Shaan pitches the “Big Box Strategy” — copying successful premium products and bringing them into Walmart/Costco at a lower price point, using Echelon Fitness (a Peloton clone) as proof. Sam shares his body composition experiments and critiques what Milk Road Pro should have been. They also cover Particle.com, the idea of a Tech All-Star Game, and a creator platform called UScreen.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
The Big Box Strategy: Copy a Product, Bring It to Walmart [00:00:00]
Shaan: I got a couple quick random ideas for you.
Sam: Okay.
Shaan: I’ll call this the Big Box Strategy. I saw recently that Kevin Hart was like, hey, our new thing is live at Walmart. And I was like, what is it? The list looks pretty much like Athletic Greens. Sure enough, it kind of is — it’s just Athletic Greens plus Kevin Hart going into Walmart at a lower price point.
Sam: How much is it? Athletic Greens is like eighty bucks a month.
Shaan: Athletic Greens is expensive. Let me see his thing. Vitahustle is the name of it. And literally it’s like a picture of him drinking his greens and electrolytes.
So anyway, I saw that going into Walmart and I had this realization when I was walking around Costco. Costco is amazing — if you have a Costco deal, anyone who has one is like, Costco drives insane volume. It will make us as a company. It might also break us as a company because they cut pretty ruthless deals. But Costco drives incredible volume.
I was walking around and basically saw: every piece of electronic equipment there is like an American knockoff of an American product. Not a Chinese knockoff. It’s like — I have a $280 Costco mattress in one of my rooms and whenever a guest stays in it, they ask about it every time. “Where’d you get this mattress?” I’m like, $280 bucks at Costco.
So they need products at a certain price point. There’s a strategy here: you take the highly desirable thing that’s at too high a price point — Athletic Greens, or an Oura Ring — and you bring it down-market.
The Oura Ring tracks your sleep. When I bought it, it was around $500 or $700 for the third generation. They’ve sold like a billion dollars in cumulative sales, so there’s clearly demand. But you go to Costco — there’s no Oura Ring. No replacement for it at Costco. I think you could create a company that just says: I’m going to make a ring-like tracker for Costco. That’s the entire business plan. If you do that one thing, you’d be more successful than 99 percent of e-commerce stores.
Hunt down what products are not yet at Walmart or Costco that have proven high-end demand — Lululemon, Peloton, things like that. Bring them down-market. The mattress thing isn’t there yet. The Oura Ring isn’t there yet. Simple strategy for e-commerce.
Sam: Have you heard of Echelon?
Shaan: No.
Sam: Look up Echelon. It’s a fitness company. It looks exactly like Peloton. When I first saw them at CES, I thought it was a Peloton booth. It was Echelon. It was the same thing. Same red. American company.
They have the mirror, the smart rower, the Peloton bike. They have a smart treadmill. And they just did the same thing but cheaper. At first it was all the same branding but instead of Peloton it said Echelon. They’re on track to do $200 million a year in revenue. I think it’s bootstrapped — or was originally. They recently raised to get to a billion-dollar valuation.
And they’re in Walmart, Costco, Target — whereas Lululemon’s mirror and Peloton were like… Walmart people? Not a chance.
Shaan: Yeah. “We are your type.” That’s their motto.
Sam: Anyway. Pretty cool that they did exactly what you’re talking about. This Kevin Hart thing — it’s kind of cheap, right?
Shaan: If I’m Kevin Hart? A hundred million dollars. That’s what he’s gonna make off this thing.
Sam’s Body Composition Experiment [00:08:00]
Shaan: I have a meaty topic about your old company, Milk Road — I think you guys made a huge mistake and I’m going to bring that up in a minute. But first I want to talk about something not business-related at all.
I’ve been working on different body stuff — I love experimenting with this. I posted these pictures in our doc. They’re about two months apart. What I’ve been experimenting with is getting super lean and then gaining weight again without getting fat. They call it a lean bulk. Look at the difference in the two pictures.
Sam: Welcome all of our thumbnail viewers who clicked because you saw a before and after of Shaan.
Shaan: Here’s what I’ve been testing: just a difference of 200 to 300 calories a day for two months. You go down to 1,900 to 2,100 when getting lean, up to 2,300 to 2,400 when adding. That’s the difference. That’s like a Twinkie. Or a pack of M&Ms. That’s not a significant amount.
Is that crazy how big of a difference that can make?
Sam: It is crazy. What’s a typical day of eating for you right now?
Shaan: Right now I prefer getting a lot of protein early in the day. I get up around 9:30, have a cup of yogurt — that’s about 15 grams of protein — and maybe a banana. Then I go and get a really hard workout in. Afterwards I do four scoops of protein powder with just water — Ascent or Momentous — which is about 100 grams right there. Then I won’t eat till dinner.
At dinner time I eat chicken and vegetables, and usually a small dessert. Last night I had chocolate-covered almonds, about 250 calories worth. Adds up to roughly 2,300 to 2,400.
Sam: That’s so little food. But it obviously works, so maybe I’m crazy.
