Tech All-Star Game, Milk Road Pro and Big Box Strategies

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
We're like, yeah, we're just going to do the same thing, but a little bit cheaper, and we're calling it an echelon. It's pretty wild that they pulled this off. I saw them originally at CES. I was like, oh, cool, Peloton booth. And it was echelon. It was the same thing. It was the exact same thing.
What's going on?

**Shaan Puri** (0:22)
Yeah, you know, lots of things going on. Where do you want to start?

**Sam Parr** (0:26)
You drive, what do you got?

**Shaan Puri** (0:27)
All right, I got a couple quick like random ideas for you. Okay, so I'll call this the big box strategy. Okay, here's my big box strategy. So I saw recently that Kevin Hart was like, hey, our new thing is live at Walmart.
And I was like, new thing? What is it? This looks pretty much like athletic greens. And sure enough, it kind of is. It's just athletic greens plus Kevin Hart going into Walmart at like lower price point basically.

**Sam Parr** (0:54)
How much is it? Athletic greens is like 80 bucks a month.

**Shaan Puri** (0:58)
Yeah, athletic greens is expensive. Let me see. Greens, let's see his thing. Vita Hussle is the name of his thing.
And literally it's like a picture of him drinking his greens and electrolytes on the cover or whatever. So anyways, I saw him going into Walmart. And I had had this realization the other day when I was walking around a Costco. I was walking around Costco and Costco is amazing. Costco, if you have a Costco deal, if you talk to anyone who has a Costco deal, they're like Costco drives insane volume. It will make us as a company.
It also might break us as a company because they cut pretty ruthless deals. And if you ever lose Costco or they don't go through with their purchase order, you might be screwed.
But Picasso can drive ton of volume. And I was walking around and I basically saw in Costco, if you go look, every electronic piece of equipment that's there is like a, it's not a Chinese knockoff. It's like an American knockoff of an American product.

**Sam Parr** (1:54)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (1:55)
It's like, here's this mattress, nine sleep. It's like, what the, this is just like eight sleep.

**Sam Parr** (2:01)
I have a $300 Costco mattress in one of my rooms at my house. And whenever guests stay there, they go, where'd you get this mattress?
They ask about it all the time. I'm like, fuck it, 280 bucks at Costco.

**Shaan Puri** (2:12)
So basically they have a lot of these, like blenders, fitness trackers, things like that. So they have like, they need kind of like, they need it at a certain price point. So there's a strategy, which is basically you take the highly desirable thing that's kind of too high price point, like athletic greens or another one, Ura ring. I don't know if you've ever looked into buying an Ura ring, but it tracks your sleep. It's whatever, it's cool ring that tracks your sleep. And it's like $700 or something like that for this ring.
And maybe they've changed the pricing now, but like, I think when I bought it, it was $700.
It looks like it's like $500, let's say. So about 500 bucks for like the generation three Ura ring. They've sold like a billion dollars of Ura ring. So there's definitely demand for this product. Like the cumulative sales is that high.
But you go to Costco, there's no Ura ring and there's no replacement for Ura ring. I think you could create a company that just says, I'm gonna make a Ura ring like thing for Costco. And that's the entire business plan is just to do that one thing. And if you do that one thing, you'll be more successful than 99% of e-commerce stores. You gotta think smarter and not work, not like try to work so hard. So like similarly, I would go and I would hunt down what are the products that are not yet in Walmart or Costco, places that drive insane volume, Target's another one, that there is proven kind of like high-end, New York, LA., Lululemon, Peloton type of customer that buys a product like that and you just bring it down market and like just make it a little worse, like they're a gun and like, you know, they've done this with a bunch of them and go figure out which one is not there. Like for example, the mattress thing, it's actually not there yet. There is no eight sleep mattress there. There is no Ura Ring there yet, at least last time I walked around.