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Will Markethive Get On Shark Tank? Fingeres Crossed!

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Chris Corey from Markethive attended an open casting call in Detroit's Hope Hall to bring Markethive into the Shark Tank

 

 

Shark Tank is a TV show where entrepreneurs come into a room and pitch a panel of “Sharks” or investors to raise money for their idea.

 

Pitching Shark Tank has been one of my goals since I had seen the first episode. The chance to stand in front of a room of skilled investors as you try to convey your vision for your company in such a way that, they too capture and embrace your dream.

I have always loved the quote " you don't know, what you don't know" as I have watched hundreds of episodes of Shark Tank I have gained a deeper insight into business from each episode. To be brought into the show via my television, to be able to experience the minds of true professional investors is worth its weight in gold.  Shark Tank, in my opinion, has done two things. One, allows its viewers to gain great insight into what investors look for in companies while allowing you to better prepare for the type of information they are looking to extract. Two, they allow you to see how they themselves would change a feature about the product or the look of the packaging to increase sales. Nowhere else can you gain this knowledge, without having a company and pitching yourself. Still, the knowledge gained from one live pitch yourself in comparison to the knowledge gained from watching hundreds of pitches is like comparing Earth to the size of our Sun. 

Entrepreneurs who make it onto a "Shark Tank" episode have the opportunity to introduce their company to a viewing audience of 7 million potential customers.

The companies that land a deal with one or more of the show's investors then have the chance to scale and, in some cases, become a nationally recognized brand.

We looked through old episodes and asked the Sharks themselves about their most successful deals. Read on to learn about the biggest "Shark Tank" success stories so far.

 

Scrub Daddy

A sponge company has far and away become the biggest "Shark Tank" success story. Over the past three years, Scrub Daddy has brought in a total of $75 million in revenue, according to investor Lori Greiner.

Greiner made a deal with its founder and CEO, Aaron Krause, in Season 4 for $200,000 in exchange for 20% equity. At that point, Krause had struggled to reach $100,000 in sales over 18 months, but Greiner saw great potential in the company's signature offering, a proprietary smiley-faced sponge that was more durable, hygienic, and effective than a traditional one.

She helped Krause expand his product line and brought them onto QVC and into stores like Bed, Bath & Beyond, where they have become bestsellers.

Shark Tank highlights entrepreneurs who are seeking an investment to expand or launch their business or product. Fervent business owners pitch their idea to the sharks, a panel of savvy investors and business gurus who are self-made millionaires and billionaires. If the sharks like what they hear they may invest their own money, and if they aren’t impressed they can be ruthless in teaching the entrepreneurs a hard lesson or exposing weaknesses within a business, product, or concept. The pitches can be quite dramatic as hopeful and passionate entrepreneurs put it all on the line, sometimes collapsing under the pressure of fast-paced negotiations and even breaking down in tears. In this fantastic whirlwind of television mania, some products are torn apart and spit out by sharks while others create a feeding frenzy. For those that make it out alive, appearing on the Shark Tank can accelerate success wildly fast. 

In reality, most pitches last for a grueling hour or more but are edited down to make entertaining ten-minute television segments. The entrepreneurs must convince the sharks to invest the full amount of money they are asking for, or more, or they leave the tank without a deal. The deals reached on the show are preliminary agreements and are not binding until the sharks do their due diligence in checking out the entrepreneur and claims made in the pitch. Some deals actually fall apart behind the scenes and some may be altered. In any case, all the businesses that appear on the show get the unique opportunity to stand in the spotlight as 8 million viewers watch their enthusiastic and heartfelt pitch. The exposure from the show creates a rapid acceleration of product sales and interest in the featured businesses, crashing websites with a bombardment of sudden traffic, stripping companies of their inventory, and turning start-ups into multi-million dollar companies practically overnight. This boom in growth and product sales has come to be known as the Shark Tank Effect. 

Chris Corey Markethive

Contributors:

http://www.businessinsider.com

 

Images from Printerest

 

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Markethive

#pitchsharktank, From Social Networks To Market Networks

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From Social Networks To Market Networks

@mzcasting15 

Most people didn’t notice last month when a 35-person company in San Francisco called HoneyBook announced a $22 million Series B*.