Shaan: Here’s the thing I’ve learned that changed my confidence in life and in business. Learning how to manipulate your body — that’s what everyone wants to do. Once I figured out it’s like a mathematical equation, life became so much better. You do this, you do this, you do this, and if you do it for three, six, or twelve months, you’re likely gonna see results.
And then it was as if I had bad eyesight and I put on glasses. That became the truth for so many other things. You do this, you do this, you do this, trust the process, hire a coach or develop a plan, follow it, do it for three to six months. And it’s really fun to start seeing results.
Once you’ve conquered the body part, it’s like — I can do anything. And by the way, the opposite is true. When you want something and you don’t figure out how to make it happen, a little seed of doubt gets planted that says: are you sure you can do anything you put your mind to? Or is it like that diet, or that goal, that one thing you wanted to do and didn’t actualize?
Sam: I told my trainer — I wrote a number on the mirror: 53. He’s like, 53 what? I go, 53 days left. I’m eight weeks away from having the body I want. I’ll just keep changing this number every day that I eat exactly the way I want; the number goes down. If I slip, we go back to the beginning.
We have this philosophy — me and my trainer both love mindset stuff. He says he likes big weights and thin books. Big weights — he likes to lift heavy. Thin books — he likes to just understand the premise of a book and move on. What we’ve been talking about: intensity is the strategy. For me with the body, I don’t need a new workout program, a new coach, a new diet, a new app to track it. I simply need to execute the very simple plan with much higher intensity. All I need to do is turn the dial up. Everything I want is on the other side of this one gesture.
What Milk Road Pro Should Have Been [00:22:00]
Sam: Okay. Last week — Milk Road Pro. Shaan, your old company. You launched this thing called Milk Road Pro: $10 a month, $150 a year. You get market insights and deep dives from Milk Road’s research team, weekly recaps, quarterly funding breakdowns.
Before I give my criticism — cool that you guys tried this. Do you know if it’s working?
Shaan: I wasn’t involved in the launch of this or the details. I knew they were going to do it and I was like, cool idea to try, let’s do it.
Sam: So, having been in this situation — I had The Hustle, and I launched a $300-a-year thing. The biggest mistake I made: instead of charging $300 a year, I should have made something I could charge $30,000 a year for. I dropped two zeros.
The difference between those two price points — I don’t think the work is as big a difference as the price would suggest. Let me give you a few examples of what I would have done instead if I were Milk Road.
Data idea 1: Crypto Salary Benchmarking. As any user who signs up, I would have asked where they work, their job title, and how much they make. Packaged the benchmarks into something and tried to sell that to HR departments at crypto companies. There are companies like Salary.com and PayScale — I think PayScale does $200 to $300 million a year in subscription revenue selling salary benchmarking to enterprises.
Shaan: That’s a cool idea. I think for crypto companies specifically, it’s a little early — the companies might not be mature enough to care about that yet. Good time to start, though.
Sam: Data idea 2: Sentiment Analysis. I wonder if big buyers of crypto stuff would care what the little guy thinks — the retail investor. There’s a company called Santiment that does behavior analytics on different crypto markets, doing like $4 or $5 billion a year in revenue. I’d look at: could Milk Road figure out what the little guy is talking about before it pops? Package that sentiment analysis in a more professional way than Discord.
Shaan: I think that’s a good idea. We’ve been doing a fear-and-greed index from the beginning — basically a meter that shows what the market’s mood is. The market is very moody. It gets extremely fearful, it gets extremely greedy. You kind of want to be buying when it’s fearful and selling when it’s greedy. Now we have probably the biggest ability of any media company to pull first-party data on this. We get tons of feedback from every email. I think we could have built our own fear-and-greed index — per coin, per project, per NFT. What are the whales saying? Create a cohort of whale sentiment and package it up for institutional money. That is a $30,000 product, not a $10-a-month product.
Sam: The reason I like data: it’s within the core competency of a newsletter company. Creating a software platform would have been a horrible idea — that’s not within your core competency. But your data grows over time. You have a Corpus of data that becomes more valuable the longer you hold it.
Data idea 3: Org Charts. With crypto you don’t always know who’s behind stuff — it’s someone’s face that’s an NFT, and you’re not sure who’s behind it. I would have done org charts that explain who’s behind each thing, the team, their contact information, the story, and a prediction: is this legitimate or nonsense? Your customer could be someone who wants to sell into those companies, fund them, or acquire something from them.
Shaan: I like that one. The theme of all your ideas is: build a data stack. Once you acquire this corpus of data, it just becomes more valuable over time. It’s not new content the same way — it’s building layers.
Sam: Do you know Zoom Info? Basically just every employee at every company in America — their contact info and a little background on the company. For salespeople: here’s your prospecting list. They started by the two founders just calling the front desk of companies to confirm phone numbers. They raised no real money, just brute-forced their way to an MVP. They created a viral loop where people could access some of the data but had to submit their own data in exchange. Now they do like a billion dollars in revenue.
