Three Wichita buddies will be on ‘Shark Tank’ this week pitching their spongy invention
Three Wichita buddies who refer to themselves as the “Side Hustle Homies” will appear Friday on the ABC show “Shark Tank” and pitch an invention designed to take on baked-on, caked-on dishes.
Local inventor Jeff Dakin and his friends and business partners Tyler Kessler and Matt Hosey will try to sell the show’s celebrity investors on The Scrubbie — a sponge attachment that hooks onto kitchen sink sprayers, pull-down kitchen faucets and garden hoses and makes it easier to successfully scrub everything from dishes to lawn furniture to windows. They call it a “universal cleaning attachment.”
The show will air at 7 p.m. Friday on ABC, and the trio say they can’t wait for everyone to see what went down when they traveled to Las Vegas to film the show last year.
Dakin, a local general contractor, has an inventor’s brain and has come up with lots of ideas during his life, he said, only to see other people beat him to a patent. He hates it when that happens.
He got the idea for The Scrubbie years ago when doing the dishes after dinner. His wife always did the cooking and he always did the cleanup, he said, and one night, he was trying to scrape stuck-on food off of a dish with the metal end of the sink’s spray gun.
“I thought, ‘There had to be a better way,’” he said. “What if we put a sponge on the end of this?’’”
Dakin, whose father is local dentist Robert Dakin, said he and his dad grew up talking about different things they could invent that would make life easier. Today, he has more than 100 ideas written down, he says, including some too expensive to pursue. Kessler always says that his friend has “too many million dollar ideas not to have a million dollars.”
Dakin reached out to his longtime friend Hosey, who he’d often hang out with in the garage brainstorming invention ideas. Hosey, a local independent contractor in oil and gas leasing, brought in his childhood friend Kessler, a local entrepreneur. Thus, the Side Hustle Homies were born.
The guys, who say they’ve been working on The Scrubbie for five years, brought their prototype to some professional product engineers who came up with a design for The Scrubbie, whose rubber connector attaches sponges to a number of different-sized nozzles with a water-tight seal. Their first outing with The Scrubbie was at the 2019 Wichita Women’s Fair, where the guys demonstrated the product at a popular booth.
They returned to the fair in 2020, and the day after it ended, they learned that a “Shark Tank” application a onetime marketing manager had sent in on their behalf had been accepted. “Shark Tank,” which shows hopeful inventors pitching their ideas to wealthy celebrity investors for a chance to secure financing, is now in its 12th season, and The Scrubbie guys are longtime fans.
They aren’t allowed to say what happened on the show or whether any of the celebrity sharks — who include Mark Cuban, Robert Herjavec, Barbara Corcoran, Daymond John and Lori Greiner — offered to invest in their company.
While they wait to find out, people can order The Scrubbie at www.thescrubbie.com. They cost $14.99 and come with three sponges. People can also subscribe to get three new sponges shipped to them every other month. The inventors are offering a “Shark Tank” discount of 10% with the checkout code SAVE10.
The guys say they plan to get together and watch the show in Colwich and that they are so ready to be able to discuss all the details of their “Shark Tank” adventure with people they know.
“We’re very aware of the rich history of Wichita entrepreneurs,” Hosey said. “We just want to follow in their footsteps.”
This story was originally published April 20, 2021 at 9:33 AM with the headline "Three Wichita buddies will be on ‘Shark Tank’ this week pitching their spongy invention."
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