What Happened To The Flag Photo Printing App From Shark Tank Season 8?

Tami Schildgen October 31, 2024

0 4 minutes read

What Happened To The Flag Photo Printing App From Shark Tank Season 8?

Samuel Agboola and Savannah Cowley on Shark Tank

ABC

“Advertisers get to connect themselves with your memories.” To the casual consumer, the words of Flag CEO Samuel Agboola were an immediate sour note. If there’s one place advertisers don’t need to be, it’s etched into our most precious memories. For the sharks of “Shark Tank,” though, the promise of money earned by siphoning off personal experiences was just another pitch worth hearing. Agboola and co-founder Savannah Cowley made a splash in the tank with their ask for $375,000 for 5% of Flag, the free photo printing service.

Mark Cuban, Barbara Corcoran, Kevin O’Leary, Laurie Greiner, and guest shark Chris Sacca listened intently as Agboola and Cowley described their vision of the future for photo printing. Highlighting the first-world pain point of using her phone as a camera to document her cute kids and interesting life, Cowley noted that “even the best ones, they never make it off my phone” and, therefore, don’t tend to get looked at. Cue Flag, “the world’s first truly free photo printer,” as Agboola describes it.

How Flag’s founders were able to offer free, high-quality, laser-cut photo prints was the true crux and, as the sharks later demonstrated, the shaky foundation of the business. Every photo sold by Flag would double as ad space, as the white space on the back would be sold to advertisers. While an interesting concept, it didn’t take long for reality to hit the entrepreneurs hard.

What Happened to Flag on Shark Tank?

Once the pitch was out of the way and Agboola flashed a clever printout of money to the salivating sharks, O’Leary was quick to chime in with a pertinent question: What’s stopping other companies from adopting this model? There was, as the founders confirmed, nothing proprietary about their business, and as one of the original investors of Groovebook (which later sold to Shutterfly for $14.5 million), O’Leary immediately knew how to chip away at that negative aspect of the concept.

“They could do it if they invested a lot of money,” Agboola responded, stating that, unlike Shutterfly, Flag could offer a variety of photo shapes because it uses laser-cutting technology, which it secured with an initial $1.6 million investment. Cowley later elaborated that the costly process was divided into three facilities, which they intended to condense with the shark’s investment and another $3 million injection they sought outside of “Shark Tank.”

The conversation shifted to the ad portion of the model, the primary source of Flag’s revenue. Unfortunately, despite revealing they had already sold $150,000 in advertising space, the entrepreneurs failed to run those ads on their photos before entering the tank, giving them zero data on the return on investment for said advertisers. No investors bought into the model, but Sacca laced into the duo when they revealed the service would later introduce a freemium model. “Somebody call a doctor because this pitch needs CPR,” he chided shortly before bowing out.

Flag After Shark Tank

Flag’s season eight episode of “Shark Tank” aired on April 14, 2017. As an unintended spoiler for the episode, two of the successful Kickstarter campaigns were updated with a post in March 2017 announcing that Flag was ceasing print production. The paywall-blocked update is no longer accessible as the campaigns have since ended, but DIY Photography confirmed some of the content, which discussed a “long-delayed Android app,” crediting unfulfilled orders, and doing what they can not to “repeat our mistake” with a relaunch.

Though the third Kickstarter campaign was successful in raising over $331,000, almost double what was raised during the first campaign in 2014, a lack of communication started to draw criticisms from backers. Even before the March 2017 update, backers showed concerns over the company’s legitimacy, with only a relatively small handful confirming they received prints they’ve ordered or earned from backing. The last comments from Alex Basalyga, a collaborator on the Kickstarter, were approximately eight years ago.

After the March 2017 update and the televised appearance on “Shark Tank,” hundreds of comments have been left by backers citing Kickstarter’s Terms of Use as part of a request for a full refund of their pledge amount.

Is Flag Still in Business?

Try to search for the Flag Photo Printing App on the Apple App Store, and you’ll find that it’s no longer even listed. This coincides with the defunct websites www.tryflag.com and www.fla.ag and the complete lack of any social media presence. Even Agboola’s socials, like his Twitter, are either nonexistent or empty. While the March 2017 update on Kickstarter suggested that Agboola and his team would continue working on Flag, specifically starting with securing advertisers, all signs point to Flag having been shut down entirely. The final nail in the coffin is Agboola’s LinkedIn, which lists his end date as Founder of Flag Universal as September 2018.

Whether the Flag team was still actively working on improving the app in the year after the failed “Shark Tank” appearance remains a mystery. The last anyone seems to have heard from any of Flag’s representatives was in early April 2017, when DIY Photographer’s Daniela Bowker received a response to a number of inquiries. Bowker states that Flag’s founder did request a day and time for a phone call, but they ultimately never responded to her suggested appointment.

What’s Next for Flag’s Founders?

Savannah showcasing the white space on a photo being used for ad space

ABC

Despite scouring the internet high and low, there’s no known update to what Savannah Cowley moved on to after Flag. Even her role at Flag remained a bit of a mystery, as she never confirmed any areas of expertise or prior business ventures. An exhaustive Google search only brought up references to the failed photo app and her appearance on “Shark Tank.” It’s also worth mentioning that Cowley was not added as a contributor to any of the Kickstarter campaigns, calling into question her role and presence at Flag when it was operational.

Even her counterpart, Samuel Agboola, has a limited internet presence beyond “Shark Tank.” However, his endeavors after Flag were listed on LinkedIn. After leaving Flag, he took on contracted strategic advisor work. His impressive client list includes Microsoft, Google, Apple, Hewlett Packard, and the Silicon Valley Leadership Group. In fact, it’s the latter that he’s listed as the Vice President of Communications + Startups. The leadership group is dedicated to improving the “innovation economy and its ecosystem” in Silicon Valley. Per his LinkedIn, Agboola has been with the leadership group since January 2022 and is responsible for “developing content strategies” and facilitating growth in startup businesses.