Colton Duval’s Post

Announcing Squarespace Refresh 2023 🎉, our annual release of the latest products and features! Learn more at: https://lnkd.in/ecn4Mheh

This guy got rejected on Shark Tank in 2013 then sold his business in 2018 for $1,000,000,000. No, that guy is not Shaquille O’Neal. It’s Jamie Siminoff, founder of Ring doorbell. Jamie came up with the idea of a “video doorbell” because he was constantly working in his garage and couldn’t hear his doorbell ring. So he needed something that rang his phone and showed who was at the front door. He started by building the first prototype in his garage in 2011. It took him ~1 year to build it, and when he finally launched his product (called DoorBot at the time) it took him just 9 months to get to $1M in sales. But growth is expensive, so Jamie started looking for investors That’s when Jamie landed on Shark Tank in 2013. Unfortunately, none of the sharks bit on DoorBot, so he walked. Quote from Jamie: “I remember after that Shark Tank episode literally being in tears, I needed the money, we were out of money at the time.” Luckily, Jamie’s episode of Shark Tank went ballistic with fans, and DoorBot did ~$3M more in sales that year after his appearance. Then, Jamie met Richard Branson. Well, sort of… A customer of DoorBot went on a vacation to Richard Branson’s resort, which is where Richard saw the video doorbell in action. Afterwards, the customer connected the two and Richard became an investor. That round of funding in 2015 was $28 million, giving Richard Branson ~5% of the business. The next year, Jamie rebranded the company to “Ring” and raised another ~$100M. Which is also when Jamie met Shaq. Shaq started off just as a customer of Ring. He was shopping home security solutions for his new house and felt he was being price gouged by the home security companies. Shaq saw Ring Doorbell in a Best Buy and thought that was good enough. So apparently Shaq was just walking around a Consumer Electronic Show (CES) exhibit where he introduced himself to Jamie who had a booth there. After meeting each other, they decided to partner up and make a bunch of commercials together. Also, Jamie gave Shaq a million dollars worth of doorbells to give away to people in the inner cities. That definitely sweetened the deal. A couple years later in 2018, Jamie sold Ring to Amazon for $1 billion dollars. That same year, Jamie returned to Shark tank. But not as a contestant. As a shark! I love stories like this, if you do as well please give this post a 👍 or ❤️ and follow me for daily business insights Jake Schmidt

The maths behind the logos 💡 Created by Florian Popescu #creative #graphicdesign #design #logodesign #branding