There’s also Particle.com — for pretty much all major e-commerce stores, they go to any Shopify store and estimate with fairly high confidence what that store does in sales, down to the product level. Which SKU is the top seller, which is the bottom seller. So you could do really great competitive research: this company’s doing really well, but there’s not a lot of competitors selling that product — there may be an opportunity. Or: our competitor has this product line that’s doing really well and we don’t have it.
They sell this for like $20,000 a year. If I’m a retailer and I can be smarter about my inventory, I make back the $20K in one or two purchases just from having better intel.
The Tech All-Star Game Idea [00:42:00]
Shaan: Okay. I tweeted this out and laid out my case: the tech industry needs its version of the NBA All-Star Game. Tech is getting pretty big — somebody pointed out to me that tech is the new Hollywood. The Facebook movie, Silicon Valley on HBO, the WeWork movie, the Theranos movie, the Uber story. These heroes are now becoming heroes in pop culture. Elon, Zuckerberg, Bezos — household names.
So somebody should create a weekend event produced like an All-Star weekend, and get the best talent in tech to compete. Here’s how it works:
You only get invited if you’re a legit awesome tech company. The CEO gets to recruit one engineer, one designer, and one marketer for their squad. They come and compete in a weekend hackathon — they have to build something awesome and pitch it at the end. You get to see these people actually work. Are they creative? Are they interesting? Can they build something cool? Can they pitch?
I think it would be a phenomenal recruiting event. A great brand builder. And fun for these people — because most tech CEOs’ jobs are actually just dealing with people problems and lawsuit problems. This would be a nice diversion for people who got into this because they love to build things.
Then you do the fun gimmick games: a speed-typing contest, or who can do X while drunk, whatever random games you come up with. Broadcast the whole thing.
Who has the incentive to do this? Nobody at the big companies. Only somebody stupid like me who’s like, yeah, this is what I’m going to spend my year on. I think it would be profitable from sponsors.
Sam: Do you remember the Silicon Valley Sports League?
Shaan: No, what is that?
Sam: It was awesome. A recreational sports league — they did soccer one season, flag football another. Different companies would pay $10,000 per season and you could have ten players. A great way to hang out, get to know your team, and play sports. The guys who started it used the profits to bootstrap their company. They made millions of dollars from it.
You’ve not heard of that?
Shaan: No. I’m on their website right now. I don’t know if you’ve been there in a while, but this might be the worst banner image I’ve ever seen. Two evil-looking tech guys pretending to play football. The guy holding the football is not holding it like you’d hold a football when you run. Tiny hands. And the other guy looks like a hyena. This is if the artist who did this hates the tech industry — like they lost their two-bedroom loft in San Francisco because some tech bro raised the rent.
You’ve got to get to boxing, though.
Sam: The YouTubers are doing it, but interesting tech people usually aren’t going to do boxing. Best case scenario is the Elon-Zuckerberg thing — which also isn’t actually happening. They have too much to lose. Jake Paul dropped out of life and trains boxing for years just to look okay. Imagine a tech CEO who’s in their 40s or 50s, or the scrawniest 25-year-old who spent their whole life building and not working out.
UScreen: The Shopify for Creators [00:52:00]
Shaan: Related to OnlyFans — Ben sent me a link to something called OnlyPage.com. I thought this is kind of interesting. I go to it and it’s basically OnlyFans, but it’s some model named Paige who’s hosting it on her own branded domain. So when you sign up to somebody’s OnlyFans, you don’t get their email address. With this, theoretically she could.
Sam: Isn’t that the golfer?
Shaan: Yeah, Paige Spiranac. Former professional golfer. She got famous for being pretty good at golf and also very attractive and leaned into it.
What’s interesting is this is basically the direct-consumer version of OnlyFans. It’s what Shopify did — before Shopify, you could list your products on somebody else’s marketplace. Amazon, Walmart, whatever. This is like the Shopify version of OnlyFans. She has her own branded domain, her own store, handling her own customer relationships.
The platform behind it is called UScreen — uscreen.tv. It’s an all-in-one membership platform for creators. On their homepage they list a YouTuber with two million subscribers, a yoga company, a pregnancy blog. She just found a course creator company and used it.
Their site says $150 million earned by creators each year. Nine million end users. Fifty to 150 employees.
Sam: I’ve never heard of this.
Shaan: Me neither. It looks like they’re killing it — and there’s no funding information anywhere. Bootstrapped, probably. I want to make a Chrome extension called the Honesty Filter that just changes homepage copy to say what it actually does. UScreen should just say: “Monetize your body with less fees than OnlyFans.”
Sam: That’s a good one. Their homepage should just be honest.
Shaan: The founder — PJ something — says on LinkedIn they’re over $20 million in ARR, bootstrapped, fast-growing and profitable. Pretty amazing for a company most people have never heard of.
And so the analogy holds: it’s like Shopify for creator monetization. If every Shopify store was called shopify.com/storename and you couldn’t collect your customers’ emails or phone numbers, that’d be the OnlyFans problem. UScreen is solving that. You promote yourself, they’re your storefront, and you own the customer relationship.
Sam: For sure. Kudos to them. Well, I think that’s the pod.
Shaan: Yeah, I think we wrap it.