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Zoobean was created by Felix Brandon Lloyd and Jordan Lloyd Bookey, based in Washington, D.C. Zoobean curates children’s books and apps based on the children’s preferences in the system.
What Is ZooBean?
Zoobean is an education-based company that encourages students to read and learn more about the English language. Each of their four key product categories caters to a particular group depending on the product’s purpose: libraries, schools, consumers, and businesses.
Zoobean is an excellent companion for parents and educators who want to boost children’s literacy while exposing them to various reading materials.
Zoobean is developed by a husband and wife team with experience in children’s education and employs data science to build a “SmartList” of recommended books for children.
Zoobean also offers a curated service in which a freshly selected book selection is delivered monthly. It allows librarians to track data and increase student involvement through Beanstack for Libraries.
The company offers badge books, reading logs, sticker books for children, and Hourglass, a smart night light that can be connected to an app to track reading time at home.
| Company Name | Zoobean |
| Entrepreneur | Jordan Lloyd Bookey and Felix Brand Lloyd |
| Product / Business | A literacy app for creating, managing, and measuring reading challenges. |
| Investment Asking For | $250,000 for 15% equity in Zoobean. |
| Final Deal | $250,000 for 25% equity in Zoobean. |
| Shark | Mark Cuban |
| Episode | Season 5, Episode 25 |
| Business Status | In Business |
| Website | Visit Website |
Who Is The Founder Of ZooBean?
ZooBean was founded by Felix Lloyd and Jordan Lloyd Bookey, married teachers. The company began by curating collections of children’s literature. The ZooBean service allows subscribers to specify which books their children love reading, and ZooBean will then supply a different book to each child each month based on their reading ability.
Having studied television, radio, and film as an undergraduate at Syracuse University, he earned an MA in fiction writing at Washington University in St. Louis. Felix currently resides in New York City with his wife and two children.
Jordan and Felix Lloyd founded Zoobean as a method to distribute books to youngsters from non-traditional family backgrounds. Zoobean’s system blends human and computational curation to produce customized reading lists for its users.
The library also offers a book-a-month service, in which families would receive a book depicting themselves, such as a book about an interracial family, each month.
Jordan and Felix developed cutting-edge tools for personalization and collaboration, such as SmartList, a Web-based suggestion engine still in use today.
The team developed a new app called Beanstack that can curate books for patrons so they can receive more personalized recommendations. They have created a valuable and personal experience for readers of all ages.
ZooBean Before Shark Tank
For Felix and Jordan Lloyd, the founders of ZooBean, who have joined Shark Tank, a $250,000 cash offer has been made in exchange for 15 percent of their company.
Jordan and Colin’s story begins: they met as teachers before marrying and having children, but it was only after they became parents that the goal of cultivating their children’s love of reading became meaningful to them.
They found it challenging to find children’s books catered to their child’s specific interests or written for youngsters from a family “like theirs.” Felix and Jordan are of different races, so they came up with the idea for ZooBean.
ZooBean offers a highly tailored subscription service for children’s books and a discovery tool for children’s books.
How Was The Shark Tank Pitch Of ZooBean?
Felix and Jordan appeared on Shark Tank seeking an investment of $250,000 for 15% equity in their firm ZooBean.
Final Deal: Mark Cuban agreed to invest $250,000 for 25% equity in ZooBean.
What Happened To ZooBean After Shark Tank?
ZooBean evolved into Beanstack, a “platform for reading programs and book recommendations for any institution, specifically libraries and schools.”
ZooBean, or Beanstack, seems ideal for larger groups of young children rather than individual family members compared to earlier versions of the game.
The market has made a much shrewder judgment than we did. The program also includes electronic books and tools that will be used to assess or assess the information that young people have learned from reading books.
ZooBean’s evolution into BeanStack appears to be more focused on assisting children to enjoy reading while subtly teaching them memory techniques through repetition.
Even a Badge system rewards readers who dedicate themselves to their reading with a badge that they can display on their BeanStack profile.
ZooBean Shark Tank Update
Seven years after appearing on “Shark Tank,” Zoobean has grown into a profitable business that provides services to more than 1,900 library systems (representing 10,000 library branches), 1,200 schools, and three million readers.
The ZooBean business model is now predominantly focused on enterprise, but the company’s primary objective, which is to encourage children to develop a lifelong love of reading, has not changed.
This consistently inspires new and imaginative ideas to make an impact, such as expanding the challenge model to promote reading fundraisers, where children may collect money for their school through reading. This concept is just one of many that have been generated.
Beanstack is also being used by businesses to facilitate team-building activities that are centered on the experience of reading the same book at the same time. Beanstack is another product that Zoobean is looking into extending internationally; it was just introduced in Canada.
One thing immediately stands out when Felix and Jordan consider their journey from beginning to end. The opportunity presented by Shark Tank served as the impetus for Zoobean’s meteoric rise to prominence, and the company is “forever thankful to be a member of the Shark Tank family.”
Zoobean is still in business and has annual revenue of $5 million as of 2022, confirming that they are still succeeding.
Is ZooBean Still In Business?
Zoobean is still in business as of 2022, with annual revenue of above $5 million. ZooBean has evolved significantly since the premiere of the show. Beanstack, formerly known as ZooBean, is a new program “created from the ground up specifically for libraries.”
ZooBean has helped 140 United States and Canadian libraries showcase their books and notify patrons of upcoming community events by alerting them. Cuban was instrumental in establishing Beanstack in the Dallas Public Library system.
What Is the Net Worth Of ZooBean?
The valuation of ZooBean was $1.6 million when it appeared on Shark Tank. The net worth of ZooBean is around $5 million as of 2022.
