This week the business ideas pitched on Dragons’ Den were:

• Back To The Movies – This was a new musical production playing tribute to movie sound tracks. Aimed at everyone unfortunately with only one night booked it didn’t look like it was going to be a success and a marketing budget of £300 per venue is far too low (although if the could get an average of 10 nights at 8 venues they would obviously have a more reasonable marketing budget).
• Dig and Drive – Coin operated diggers and tractors for kids, but we didn’t see much of the pitch so it’s hard to comment on this business.
• Steri-Spray – Looking for £145K for 10%, this was a system that used UV light to kill legionaries disease in the shower head (or tap presumably). Peter Jones suggested a good alternative approach to grabbing market share, i.e. dropping the price to the same as standard shower head and making less margin. Amazingly the entrepreneur didn’t point out the 1.5M units his competitor is selling until quite late. He still managed to get £145K from Theo Paphitis and Deborah Meaden in exchange for 40%.
• Food and Drink Party Business – Another short pitch – it didn’t really look like an investable businesses as all they are doing is selling deli food through parties.
• Swamp Soccer – Apparently playing football in a swamp (lots of mud) is popular. Given I a number of my hobbies involve getting wet, cold and muddy I can see the attraction as a player but not as an investor.
• Yes Superbaby – As a new parent I’ll freely admit to being more than a little “baby mad” at the moment, but I just don’t see myself buying any of Yes Superbaby’s products. I certainly would not have invested in Susanne Chishti who despite promptly informing the Dragon’s that she had an MBA and had worked as a consultant and investment banker promptly placed a ridiculous valuation on her business by asking for £175K in return for 10% therefore valuing the business at £1.75M on sales of £1.6K. She reeled off a number of ways of valuing a business that she no doubt learned about while studying for the MBA (such as discounted cash flow) and then said none of them were relevant (in other words they showed the business wasn’t worth anywhere near £1.75M) but a fellow investment banker who values startups had picked the valuation and apparently invested £50K. There’s two possible conclusions that can be drawn from this, a) they’re both daft or b) she wasn’t looking for investment she was there for the publicity and the valuation was deliberately unrealistic.
• PUK – A short pitch demonstrating a classic marketing mistake, packaging/advertising that doesn’t say what the product does.
• Extreme Team Building – Apparently going to make £700K profit on team building, sounds unrealistic but the pitch was only a short one so we didn’t get to find out.
• Caribbean Ready Meals – Obviously these two were doing something right as they’d get the product into two supermarkets and turned over £500K, unfortunately while they can obviously sell they don’t have the operational expertise to sort out their production and distribution, but with two Dragons buying a 50% stake between for £100K, one of whom is also an investor in a distribution company they should be well on their way.

So what did you think of the businesses pitching this week?

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