Luck may have been what got Ring founder Jamie Siminoff cast for Shark Tank, but preparing for the pitch that supercharged his company required nothing short of Olympic-level preparation.
It had barely been a year since his company, DoorBot, had released its first iteration of a video-enabled doorbell, but that didn’t stop Siminoff from taking a leap of faith and applying to be featured on Shark Tank.
Out of the 30,000 or more people that applied to be on the popular business reality series that year, Siminoff said he was lucky enough to make the cut—and then also lucky to make it on air. Yet, making the most of his pitch was something else entirely, he told Fortune.
“We did get lucky, but lots of people get lucky and don’t take advantage of the luck,” Siminoff said.
For him, going on the show was just one of many pivotal moments in which he jumped in headfirst to take advantage of an opportunity that would later help make Ring the $1 billion success it is today.
Preparing for the pitch
Ahead of the pitch, Siminoff said he recreated the Shark Tank set as best he could in his backyard, with his neighbors standing in for the sharks and lobbing him questions.
“Once we got on [Shark Tank], I was like, ‘I’m training now. I’m Shaun White, training for the Olympics,’” Simoff said. “No stone will be unturned.”
He also watched and rewatched older episodes of Shark Tank, taking notes and preparing hundreds of potential questions for himself.
“I rewatched the people that I thought did the best job that would correlate to sort of how I wanted our company to be perceived,” he said.
The end result of Siminoff’s preparation: only one judge, Kevin O’Leary, also known as “Mr. Wonderful,” gave him an offer—which Siminoff ultimately rejected. While Siminoff came in asking for $700,000 for 10% of the company, O’Leary offered him a $700,000 loan with a royalty deal and a 5% stake.
Even though Siminoff turned down the deal, his pitch later earned him praise from O’Leary, who in a 2018 interview with CNBC called him “A really good salesperson.”
Ring later went on to be acquired by Amazon in 2018 for roughly $1 billion, cementing what is among the biggest misses in Shark Tank history. Siminoff, for his part, eventually returned to Shark Tank in 2018, this time as a guest shark.
“As crazy as it is, my goal was to be the best company ever, to be on Shark Tank. Like that was definitely what I wanted. And I worked for it,” he said.
