UCSB student lands a $1 million dollar 'Shark Tank' deal

When 26-year-old PolarPro founder and CEO Jeff Overall walked into the pitch room in the latest episode of "Shark Tank" Season 7, he played up his heavy Southern California accent and surfer slang for the investors' amusement.

But not long into his pitch, it became clear that he was one of the more successful and astute entrepreneurs they've had on the show.

And after a bidding fight among the Sharks, Overall walked away with a $1 million deal with Mark Cuban and Robert Herjavec for a 20% stake in his high-end camera accessories company.

Overall founded PolarPro in 2011 as a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was a member of the school's ski team and was frustrated by the low quality of the GoPro videos of his ski runs. After doing some research, he bought a DSLR polarized lens, which cuts glare from the sun, and taped it over his GoPro.

Satisfied with the difference and figuring other GoPro users would be, too, he bought some polarized film and started selling Ziploc bags of amateur lenses for $10 each, he told the Orange County Register this month. Eight months in, he decided to turn his hobby into a business and hired his best friend Austen Butler to help him.

Overall took out $2,000 of his student loan money and got to work building his business. Though GoPro was once interested in making a deal with him, he told the Register, they ended up producing their own line of filters. Overall found that offering a cheaper but high-quality alternative maintained a customer base for PolarPro. He decided to start producing new camera accessories primarily for the extreme sports crowd to stay ahead of the competition. Today, PolarPro has more than 30 products.

After the first year of business, the company brought in $8,000 in revenue, Overall said. In 2014, that number was $2.8 million. For 2015, that number is projected to hit $5.6 million.

Back in the Tank, for a segment that was filmed in June, the investors were very impressed with the numbers. Overall explained that across much of the explosive growth has come from owning the drone camera filter market.

Read the full article on Business Insider.

Richard Feloni, Business Insider, November 15, 2015