Pacific Beach entrepreneur Stephan Aarstol is scheduled to appear on “Shark Tank,” one of ABC-TV’s top national shows, on Friday, March 16. Aarstol will pitch his Pacific Beach start-up — Tower Paddle Boards — to billionaire Mark Cuban and others on the entrepreneur reality show slated to air at 5 p.m. (8 p.m. EST/7 p.m. CST). This show is currently one of the top shows in the country on Friday nights. According to the show’s producers, 24,000 entrepreneurs applied to compete on the third season of the show, currently rated among the top shows in America on Friday nights. Aarstol founded the stand-up paddleboard (SUP) brand less than a year before being selected by the “Shark Tank” producers. The producers selected Tower, in part, for its web-marketing-based, direct-to-consumer eCommerce business model that brought visibility and market share to Tower in competition with better-known and traditionally more-established competitors. Aarstol’s approach relied heavily on search engine optimization (SEO), which brings his cost of sales down to zero. From there, he leveraged the reach of the web to forgo the traditional distribution channel, which offers cost savings to his customers. “The web and search engines offer a near perfect meritocracy,” said Aarstol. “I used a direct-to-consumer model to bring down costs and create a better value proposition for SUP consumers, then leveraged my online marketing expertise to get the word out. “To have received consideration from the producers of ‘Shark Tank,’ who review thousands of business submissions is a huge honor in itself,” he said. Aarstol will present his company to a panel of investors, which includes Cuban, the owner of the NBA champion Dallas Mavericks; Daymond John, founder of urban clothing brand FUBU; Kevin O’Leary, an entrepreneur who sold his educational software company to Mattel for $3.7 billion; Barbara Corcoran, real estate investor who built $5 billion real estate empire; and Robert Herjavec, a prominent technology entrepreneur who sold his first technology company for over $100 million. Prior to starting Tower Paddle Boards, Aarstol turned a $10,000 credit-card advance into $2.5 million in revenues in its first five years in a similarly conceived high-end poker chip company (www.BuyPokerChips.com). That company’s products have been featured on Spike TV. For more information, visit www.TowerPaddleBoards.com.