We went on Shark Tank and it was intense — the show even had psychiatrists at the ready. Here's what it was like. (2024)

We received $500,000 from four out of the five Sharks on the panel that day. Mark Cuban, Daymond John, Kevin O'Leary, and Peter Jones now share a 40% stake in our company, Songlorious — a custom song business that connects musicians and songwriters with people who want personalized songs for events like weddings and birthdays. At the time of shooting, our business brought in $700,000 in sales. In 2021, we're currently on pace to bring in $2.5 million.

Here's what our experience was like being on the show, and how it's helped our business.

We had no previous experience with starting a business and would not consider ourselves "businesspeople"

Ellen and I were musicians and both living in New York. We'd met online and started dating. (We're married now and live in Tennessee.)

While in New York, we offered to write a song for our friend's wedding. The couple and everyone at the wedding absolutely loved our song. And that got us thinking.

We said to ourselves, "Hey, let's put a website together and see if we can make personalized songs as a little side business." That same night, we set up a very simple website and started taking orders.

Our goal was to work on three songs a week. But we quickly became overwhelmed with the number of orders we received and we couldn't handle it on our own. So we put up advertisem*nts for writers on our personal Instagram accounts. Musicians would directly message us or reach out via email. A lot of musicians needed work during the pandemic.

Since then, it's safe to say that we have grown quite a bit. We've delivered more than 12,000 songs ranging in price from $45 to $230 and have worked with 160 musicians — 120 of them are currently on our roster.

Financially, we were doing fine before songwriting. Outside of our music careers, I'm an engineer and she's a barista. But after about three or four months we both quit our jobs to pursue this full time — it was a little scary but we were confident in our business.

Although our business was doing extremely well, we dreamed of something even bigger

We came up with the idea ourselves, but we got to a point where we realized that if we wanted to have the explosive, international growth we wanted, then we needed business-minded people like the Sharks.

Ultimately, we decided "Shark Tank would be a good idea for three reasons:

1. The Sharks have diverse experiences and resources.
2. We needed investors who could mentor us.
3. "Shark Tank" has a big audience, which would help us get exposure for Songlorious.

Overall, we felt like going on the show could only be a positive thing for us. It's really natural to be worried about having a bad experience on TV, but we knew we had a good business, and we were pretty confident that we would see at least some interest.

We prepped to pitch the Sharks for 4 months

We worked on drafting the pitch for four months and rehearsed it over and over and over. We read countless business articles to prepare. There's tons of free information available on the internet. We also pulled all the resources at our disposal to try and understand as much as we could — even going to Omayya's uncle to ask accounting questions. We found that most people want to share what they've learned; you just have to ask.

We tried to keep our pitch to a minute and a half to two minutes long — just long enough for them to understand Songlorious without losing interest.

The 'Shark Tank' set is basically a big warehouse

There were about eight companies there that day, and we each got our own trailer to wait in until we were called. You just sit there and practice in anticipation. You get your wardrobe approved, but you get to pick your own clothes.

You don't get to meet the Sharks beforehand, so when you walk out, it's really nerve-wracking. But once we got out there and started pitching, we were pretty calm. We have a lot of stage experience — especially Ellen, because she sings.

We felt collected even as we performed a live song for the Sharks, which was something that helped us stand out and get their attention. The one thing we were nervous about was fielding the Sharks' questions at the end. We were out there for about 40 or 45 minutes, and most of the time was spent on questions.

To prepare for that, we thoroughly memorized all of our data and made sure not to sugarcoat anything to make it sound better than it was. It was really important for us to be genuine, because we've seen people trip up on the show when they exaggerated numbers. Plus, our numbers were pretty darn good already, so there was no need to lie. We took Songlorious to a little over a million dollars in revenue in our first year, so we had to be doing something right.

Ultimately, we made a deal to give four sharks a 40% stake in our company

We're happy that four of them went in with us — the more the merrier. The Sharks' value is more abstract than a dollar amount; their knowledge is now available to us. We like that their backgrounds and areas of expertise are different from one another, and we aren't worried about how much stake they have.

The hardest part is that you can't tell anybody about what happened because of the show. We had to wait several weeks to tell friends and family. When we could finally talk, it felt like we told everyone we knew all at once. We were so excited.

When we walked off after making the deal, we felt like we were in a dream state

It's hard to describe, kind of like you're hungover but you're still overjoyed. We went back to our trailer and a psychiatrist came to see us — all contestants are offered to be seen by a psychiatrist because of how intense the process is. They asked us if we were okay and told us they were available if we needed anything, but we didn't need their assistance. We had so much adrenaline in our systems, but we snapped back pretty quickly because we're very mellow people.

When we got home from shooting that night, we were still in shock and it hadn't really set in. Also, we hate to raise our hopes too much and feel disappointed later, so we don't celebrate prematurely. We just took deep breaths, processed what happened, and got back to work.

Since going on the show, we've been in steady contact with reps of the investors

We're so glad we decided to pursue being on "Shark Tank." Not only did we gain investors and mentorship, but appearing on national TV also gave us a significant boost in sales.

Reflecting back, prepping for the "Tank" forced us to take an intense, deep dive into the operations of our company and forced us to re-examine our vision, and we're much better set up for future success because of it. It's like an entrepreneurial boot camp. We're excited to see what's in store for us next.

If you'd like to talk about your experience on "Shark Tank," email Jenna Gyimesi at jgyimesi@businessinsider.com.