University of Michigan Students Pitch Us Their Startups For $5000 Prize Money

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, there's this amazing book called Getting Everything You Can Out Of All You've Got. I read it a few years ago and it changed my life.
And the reason I loved it was because it basically talks about how to get and make more money using things that you already have.
Coincidentally, today's podcast is brought to you by Business Made Simple. It's a podcast by Donald Miller, who I'm gonna tell you about in a second, but he has this amazing episode that's all related to this book and the things that I learned in this book. It's called How To Make Money With What You Already Have. It's an incredible episode. It talks about all the stuff that I learned in this book. The host is Donald Miller. I didn't know who Donald Miller was up until recently, but over the last 12 months, this is totally by coincidence. It was all separate people. They said, you have to check out Donald Miller. He's amazing. So I'm happy that he's part of HubSpot's podcast network. You can check it out, Business Made Simple Podcast. It's where he coaches you on how to build your business like an airplane, where the cockpit is your leadership, the body is your overhead, the right engine is your marketing, the left engine is your sales.
You have to check it out. This guy's amazing. It's called Business Made Simple with Donald Miller.

**Shaan Puri** (1:02)
By the way, you like how he was like, so sharks, you want to come take a swim in the maritime industry?

**Jason** (1:08)
These kids are the best.

**Sam Parr** (1:10)
This is the greatest thing I've ever seen. I thought this was going to be stupid. These guys are so much better than anything we've ever done with this. They are so talented.

**Shaan Puri** (1:19)
Also, if this is like the bar, if this is the normal bar of college entrepreneur, then I feel like we were playing basketball back in the days when they had short shorts and nobody could use their left hand and it was a beach basketball hoop. It's like, oh wow, these guys can jump.

**Sam Parr** (1:35)
Yeah, it's like Lebron just learned how to lift weights. Like that's what this feels like.

**Shaan Puri** (1:47)
All right, what up, we got a special episode. This is like a Shark Tank style episode. So this is the My First Million pitch competition. We got the University of Michigan. So Wolverines are here. We got five companies, I believe. Each company is gonna have two minutes to pitch, a five minute Q and A, and the winner will get $5,000 at the end, as decided by me and Sam, whoever is the best at pitching. And little do people know this.
This is how I became an entrepreneur. I was gonna be a doctor, and then I entered a pitch competition at my university, and I won that baby for 25 grand.
And that was what got me on the path of entrepreneurship altogether. I would have never, ever, ever done startups if it wasn't for that competition that we randomly entered. So this could be kind of for somebody out there, this could be their break too. So here we go. University of Michigan, pitch competition.
First up, who is it? Jake, so Jake from Aria, is that right?

**Jake** (2:45)
Yes, hey guys.

**Shaan Puri** (2:47)
What's up? All right, two minutes is all yours, go.

**Jake** (2:49)
Cool, so hey guys, my name is Jake. I'm the founder of Aria. We're bringing e-commerce abilities to in-person shopping. And so as an e-commerce business owner myself, we know quite a bit about our customers, such as who they are, what they're interested, and how they engage with our business. And so this type of information informs all aspects of our operations, from developing new products, and then driving more sales.
And so the question that comes to mind is, why aren't these same necessities available to retail business owners? Why is this limited to just e-commerce? And this happens because the source of the transaction, which is the barcode. At Aria, we're making a new type of product code that brings e-commerce abilities to retail. So this is called OneTag, it uses radio frequency identification.
This is the same type of technology in contactless credit cards and garage door openers, and it recently became affordable at a mass scale. And OneTag is super versatile, there's a lot of uses for it. It costs pennies to manufacture, and it's printed on a sticker to attach to merchandise. So by replacing the barcode with OneTag, retailers unlock new capabilities in a variety of things. I'm going to go into one example now. So this is a traditional retail set up. You have your products, then you have barcodes. And each one is individually scanned. Instead of that, let's just replace all these barcodes with OneTag.