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.
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.
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.
“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.
