The Groovebook Success: A Bright Idea Conceived by Sharks

To celebrate the anniversary of Groovebook’s grand debut, we decided to do a little recap of the relevant episode of ABC’s reality series, Shark Tank, and see how this idea came to fruition to such extent even a photo book giant had to make a deal out of it.

Despite the above concerns, 4 out of 5 sharks took the bait. Eventually Brian and Julie went with the offer of Mark Cuban and Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful): they got the desired $150k for 80% of the rights to licence Groovebook as a service to other companies.

And like they say, the rest of it is history…

Swimming with sharks as successful millionaires

Within 4 months from airing, Groovebook’s sales skyrocketed: Brian and Julie got 50k more subscribers in just 5 days, sold 3 million copies and, with the aid of Kevin O’Leary, their product was featured in Jimmy Kimmel Live! But the ultimate success came a year after Groovebook was introduced: in 2015, in accordance with Mr. Wonderful, the Whitemans joined forces with Shutterfly and struck a deal of $14.5 million, turning Groovebook into Shark Tank’s largest deal period.

Since then the Groovebook app has been downloaded over a million times and has successfully converted millions, if not billions, of smartphone/tablet photos into a neat monthly photo book. Regardless of the current ownership, Shutterfly kept Brian and Julie’s dream alive: creating a fun little photo book every month for an affordable price.