What was unusual about the deal is that nearly all the best-known Silicon Valley VCs competed for it. That’s because HoneyBook is a prime example of an important new category of digital company that combines the best elements of networks like Facebook with marketplaces like Airbnb — what we call a market network.

Market networks will produce a new class of unicorn companies and impact how millions of service professionals will work and earn their living.

What Is A Market Network?

“Marketplaces” provide transactions among multiple buyers and multiple sellers — like eBay, Etsy, Uber and LendingClub.

“Networks” provide profiles that project a person’s identity, then lets them communicate in a 360-degree pattern with other people in the network. Think Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

What’s unique about market networks is that they:

  • Combine the main elements of both networks and marketplaces
  • Use SaaS workflow software to focus action around longer-term projects, not just a quick transaction
  • Promote the service provider as a differentiated individual, helping to build long-term relationships

An example will help: Let’s go back to HoneyBook, a market network for the events industry.

An event planner builds a profile on HoneyBook.com. That profile serves as her professional home on the web. She uses the HoneyBook SaaS workflow to send self-branded proposals to clients and sign contracts digitally.

She then connects to that project the other professionals she works with, like florists and photographers. They also get profiles on HoneyBook, and everyone can team up to service a client, send each other proposals, sign contracts and get paid by everyone else.

This many-to-many transaction pattern is key. HoneyBook is an N-sided marketplace — transactions happen in a 360-degree pattern like a network. That makes HoneyBook both a marketplace and network.

A market network often starts by enhancing a network of professionals that exists offline. Many of them have been transacting with each other for years using fax, checks, overnight packages and phone calls.

By moving these connections and transactions into software, a market network makes it significantly easier for professionals to operate their businesses and clients to get better service.

We’ve Seen This Before

AngelList is also a market network*. I don’t know if it was the first, but Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi deserve a lot of credit for pioneering the model in 2010.

On AngelList, the pattern is similar. The startup CEO can complete her fundraising paperwork through the AngelList SaaS workflow, and everyone in the network can share deals, hire employees and find customers in a 360-degree pattern.

Joist is another good example. Based in Toronto, it provides a market network for the home remodel and construction industry. Houzz is also in that space, with broader reach and a different approach*. DotLoop in Cincinnati shows the same pattern for the residential real estate brokerage industry.

 

Looking at AngelList, Joist, Houzz, DotLoop and HoneyBook, the market network pattern is visible.

Six Attributes Of A Successful Market Network

Market networks target more complex services. In the last six years, the tech industry has obsessed over on-demand labor marketplaces for quick transactions of simple services. Companies like Uber, Mechanical Turk, Thumbtack, Luxe and many others make it efficient to buy simple services whose quality is judged objectively. Their success is based on commodifying the people on both sides of the marketplace.

However, the highest value services — like event planning and home remodeling — are neither simple nor objectively judged. They are more involved and longer term. Market networks are designed for these types of services.

People matter. With complex services, each client is unique, and the professional they get matters. Would you hand over your wedding to just anyone? Or your home remodel? The people on both sides of those equations are not interchangeable like they are with Lyft or Uber. Each person brings unique opinions, expertise and relationships to the transaction. A market network is designed to acknowledge that as a core tenet — and provide a solution.

Collaboration happens around a project. For most complex services, multiple professionals collaborate among themselves — and with a client — over a period of time. The SaaS at the center of market networks focuses the action on a project that can take days or years to complete.

Market networks help build long-term relationships. Market networks bring a career’s worth of professional connections online and make them more useful. For years, social networks like LinkedIn and Facebook have helped build long-term relationships. However, until market networks, they hadn’t been used for commerce and transactions.

Referrals flow freely. In these industries, referrals are gold, for both the client and the service professional. The market network software is designed to make referrals simple and more frequent.

Market networks increase transaction velocity and satisfaction. By putting the network of professionals and clients into software, the market network increases transaction velocity for everyone. It increases the close rate on proposals and expedites payment. The software also increases customer satisfaction scores, reduces miscommunication and makes the work pleasing and beautiful. Never underestimate pleasing and beautiful.

