Pili Hunters
Pili Hunters is a new type of snack food made from the Pili Nut, an "ultra buttery, ultra fatty, high carbohydrate, high fat" nut native to the Philipines. The entrepreneur demonstrates that every nut has to be opened by a machete and that they're surprisingly large.
The entrepreneur passes around the "plain" flavor of the Pili Hunters product and all of the sharks compliment the flavor.
Pili Hunters started 4 1/2 years before appearing on Shark Tank. They were originally introduced to the "keto" community. In the time since, the entrepreneur believes that he's created hundreds if not thousands of jobs in the harvesting and processing of pili nuts. (Guest shark Daniel Lubetzky appeared this episode and noted that Kind does not use Pili nuts.)
A small back of Pili Hunters nuts costs between $1.40 and $1.80 to produce and retails for $5.99. The entrepreneur believes that 40% of his sales are direct to consumer. In the lifetime of the company, Pili Hunters has made $2,500,000 in sales with $700,000 in just the prior year and $1,000,000 in the year so far.
Daniel brings up a natural thing to be worried about, scalability given the relative difficulty of harvesting the nuts but the entrepreneur believes that he could do ten-times more business before that becomes a real issue.
It is revealed that Pili Hunters has 14 SKUs and $400,000 in unsold inventory. This does no favors for the entrepreneur to Mark, who states that this makes him think the entrepreneur has entered a "desperation stage" by ordering too much inventory.
Daniel, likewise, worries about the entrepreneur getting "too creative" and spreading himself too thin. Because of those reasons and his worries about the supply chain, Daniel exits the deal. Robert also thinks the entrepreneur needs more focus and drops out.
Lori states that she thinks the carb count for the product is super low and great and that she likes the chocolate flavor but that she just doesn't think the business is right for her and becomes the third shark to exit.
Kevin brings up a really valid point. If the entrepreneur believes that the company can easily scale to sell ten times, that is still only $10,000,000 in sales. He wants to know how the entrepreneur will get to $100,000,000 or $200,000,000 in sales. Because of that, he is, as usual, unhappy about the value being place on Pili Hunters and drops out of the deal.
With Mark as the last shark still in deal, he takes the chance to offer some advice, stating that, while he thinks what has been done so far is outstanding, an entrepreneur needs to know when they aren't good at something and hiring that person. Mark says that he thinks the entrepreneur needs a fulltime operations staff and that he wishes he could give him one but that he can't.
When Mark exits the deal, it leaves the entrepreneur and Pili Hunters without a shark to partner with.