Who is Julie Whiteman?
Julie Whiteman co-founded GrooveBook with her husband, Brian Whiteman, after the couple spent years running a printing company. They used that background to build a mobile app that collected up to 100 of a subscriber's phone photos each month and mailed them back as a bound book for $2.99. A grooved spine design kept the books flexible enough to ship at bulk postal rates, the cost advantage that made the model work. The Whitemans appeared on Shark Tank in Season 5, in an episode that aired in January 2014, with about 18,000 subscribers.
Instead of selling equity, they took $150,000 from Mark Cuban and Kevin O'Leary for 80% of the company's licensing rights. The exposure sent the subscriber base past 500,000 and app downloads above one million. Less than a year after the episode, Shutterfly acquired GrooveBook for $14.5 million, a price reported at more than 22 times the company's pre-show revenue. The Whitemans remained with Shutterfly as consultants after the sale.
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