Social Networks Were The Last 10 Years. Market Networks Will Be The Next 10.

First we had communication networks, like telephones and email. Then we had social networks, like Facebook and LinkedIn. Now we have market networks, like HoneyBook, AngelList, Houzz, DotLoop and Joist.

You can imagine a market network for every industry where professionals are not interchangeable: law, travel, real estate, media production, architecture, investment banking, personal finance, construction, management consulting and more. Each market network will have different attributes that make it work in each vertical, but the principles will remain the same.

Over time, nearly all independent professionals and their clients will conduct business through the market network of their industry. We’re just seeing the beginning of it now.

Market networks will have a massive positive impact on how millions of people work and live, and how hundreds of millions of people buy better services.

I hope more entrepreneurs will set their sights on building these businesses. It’s time. They are hard products to get right, but the payoff is potentially massive.

by (@JamesCurrier)

Is Markethive one of the new pioneers called a Market Network?
Please comment below what do you think?

References:

TECHCRUNCH

THE HIVE IS THE NEW NETWORK

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member

Markethive

The Markethive Automated Workshop

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Markethive is a Market Network

Come join me as I run the workshop system that lifts you up into entrepreneurial exceptionalism!

Markethive is a Market Network. That means it is basically broken down into 3 facets all integrated.

  1. A market platform for conducting business
  2. A social network primarily for entrepreneurs
  3. A SAAS (Software as a Service) Inbound Marketing platform

All systems (Facebook included) have a learning curve. Our focus, our goal, is to deliver to you a gentle intuitive fun and rewarding learning process. We are in the process of turning the entire process into an automated structure. Regardless, this learning structure is designed to build you into a powerful , wealthy, successful entrepreneur.

Are you an entrepreneur? Good question. Not necessarily easy to answer. So here are a few definitions:

The classic definition (I do not totally agree with)
en·tre·pre·neur
noun: entrepreneur; plural noun: entrepreneurs

  1.  a person who organizes and operates a business or businesses, taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so

Most people would agree that an entrepreneur is a person who has started his or her own business. But that basic definition barely scratches the surface. It does little to capture the true essence of what it means to be a risk-taker, innovator and individual willing to carve his or her own path in a world that doesn't always take kindly to people who fail to follow the status quo. 

Are you itching to venture out on your own, but you wonder if you have what it takes to choose the road less traveled? Check out what these company founders and business leaders think makes a truly successful entrepreneur.

However, before we venture further defining what exactly is an “entrepreneur” and other aspects breaking it down and related concerns like “venture capital” and the proverbial “entrepreneurial ecosystem, let me direct you along the paths of getting quickluy up to speed, as I believe that is exactly what you need. To succeed, attain structure, stability, vision and ultimately wealth.

Getting into our Workshops:

I made this simple little instructional video so you clearly see how easy it is to assimilate this ecocenter and huge powerful platform.

OK now about being an entrepreneur!

"Entrepreneurship is all about embracing challenges. When you're building something from the ground up, you need to get into the weeds and problem solve. All the weed whacking often allows you to better hone in on a better big-picture strategy — why did this happen? How do I solve it? How do smarter people than me solve it? With a young company, when you experience a new challenge, it's usually a growing pain. So while it can be difficult to get through, it's for the best possible reason — your company is getting bigger!" – Jennie Ripps, CEO of Owl's Brew

 

"To me, entrepreneurship means being able to take action and having the courage to commit and persevere through all of the challenges and failures. It is a struggle that an entrepreneur is willing to battle. It is using past experiences and intelligence to make smart decisions. Entrepreneurs are able to transform their vision into a business. I believe this process is at the core of any true entrepreneur." – MJ Pedone, founder and CEO of Indra Public Relations

 

"Being a successful entrepreneur requires a great deal of resourcefulness, because as an entrepreneur, you often run into dead ends throughout the course of your career. You need to be able to bounce back from losses if you want to be successful. Know that there will be much more disappointment than progress when you first start off, and you need to have a short memory in order to put the past behind you quickly. It's imperative to stay optimistic when bad things happen." – Vip Sandhir, founder and CEO of HighGround

 

