Trivia / Dragons' Den

• Cheaters Never Prosper: One guy on the UK version almost wound up being disqualified before his pitch began after it turned out that he'd contacted one of the Dragons previously to enquire about investing and had not admitted that he also had a working relationship with one of the other Dragons. (The rules for at least the UK version state these two things very clearly).
• Colbert Bump:
  • Whether a contestant is successful or not in getting the Dragons to invest in your idea, they've certainly made a lot of people aware it exists.
  • Sometimes the investors have accused entrepreneurs of coming onto the show not in the interest of gaining an investment, but just for the publicity that they gain from appearing on the show.
• Distanced from Current Events: An episode of the 2020 series broadcast in the middle of the COVID-19 Pandemic had to be edited to remove a pitch for a virus-killing air purification unit.
• Friday Night Death Slot: Shark Tank inverts this; since its move from Sunday to Friday nights, it has garnered more viewers and got renewed for 22 episodes during its second season in that time slot, compared to the <15 of previous ones. Despite this, the show was eventually moved back to Sundays beginning in the fall 2017, the reasoning being that ABC wanted to start rejiggering its schedule to find a place for American Idol when it returns.
• From Entertainment to Education: A couple of marketing professors have used this to show students on how to pitch the products. The show itself has made episodes that serve as tutorials of the proper way and the improper way to do a product presentation.
• Milestone Celebration: The hundredth episode of Shark Tank ended with a segment where all six regular Sharks reflected on the series so far. Later, when the Sharks' total investments surpassed $100 million, 20/20 did an episode about the show to celebrate.
• Missing Episode: One January 2024 episode of the UK series was pulled a week after it first aired due to concerns that a product was making unfounded claims about its medical benefits. It was later restored with the addition of a prominent on-screen disclaimer.
• No Budget: B-Roll of contestants at their home/business aside, Shark Tank is shot in only three rooms, the lobby, the hallway and the meeting room with the Sharks.
• The Pete Best:
  • Simon Woodroffe, who was only around for the first UK series. Rachel Elnaugh to a lesser extent; she was there for series one and two, but was soon forgotten once the much more vocal and imposing Deborah Meaden replaced her.
  • In the Canadian version, Jennifer Wood had only appeared in the first season before being replaced by Arlene Dickinson. Laurence Lewin, like Rachel, was on for the first two seasons before he passed away in 2008.
• Promoted Fanboy: Some businesses come onto the various incarnations not necessarily because they need the funding. Rather, they're fans of the dragons/sharks and use the show as an opportunity to meet them and hopefully start up a business relationship.
• Technology Marches On: As a show that has been running in various forms since 2001, there's bound to be a lot of entrepreneurs whose inventions and products date themselves from an era just before the internet was so ubiquitous and easily accessible.
  • A few "phone hotline for [X]" pitches fall into this category. Deborah's reason for rejecting "The Knowledge" (a hotline for London tourists and visitors staffed by off-duty taxi drivers) was that technological advances would soon make the idea obsolete; given that the episode aired one year before the release of the iPhone, she was completely correct.
  • "Personal Trainer" was to be a system for connecting exercise bikes to PC's for statistical collection and other interactive features. While that is certainly where exercise equipment was heading, the need to connect it to your 2000's home office computer was an obvious flaw in the idea, with Theo giving a pretty much spot-on prediction on what the product should've been:
    Get yourself a little machine that's got a screen on it, that you can load your software into, that people can clamp onto the handlebars of their bike, and it's got it all built-in. It might cost another hundred quid to do it all together as a box, but you've got a product.