What Happened To DrumPants From Shark Tank Season 6?

The third episode of the sixth season of ABC's "Shark Tank" premiered on ABC on October 3, 2013, to an audience of 7.29 million people, according to Nielsen Media Research's viewership ratings. The fourth and final pitch heard that episode was for DrumPants, a company selling wearable touch sensors that could be used as percussive musical instruments as well as in other software applications.

When the episode was shot, the company was in the pre-order stage, having only run a Kickstarter campaign, and was otherwise pre-revenue. Some of the sharks seemed skeptical of the market for the product, seeing it as a novelty, but two of them were interested: one for the long-term goal of exploiting the tech in other ways, the other to license it to bigger companies. After they grew impatient with Drumpants' co-founders, those deals evaporated.

It doesn't seem like DrumPants' luck got any better after the episode aired. Though there's evidence that the product shipped to Kickstarter backers, including a second campaign, it's unclear if the product was ever shipped to any non-Kickstarter customers. Ship dates were repeatedly moved back, and by early 2016, the DrumBeats storefront was no longer functional. Let's take a detailed look at how DrumPants did on "Shark Tank" and beyond.

Tyler Freeman and Lei Yu entered the tank seeking $150,000 for a five percent equity stake in DrumPants, their company making wearable triggers for use in digital music production as well as control of other applications. At the time, they were strictly in the pre-order stage, having gotten $74,236 in pledges from 558 backers on Kickstarter, blowing away their $35,000 goal. The various DrumPants products sold for $99 to $229, depending on the model. After Freeman mentioned that they had some provisional patents, Mark Cuban asked what they thought was patentable, to which Freeman explained that they were trying to secure patents on the use of custom gestures with the triggers. Robert Herjavec didn't understand what the market for this was, which Freeman explained as mainly being for EDM musicians who wanted to make their performances more exciting.

Kevin O'Leary opted out first, at a loss for how they arrived at a $3 million valuation, but Herjavec made an offer of $150,000 for 20 percent. Daymond John then offered $250,000 for 20 percent contingent on licensing the technology, which Robert tried to downplay as too big a risk, much to Daymond's consternation as he explained that such deals generally included minimum guarantees. After conferring in a hallway, they countered Robert, asking for 15 percent for $150,000, which caused Daymond to pull out, followed by Cuban. Robert, frustrated by Freeman repeatedly trying to get Cuban involved, also opted out, so there was no deal.

It's not clear what degree DrumPants ever actually made it to market. The updates page on their Kickstarter campaign has a post about a shipping delay in December 2014. A follow-up post states the product was actually shipping, and various backers reported on the comments page that they'd received their preorders. They followed up with a DrumPants 2.0 Kickstarter campaign that closed in July 2015 with $46,731 in pledges from 223 backers. Those kits were announced as shipping in November 2015, though some users on the campaign's comment page complained of never getting their orders, while others quipped that Freeman and company had disappeared.

Just how far did it get beyond fulfilling the Kickstarter preorders, though? That's also a bit of a hard nut to crack. If we look at the available archives of the DrumPants storefront on the Wayback Machine, we can see that the estimated ship date kept getting pushed back. After January 2015, the next available caches are from March and April 2016, and they're not functional. There are a lot more caches of the main DrumPants.com page, but they don't really convey any important information, and they all direct visitors to the same storefront that may have stopped functioning in 2016.

In July 2015, DrumPants announced a collaboration with a brain injury rehabilitation team to form TAPS, short for Trigger Activated Personal Assistant, to allow the nonverbal to use digital assistants. It doesn't look like there were any further details announced, though. 

By all indications, DrumPants is no longer a functional company. The LinkedIn pages of both co-founders list them as leaving Tappur, DrumPants' parent company, in 2016, the year when the DrumPants order page appears to have ceased operating. The main DrumPants.com website is still operational, but the only section that dates it, the "press room" section, was last updated on March 18, 2015. The link to order DrumPants also directs to the long-dead storefront page. The navigation bar at the top of the site also includes links to the TAPS and Tappur websites. The TAPS site no longer exists, and while the Tappur site still does, it features links to mobile apps that are no longer in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

On the social media front, DrumPants has posted no YouTube videos since September 17, 2015. Its Instagram page never got going, with just one post, dated January 13, 2015, and similarly, the Tappur LinkedIn page never featured a single post on its blog. 

Facebook is a little bit more interesting, as that DrumPants account continued to post into May 2016, but it also includes the last word, the most conclusive proof that the company is dead. "Hi! Thanks for your interest," reads a post dated December 22, 2023. "We are no longer selling DrumPants at this time." Whoever wrote the post noted that the existing product works without access to the DrumPants app, as the pads are standard MIDI controllers.

Both Tyler Freeman and Lei Yu left Tappur, the parent company of DrumPants, in 2016. According to her LinkedIn page, Yu left first, in July 2016, for a job as Director of Product Growth for Neura Inc., a "software as a service" startup focused on processing mobile sensor data. She left 11 months later before starting as a Senior Project Manager for Chariot, a transportation service later acquired by Ford Smart Mobility, in September 2017. During that time, she also started a years-long side project of mentoring various startups, and in July 2019, she moved on to CaaStle, an apparel rental company, serving as Senior Project Manager before being promoted to Director of Product Management. Since February 2022, she's been at Roku as a product lead in their special projects department.

According to his LinkedIn page, Tyler Freeman has taken a much less winding road to his current job. He freelanced as a digital artist while still at Tappur, becoming a Software Engineer and UX Designer for smartwatch startup Cronologics Corporation in January 2016. Cronologics Corporation was acquired by Google in December 2016, and he's been working at Google ever since. In the intervening years, he's risen from Software Engineer to Senior Software Engineer and UX Designer. He was the lead UX engineer on Wear OS smartwatches before transitioning in June 2022 to the lead on Android Accessibility projects for those with low vision.