"Entrepreneurship is the ability to recognize the bigger picture, find where there's an opportunity to make someone's life better, design hypotheses around these opportunities, and continually test your assumptions. It's experimentation: Some experiments will work; many others will fail. It is not big exits, huge net worth or living a life of glamour. It's hard work and persistence to leave the world a better place once your time here is done." – Konrad Billetz, CEO of Frameri

 

"To me, entrepreneurship is completely dedicating yourself to creating something out of nothing. It's not simply taking a risk and hoping to realize big rewards. Creating something out of nothing also tends to present numerous challenges and roadblocks which seem insurmountable. I believe the great entrepreneurs, who I look up to, can help their team push through those roadblocks and find solutions." – David Greenberg, CEO of Updater

 

"Entrepreneurship is the mind-set that allows you to see opportunity everywhere. It could be a business idea, but it could also be seeing the possibilities in the people that can help you grow that business. This ability to see many options in every situation is critically important; there will be unending challenges that will test your hustle." – Preeti Sriratana, co-founder and CEO of Sweeten

 

"It is not about making a quick buck or deal. Successful entrepreneurs look past that 'quick buck' and instead look at the bigger picture to ensure that each action made is going toward the overall goal of the business or concept, whether or not that means getting something in return at that moment." – Allen Dikker, CEO of Potatopia

 

"Entrepreneurship is a lifestyle, in that being an entrepreneur is ingrained in one's identity. [It] is the culmination of a certain set of characteristics: determination, creativity, the capacity to risk, leadership and enthusiasm. I don't think you can be an entrepreneur without these qualities, and for me, that idea was ingrained in me very early on. An entrepreneur is part of the foundation of who I am, and who I strive to be." – Eric Lupton, president of Life Saver Pool Fence Systems

 

"Entrepreneurship is an unavoidable life calling pursued by those who are fortunate enough to take chances [and are] optimistic enough to believe in themselves, aware enough to see problems around them, stubborn enough to keep going, and bold enough to act again and again. Entrepreneurship is not something you do because you have an idea. It's about having the creativity to question, the strength to believe and the courage to move." – Jordan Fliegel, founder of CoachUp

 

"The journey of entrepreneurship is a lifestyle for many of us; we are wired this way and have no choice. We are driven by an innate need to create, build and grow. In order to be a successful entrepreneur, you must have an underlying positivity that enables you to see beyond the day-to-day challenges and roadblocks, always moving forward. You must also be a master plate juggler, able to switch between thinking, genres and activities moment to moment. Most importantly, you must not be afraid to fail, and you must be comfortable living with risk and unknowns — a state of mind which is certainly not for everyone!” – Justine Smith, founder and CEO of Kids Go Co.

 

"Being an entrepreneur is about giving everything you have when the going gets tough and never giving up. If you truly love and believe in what you're doing, then you must hang in there. Entrepreneurship is not knowing everything about your business. You must humble yourself and not work from your ego. Always be willing to grow, change and learn." – Jennifer MacDonald and Hayley Carr, founders of Zipit Bedding

 

"Entrepreneurship is seeing an opportunity and gathering the resources to turn a possibility into a reality. It represents the freedom to envision something new and to make it happen. It includes risk, but it also includes the reward of creating a legacy. Anti-entrepreneurship is satisfaction with the status quo, layers of controls and rules that hamper forward movement, and fear of failure." – Maia Haag, co-founder and president of I See Me!

 

"When it comes to being a successful entrepreneur, I think one must possess grit. The stakes tend to be high, the bumps in the road frequent. Remaining focused, regardless of the obstacles, is paramount. That said, being an entrepreneur means being in full control of your destiny. If that's important to you, then all of the challenges associated with striking out on one's own are but a small price to pay.” – Mike Malone, founder of Livestock Framing

 

Thomas Prendergast
Founder CEO
Markethive Inc.

P.S.

Reid Hoffman Tells Charlie Rose: "Every Individual Is Now An Entrepreneur."

https://techcrunch.com/2009/03/05/read-hoffman-tells-charlie-rose-every-individual-is-now-an-entrepreneur/

Alan Zibluk – Markethive Founding Member