Outside of small bits presented throughout the show, many firms typically go unnoticed after appearing on “Shark Tank.” With so many new businesses opening every season, not every firm can be Scrub Daddy or Bunch Bikes, and many successful enterprises fall into obscurity after their initial debut. However, just because a firm isn’t in the spotlight for a long time doesn’t indicate it’s a failure.
CoinOut is an example of a “Shark Tank” success, since the business’s contestant and creator, Jeff Witten, not only secured a transaction but went on to operate a thriving company with over two million members.
However, success did not come easily, and the firm was compelled to evolve immediately after its appearance on the show. The CoinOut episode in Season 9 is a terrific tale that illustrates that sometimes taking hard advise and rethinking the foundation of your business is the best thing for everyone involved in one of the more inspiring “Shark Tank” episodes.
What happened to CoinOut on Shark Tank?
Jeff Witten, the founder of CoinOut, made his television debut on “Shark Tank” in Season 9 Episode 23 in 2017. He joined the program seeking for $250,000 in exchange for 7.5% of the company’s ownership, putting the CoinOut worth at about $3.3 million. Witten hoped that his new product, which would contain a plastic card (similar to a debit or credit card) that members could use to keep change after buying with cash at participating businesses, would eliminate the need for real coins. He’d go on to say that integrating store rewards programs would motivate businesses to pay the $20 per month subscription fee and 3% transaction charge.
Initially, the Sharks questioned Witten’s business strategy, wondering why shops would have to pay him for the service and what differentiated his product from competing services from large banking institutions. Witten stayed steady in his trust in his company, refusing to surrender, and highlighted the company’s value propositions, such as the capacity to sell to advertising using user purchase data.
Witten’s tenacity would eventually earn him a disputed offer from Barbara Corcoran. She recommended a $250,000 investment at 15% with the condition that CoinOut find 700 new retail outlets within the following six months. Feeling pressed, Wittens declined the offer, finally agreeing with Robert Herjavec on $250,000 for 15% stock with no contingency, lowering the company’s entire worth to $1.66 million.
Robert Herjavec’s deal with CoinOut fell through after Shark Tank
Even though the transaction appeared to be finalized and resolved on “Shark Tank,” the CoinOut agreement with Robert Herjavec never materialized. Surprisingly, Herjavec will most likely regret this course of events in retrospect. CoinOut was bought by Informed Resources Inc. (IRI) in May 2021, a market research and analytics corporation founded in 1979 that collaborates with large retailers such as 7Eleven, CVS, Speedway, Kroger, and others.
Wittens would go on to acknowledge the transaction falling through in a Columbia Magazine interview in 2022, acknowledging that it was “lucky for us, in retrospect, because it would have been terrible from a valuation perspective.”
That so, it wasn’t the young entrepreneur’s original idea of a coin-based plastic card scanned throughout New York City cafés that earned him the sale. CoinOut was already a new firm by the time the episode aired on Shark Tank in 2018, having rethought the very basis of its idea following its appearance on the show.
CoinOut is now a cash-back app for receipts
CoinOut’s business strategy evolved immediately after recording the “Shark Tank” segment. During the show, Mark Cuban said that while storing user profiles on the cloud as part of the CoinOut registration process was a brilliant idea, Witten’s insistence on pushing physical cards with POS integration was a nonsensical waste of time and concentration.
As it turns out, Wittens took this to heart, because CoinOut re-engineered the software immediately after the presentation to appeal mostly to individuals searching for cash-back benefits by scanning receipts with their phones. When the firm unveils its data platform in 2020, it will begin selling consumer behavior data based on these scans to large corporations, and this will pave the way for IRI to buy the company altogether a year later.
CoinOut is still owned by IRI and is available on Google Play and the App Store.
Jeffery Witten stepped away from CoinOut in 2022
Despite the fact that Witten battled for his product when it appeared on Shark Tank, he ended up cashing out or “coining out” and has since gone on to other endeavors. Jeffery Witten will formally relinquish his position as CEO of CoinOut in April 2022.
