we were going to grow BeatBox, and Mark cut it down to one. Rather than just telling us what to do, Mark explains his thought process.”
“The BeatBox team has five co-founders, and we all contribute something completely different. There is a huge level of respect we have for one another which is always a solid foundation. We’re so focused on growing the business that there’s really no time for much else. When things do get tense, we take the bag out of the box and slap the bag!”
“ABC put the fear of God into us to not utter a word about the results. It was insanely hard to do. A lot of the deals made on the show don’t actually close, so we didn’t want to jinx it.”
“We’ve been getting tons of calls from people all over who want to try BeatBox and bring it to their parties. We’re recruiting people to represent the BeatBox brand in their areas. We’re trying to make the most of the attention to help get the word out about the product and get more distribution in place.”
