By: Diana Vilic - Senior at East Kentwood HS, Kent Career & Technical Center - Grand Rapids, MI.
The ocean of inventions is filled to the brim with sharks waiting to take a bite, yet only the brave leap in. Garrett Gee, a self-proclaimed college dorm-room inventor took to the Tank, hoping for what some would call an outrageous result: 5% equity for a whopping $1,000,000. Instead, Gee left the Tank empty-handed after delivering an awful presentation with many issues.
Gee’s product is called Scan, and is an interactive QR reader app able to find sales and discounts for products, as well as make other codes. Although the product sounded cool and I was ready to download the app within the first three minutes, there were a lot of mistakes with his pitch. To start with, he showed up in jeans, a hoodie, and flip flops – showing a complete disregard for the Sharks' positions. Gee didn't seem to know his numbers as he constantly checked his tablet to “make sure he gave accurate answers”. He also admitted to the Sharks that all he knew from business he learned from Shark Tank, which certainly startled the sharks to say the least. And while most entrepreneurs end their pitches with a warm invite to join their bandwagon, Gee ended his pitch asking the Sharks, “which one of you is still young and foolish to take a chance on us?” And as if all that wasn't enough, when Lori Greiner asked him if he had any competition, Gee responded saying that “this wasn't the newest or best idea, but when I looked at the other competition, I didn't see anyone else executing it how I felt it needed to be executed”. He then said that the key difference is that the competition only built 'half the table', while they built the whole '360 experience'.” The truth is, Scan isn't at all different from its competition, and Gee himself was really admitting to that.
However, even with his disastrous performance, the Sharks still showed some level of interest for his cool piece of technology. Well kind of. Kevin and Robert lost interest as soon as Gee disclosed that he only makes a profit of $30,000 a month through his Beta customers. Mark Cuban took a hit on Gee next when he confronted the future of QR codes, and argued that Scan.Me, even with $8.7 million in investments, will soon become secondary to the sensor business. Daymond went as far as accusing Gee of pitching his product just for publicity and told him that he didn't really belong in the Tank to begin with. Lori went out the easy way saying that she simply didn't have enough experience in the technical field to add value to the company. For all these reasons, Gee left the Tank without securing a deal, leaving the Sharks with a lot vision but little reality.
Overall Performance: Presentation: 25/50. Strategy: 10/25. Product: 15/25.
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