The 11 most successful Shark Tank rejects prove that even professionals can often be wrong. Shark Tank is an American reality show where the contestants don’t sing or dance or tell jokes, but they bring their business to the table. They convince the judges or the ‘sharks’ to invest in said business. The show has been extremely successful and has won several awards with one of the most important ones being the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Structured Reality Program, an award which the show has claimed three times.
The show has been well received by critics, in addition to winning the aforementioned awards. Most of the praise has been centered on the sharks who are actually successful entrepreneurs themselves, and have achieved success in their respective businesses. These guys are well-informed about the businesses and industries in which the contestants are engaging–they ask probing, relevant questions, which allows them to pick holes or shore up what the contestant’s aims.
This practice led to the sharks investing in several extremely successful businesses, which you can check out on the 10 Most Successful Shark Tank Businesses Ever. If you are wondering about the highest earning investment, it is Scrub Daddy, which has earned over $75 million in 3 years. On the other hand, no one is immune from mistakes. There have also been several deals which the sharks took part in that failed to take off and lost a lot of money.
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Of course, this has worked the other way around too. Despite their experience and technical know-how, the gurus in charge of offering deals have actually rejected ideas which they deemed to be incompatible with today’s market or simply lacked the necessary ingredients required to create success. Then, despite being rejected by the show, those products have gone on to earn millions of dollars in some cases. There are rumors that one of the successful rejects includes Uber. However, that is unlikely. Or at the very least, any such approach was not shown on the show itself, though there are several deals which are scrapped and not televised at all, so that may be a possibility.
On the other hand, there are some contestants who only appear on the show in order to generate publicity for their business rather than actually hoping to make a deal. A prime example of this is Garret Gee, who launched a mobile app Scan, which could scan codes. However, even before appearing on the show he had already raised nearly $9 million, which led the sharks to question his reason for appearing on the show. The subsequent positive response for his app allowed it to climb up to number 20 on all paid iPhone apps.
We have only considered those businesses which intended to make a deal, but were either rejected by the judges or couldn’t reach an agreement due to differing interests. We have consulted various websites in order to conduct our rankings. Starting from number 11, here are the 11 most successful Shark Tank Rejects!
