Never Miss, Never Wake. The IllumiBowl Has Come To Save You.

The power of Shark Tank is they have eight million viewers. They can help us launch into a national brand and we can really leverage that to get into retail, to get exposure, to scale a lot quicker than we could on our own.

I’m ashamed to admit this: I’ve pissed on a toilet before. Not in a toilet. On a toilet.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Why would any self-respecting citizen of the world piss on a toilet, much less admit to this in a public setting? Good question, that’s one point for you. To answer your question, I will describe a scenario that a decent amount of males can relate to.

It’s the middle of the night. You regret drinking 24 ounces of water just before bedtime, because now that decision has demanded a nighttime visit to the bathroom. What’s the last thing in the world you want to deal with? Light. You know, those dreaded rays that will undoubtedly jar you from your stupor, costing any chance of a peaceful and quiet return to blessed slumber. So you have two choices. Behind door one: turn on the light, forfeit the remainder of your night’s sleep, and guarantee that you will successfully urinate directly into the toilet. Behind door two: keep the light off, pray to the heavens that you are urinating in the general direction of your toilet, and guarantee that you will return to bed and fall asleep immediately.

As you may have guessed, I’m one of the people who chooses the second option, a choice I always love until I wake up in the morning and have to determine what kind of unholy carnage happened in my bathroom. At that point, I not only question the decisions I make in the black of night, but every general decision on a day-to-day basis.

Luckily, as any logical person can tell you, for every problem there must be a solution. This comes in the form of IllumiBowl, a motion-activated toilet night light that preserves the sanctity of your night’s sleep while ensuring everything that needs to go in the toilet, ends up in the toilet.

“I drink a lot of water so every other night I got up to pee in the middle of the night,” said Matt Alexander, co-founder of IllumiBowl. “And I hated turning on that stupid light and waking myself up.”

Searching for a business idea, Alexander took the idea of a glow-in-the-dark, weight-activated floormat to his brother-in-law, Michael Kannely, who tweaked it into a motion-activated night light that clips onto any toilet.

“We started prototyping it, testing it, and we realized there was demand there,” said Alexander.

IllumiBowl launched a successful Kickstarter campaign at the end of 2014, raising $100,000 to get business running. And run it did — within the first six months, IllumiBowl totalled over $1 million in online sales, with Alexander and Kannely currently finalizing deals to put their product in major retail outlets.

What else helps a business grow? Exposure, another thing IllumiBowl is poised to take advantage of after being selected to pitch on ABC’s Shark Tank in an episode that airs tomorrow (March 11) at 8 pm (MT).

“The power of Shark Tank is they have eight million viewers,” said Alexander. “They can help us launch into a national brand and we can really leverage that to get into retail, to get exposure, to scale a lot quicker than we could on our own.”

Regardless of how IllumiBowl swims with the sharks, their trajectory is rising. Sales are flowing, exposure is increasing, and with a growing customer base, IllumiBowl is hoping to make nighttime misses a thing of the past. Stay tuned….

Published 3/11/2016

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